UCLA

Warriors of the Wake: The Black Male Rapper as Mythological Subject and Archetype examines a blended set of discographies from eight contemporary Black male rappers to explore how Black masculinity can be lived and performed as a meta-fiction reflecting hauntological and postcolonial anxieties of the 21st century, from racial capitalism, intergenerational trauma, and political marginalization to militaristic state violence and an anti-Black carceral complex. In my project, I argue that the Black male rapper can be characterized as a sociopolitical actor participating in a multiscalar mythology built from the hip-hop canon’s intertwining narratives. Through key songs from the discographies of Childish Gambino (The Outcast); J. Cole (The Sage); Drake (The Popstar); Pusha T (The “Old-School” Remnant); Montana of 300 (The Monster); Kanye West (The Uncle Tom); Tyler, the Creator (The Paradox); and Big Freedia (The Gender Bender), I hope to reveal how and why other Black men use these rappers’ discographies and personas as formative components in identity formation, culture creation, and racial politics. This project offers a reading of the aforementioned rap personas by analyzing Black, postcolonial, Romantic, and cultural literatures that reorient Black masculinity’s value in the cultural mythologies and value systems intervening between colonial systems and the world we experience. Ultimately, to read these rapper personas as mythological archetypes requires a praxis of literary thinking and framing that explores what it means to read for, with, and against these personas as texts. Using a hauntological approach, this project examines how haunting is embedded within the very language and experiential modality of these rappers’ poetics to provide a critical framework for understanding the ongoing legacies of slavery and Jim Crow in the contemporary moment. After constructing these archetypes, the project closes by analyzing the future of hip-hop, Black masculinity, and the para-critical questions of Black representation looming as emergent and developing technologies around AI, commodification, and surveillance continue to dominate and shape our understanding and lived experience of the human.