This lecture explores the re/generative capacities of Hip Hop for being at-home-in-the-world under ongoing conditions of occupation and colonial rupture.
Sudiipta Dowsett draws on ethnographic research with migrant Xhosa artists in Khayelitsha (‘new home’) township, South Africa, and collaborative research on Hip Hop in a First Nations Warlpiri community in the central Australian desert where ngurra-kurlu or ‘home within’ (Pawu-Kurlpulurnu, Holmes & Box 2008: 7) forms the driving logic of an experimental ceremony called Milpirri*.
Dowsett considers how Hip Hop as embodied cultural practice has particular proprioceptive capacities for reorienting to new environments, of producing structures of feeling that contest the out-of-placeness of colonised subjectivities and revitalise Indigenous place-making. Particular logics internal to Hip Hop culture – the ethic to represent, ‘Knowledge of self,’ and place-making – enable the reproduction of place and
emplaced being, materialising and mediating ‘two-way’ subaltern/vernacular sensibilities. Hip Hop emerges here as a technology of orientation: a practice that recalibrates place-based body schemas to new homes amid migration and rupture, re-presencing body schemas from elsewhere and everywhen and synthesising samples of disparate worlds. The concept of home here is taken as a feeling of being at home in the world, and a feeling of ‘home within
*Milpirri is directed by Pawu Kurlpururnu Wanta Jampijinpa, co-produced by Lajamanu Warlpiri and Tracks Dance Inc. Research on Milpirri is supported by the Australian Government through the ARC’s Linkage scheme (LP190100552). The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily those of the Australian Government or the ARC.