Hip hop will get some serious consideration this weekend at Dartmouth.
Students from Harvard, Brown and Middlebury, youth activists from around the Northeast, scholars, hip hop performers and interested Dartmouth students will gather Friday and Saturday to discuss hip-hop as a genre, an art form, a means for identification and a tool for social justice.
The conference,"Hip Hop Identities and Poetic Race Relations," will open Friday evening at 7 p.m. in Collis Commonground and will continue Saturday with a series of performances, panels, workshops, and speeches in Filene Auditorium. It will conclude with a concert in Alumni Hall featuring performances by SHEBA, Soul Scribes, Young Chozen, Libra Project and Akrobatik and DJ.
Rebecca Heller '05 organized the conference, which intends to analyze how identities are formed by hip-hop. Heller's interest in the identities and relationships cultivated by hip-hop was sparked by government courses on political identity and memory, she said.
Heller said she hopes the conference will address many questions surrounding the genre. "Is [hip hop] creating a common basis of understanding?" Heller asked. "Should we hold artists accountable for the messages they're sending out?"
English and African-American studies Professor Bill Cook will open the conference with a keynote address on hip-hop as a poetic form. Cook's address will be followed by a panel discussion led by Professors Cole Heinowitz, Steven Swayne, Ned Lebow and Echo Brown '06, and by a Soul Scribes performance.
Saturday's events will include an address from Professor Tricia Rose of the University of California at Santa Cruz, who, according to Heller, introduced hip-hop to the academic world. Cruz's morning speech will be followed by a series of workshops. Workshop participants will be given the chance to learn aspects of beatboxing and free-styling, and Sheba will help participants explore expressive dance. The afternoon will also examine hip-hop's power to sustain a social movement and to further youth activism.
A delegation of roughly 50 will be coming to Hanover from Harvard for the conference, and the group plans to bring youth activists from the Boston Cambridge area. 30 people will be coming from Brown and 15 from Middlebury. Youths from the Upper Valley will also attend.
The conference is being sponsored by 15 different campus groups.
Associate director of the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity Giavanna Munafo said that she hopes the conference will provide "opportunities to reflect in new ways about the impact that music and movement and visual arts can and does have."
"I also hope that the ideas so common in popular media about hip hop and rap " often stereotypes about black people " will be made more rich and complex," Munafo said.
Heller she her aim is for the conference to "educate about hip-hop through hip-hop."
Lebow, who taught government seminar on Identity Politics that inspired Heller to launch the conference, lauded the initiative she took to plan the event.
"Becca is truly extraordinary," Lebow said. "We're hoping to have some interaction between the groups and to see what hip hop does for their identities as either blacks or whites and how it brings them together."
