american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

170 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
“radical form of democracy” organizes actors and performers and
empowers people who are often left out of public debates due to age,
race, education, and socioeconomic status (xxxi). However, as Negt
and Kluge admit, “no local counterpublic can emerge today outside or
independently of” larger, more powerful commercial structures
(Hansen xxxv). As such, the small club show exists in an implicit relationship
to corporate power and mainstream hip-hop riches. To begin
to address this concern, I want to take a brief detour into postmodernism
and hip-hop as a radical political “practice.”
If live hip-hop shows can organize experience in order to enact
coordinated collective identity and agency, it is crucial to understand
hip-hop as a political practice. Live hip-hop must be the fundamental
component of Russell A. Potter’s and Richard Shusterman’s assertions
of hip-hop as a cultural practice. In 1991, pragmatist critic
Shusterman tentatively proposed that hip-hop was the “new radical
cultural politics” Fredric Jameson claimed was only “hypothetical” in
his much-discussed “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism” (627). Potter claims that hip-hop is “a vernacular practice”
that depends on audience and performers collectively producing
“a zone of sonic and cultural bricolage.” Hip-hop, he says, is a “practice
in action” (45–46). Shusterman’s and Potter’s notions of hip-hop
as a practice and as a form of cultural politics is best activated by—and
indeed, is dependent upon—live shows, where it is possible to see hiphop
as a political practice in action. Though both understand hip-hop
as a fundamentally postmodern art, I want to suggest that even if its
production and its musical form are postmodern, the space and form
of the small club live show are not. Here, many basic features of postmodernism
are trampled: the subject is alive not dead, agency is present
not absent, uncertainty and ambiguity are difficult to find
(confidence is paramount), and community is active instead of simulated
via passively received simulacra. A postmodern musical form
need not obviate concerted political action. In live hip-hop shows,
finally, it is not futile to dissent, mobilize, and speak truth to power.
Active participation works against cynicism and complacency.
Unlike political poetry, where a poem is adjudged to be political
based largely on its content, language, or rhetoric, hip-hop’s
political import is partially a function of the form of its performance
and the context for the performance. The shows I discuss here occupy
specific historical moments, moments that are important for those live
shows in which performers comment on current issues. However, the
political work of a live hip-hop show does not rely exclusively upon
the particular historical moment during which it occurs. A performer