american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

CONTESTATORY URBAN AGENCY 155
their own culture or music, a point echoed by rapper Brother Ali, who
claims that hip-hop is “not ours anymore. It used to be antiestablishment,
off the radar, counterculture. People in the streets are
now being told what hip-hop is and what it looks like by TV”
(Kitwana). It is starker in dead prez’s “I’m a african” (let’s get free),
which states unequivocally that urban actors are “made” by the social
conditions in which they live: “my environment made me the nigga
I am.” The truth is somewhere between these two poles (as are most
hip-hop conceptions of agency), but they are useful in defining the
preliminary terms of contestatory urban agency. They provide the
outer boundaries for action in urban neighborhoods, but the scene is
usually much more complicated than either position asserts.
The tension between acting according to one’s purposes and negotiating
the constraints of racism and socioeconomic inequality frames
many conceptions of agency in hip-hop. Rappers often style resistance
as fundamentally possible within urban landscapes that work against
the goals and aspirations of poor, young, mostly African American
agents. In her book on hip-hop culture, Tricia Rose emphasizes the tension
between individual agency and the determining social and political
counterforces for poor urban actors. It is dangerous, she writes, to
“overemphasize the autonomy of black agency in the face of massive
structural counterforces.” The desire to preserve agency, she points out,
must not result in the elision of the “structural forces that constrain
agency” such as racism, poverty, and the lack of resources and adequate
education. She concludes that the desire for inner-city youth to exercise
individual agency/free will “outside of racist and discriminatory contexts
within which such action takes place” is an illusion (141–142).
According to Rose’s view, any lyrics that stress autonomy and the formation
of purposes as wholly individual are incomplete and misleading
if they do not also acknowledge that all actions are responses to a variety
of conditions, some of which constrain possibilities for action.
Whereas such a view is accurate from a practical standpoint, it can limit
the range of expression for lyrics as political statements (or revolutionary
pronouncements). Foregrounding autonomy and agency is often
part of a rhetorical strategy intended to uplift or organize potential
actors. In some cases (including in Jean Grae’s song), it serves to inspire
and to mobilize energy for positive social change. If rappers give too
much weight to agency and too little to constraining factors, it may be
strategic as well as unrealistic.
There is in hip-hop, then, a palpable discursive tension between
agency and the determinate factors that limit agency for urban youth.
Stuart Hall’s distinction between determinism and determination,