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WHAT TIME IS IT?: Post-Modernist Youth in War, Hip-Hop, and Radical Movement
by
Taiyo Na
12.23.05
Note from author: i am a long-time reader of your fabulous zine. recently i was asked to write a chapter on an upcoming book on global youth cultures. i took the oppurtunity to reflect on the last 7 years of doing cultural work and really look at youth & cultural movements in historical context. the following is the first third of the chapter and the rest can be read on my blog site.
peace.
INTRODUCTION: Post-Modernist Movements
"Edutainment's a legitimate weapon." -Blue Scholars, "No Rest For The Weary"
At the turn of the century, civil rights activist/scholar Grace Lee Boggs wrote the remarkable essay "A Paradigm Shift": a reflection on her 60 years of experience in various social movements of the last century and her new ideas for the new one. Just as Marx and Lenin provided ideas and strategies for 19th and early 20th century radicals, including Boggs, Martin Luther King, she believed, was now the "indispensable starting point for 21st century revolutionaries."
To Boggs, King developed "a profoundly political concept of Love (he called it Agape)"--"the willingness of the oppressed to go to any lengths to restore or create community...empower[ing] the oppressed to overcome fear and the oppressors to transcend hate." Outlining the great challenge of the new century, King transcended the ubiquity of Cold War politics to powerfully proclaim, "We need a social system... that not only goes beyond Capitalism which is too I-centered, too individualistic but also beyond Communism which is too collective, too statist."
Boggs expressed high hopes for these new social systems in "Grassroots Post-Modernism"--social movements emerging out of local communities that reject global capitalism and create "a new self-determining civil society based on indigenous culture and pre-modern philosophies from the ground up," e.g. the Zapatistas--but also believing in what would be "Revolutionary Post-Modernism," e.g. Bolivarian Venezuela, as noted in other Boggs works. Post-modern movement discourse, however, would not be sufficient if it did not include the hip-hop generation's developments--the indispensable starting point where this chapter begins.
By 1988, writer Greg Tate "prophetically" described hip-hop's coming-of-age in its place in US culture. In that explosive "Golden Age" year, "hip hop," he wrote, "locates their market potential and their potential militancy"--or in other words, it located its ever-growing capital net worth and its far-reaching socialist dreams to redeem the poor. Taking cues and consideration from past literature (most notably from Jeff Chang, Tricia Rose, Kevin Powell, and Robin Kelley), this chapter intends to illustrate further how this generation has defined themselves in between those mentioned locations and beyond them. Critically responding to the crisis of development, the failure of electoral politics, the privatization of human rights and the war on youth and the poor, just as other post-modern movements, hip-hop--led by the disenfranchised youth themselves--has cradled some of the brightest and original ideas of new century radicalism. This is not to refute Boggs, but rather to add to the discourse of the power and potential of global post-modern movements.
