UCLA

Through historical and political contextualization, this dissertation aims at deconstructing dominant hip-hop discourses, and their role in the legitimization of the socioracial order. The objective of this work is not solely to critique conservative understandings of hip-hop, but all limited and reductive understandings of hip-hop, including so-called progressive ones. By critically interrogating dominant hip-hop discourses, I not only intend to reveal their biased reliance on ideologies of difference involving race, class, and gender, but also make room for more complex and just understandings of hip-hop. Therefore, by critically interrogating dominant hip-hop discourses and their connections to larger systems of power, the deconstruction work achieved in this dissertation intends to open the door for reimagination work. Relying on archival research, and oral histories with hip-hop participants, this deconstruction work aims to show the wrong ways we’ve commonly been thinking about hip-hop, and to urge to provide new ways to think about it. Focusing on ghetto discourses as particular constructions of Blackness mediated through race, class, and gender, the dissertation analyzes how most commonly accepted understandings of hip-hop are constructed in relation to ghetto discourses.