The Department of Communication is excited to announce that Dr. Antonia Randolph will be kicking off our Fall Speaker Series on Thursday, September 29 from 5:00-6:30PM in Murphey Hall. Her talk is titled: “‘I’d Free All My Sons’: Feeling Political Subjectivity in Hip-Hop.”
Bio and abstract:
Abstract: This talk examines how hip-hop uses affect to construct Black men, but not Black women, as legitimate political subjects through analyzing the 2019 documentary television series Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men. I contrast the series’ portrayal of Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s legal trouble with his estranged wife’s demands for child support to distinguish between visceral and vicarious subjectivity as the grounds of legitimate political redress within hip-hop.
Antonia Randolph is an assistant professor of American Studies at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her interests include diversity discourse in education, multicultural capital, non-normative Black masculinity, and the production of misogyny in hip-hop culture. Her book The Wrong Kind of Different: Challenging the Meaning of Diversity in American Classrooms (Teachers College 2012) examined the hierarchies elementary school teachers constructed among students of color. She has also published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and The Feminist Wire. Her current book project, That’s My Heart: Queering Intimacy in Hip-Hop Culture, which is under contract with University of California Press, examines portrayals of Black men’s intimate relationships in hip-hop culture.