Tri-Co Philly: Narrativity and Hip Hop

ENGL B216 | Tuesday 2:10–5 p.m.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Bryn Mawr College

This course explores narrative and poetic forms and themes in hip-hop culture in Philadelphia and beyond. Through close, intensive analysis of hip hop lyrics, as well as audiovisual performance and film, we will consider how artists from the late twentieth century onward have used the hip hop to extend, engage, and complicate key concerns of literature in general, and African American and African Diaspora literature in particular. How do literary tropes such as the cautionary tale, the coming-of-age narrative, the quest narrative, the redemption narrative, the protest narrative, and the coming-out story influence hip hop texts? What possibilities do these forms of hip-hop storytelling open for our analysis of cultural and political life in 2021? Focusing on the musical and literary cultures of Philadelphia and drawing links to other contexts, we will take up these questions through an analysis of hip hop texts from the late 1970s to the current moment, including works by Philadelphia rappers The Roots, Meek Mill, and Lady Cannon, as well as Queen Latifah, Kendrick Lamar, Kurtis Blow, Notorious B.I.G., Lxs Krudxs Cubensi, Nitty Scott, KripHop Nation, Bad Bunny, Megan Thee Stallion, KC Ortiz and others. Reading these alongside Philly-focused stories and other narrative works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Alice Walker, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, Raquel Salas Rivera, and Asali Solomon, we will examine how hip hop intervenes in narratives about nation, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic location, (dis)ability, and intersectional political engagement across space, time, and genre. Through a series of in-class visits from Philadelphia rappers, writers, and activists, as well as excursions exploring the city’s hip hop and literary cultures, we will consider how Philadelphia’s cultural and historical complexity offers fodder for a rich intersectional analysis of hip hop storytelling. Conditions permitting, this course will be taught in Philadelphia at the Friends Center.