Theorizing Literacies as Affective Flows: Attuning to the Otherwise Possibilities of Hip-Hop's “In-the-Red Frequencies”

Abstract

In this theoretical and conceptual article, we consider how meaning-making, literacies, identities, power, privilege, and in/equities are entangled with/in non/human sociomaterial force relations. Inspired by Rose, we build theoretically on the philosophical principles of hip-hop—flow, rupture, layering, and sampling. Conceptually, we invite literacy educators to attune to “in-the-red frequencies,” or “noisy” political philosophies and practices that Black people have used to create alternative realities to white supremacist patriarchal systems of oppression. Afrodiasporic approaches to mobility and sounding pivot us away from humanist ways of knowing/being/doing/researching literacy and toward more creative, emergent, and “fugitive modes.” Ultimately, we argue that theorizing affective literacies via flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling enables ethical teaching, learning, and research practices that respect multiple perspectives, histories, and truths; account for affect, power, privilege, positioning, and complicity; and highlight “otherwise worlds” not predicated on hegemonic whiteness, anti-Blackness, and sociopolitical violence.

Over the past two decades, sociologists, cultural theorists, and literacy scholars have attended to the new and emerging changes, speeds, rhythms, and movements of contemporary social life, which have been described as mobilities or cultural flows (Appadurai, 1996; Leander et al., 2010). Within such mobile flows (e.g., of affect, people, media), the social becomes reimagined as a complex, ever-changing cultural landscape characterized by the intraconnectedness of the global and local, and the vitality of educational spaces as more-than-human “places-in-the-making” (Leander et al., 2010, p. 334). Although the recent posthuman turn in the field of literacy has tended to celebrate the possibilities of reconceptualizing “situated” sociocultural learning environments as non/human “mobilities of learning” (Leander et al., 2010, p. 331), feminist and critical scholars remind us that mobilities↔flows are never neutral and, at times, have shaped and perpetuated sociopolitical, gendered, racialized, economic, and environmental injustices—what Cresswell (2010) refers to as the “politics of mobility” (p. 17). In other words, we cannot forget that mobile flows are differentially embodied. Take, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement, where bodies of all kinds have mobilized to protest the endemic brutality and discrimination directed toward Black folks by the state, individuals, and society, writ large, or the handling of flows of asylum seekers at the U.S.–Mexico border, resulting in family separations and the detainment of thousands of migrant children in governmental holding facilities (Cheatum & Roy, 2021). These current events point to the “paradox of mobility” (Leonard, 2013, p. 17), or the ways that mobilities are contingent, unstable, unequal, and potentially violent. And yet, mobile flows and their complex relations to literacy learning remain largely undertheorized.

In this theoretical and conceptual article, we take up Stornaiuolo et al.'s (2017) invitation to develop additional theoretical and methodological directions for mobilities research that consider how meaning-making, literacies, identities, power, privilege, and in/equities are entangled with/in non/human sociomaterial force relations (i.e., affect). Our purpose for doing so is threefold: (a) to highlight how particular understandings of posthuman mobilities may work to unintentionally reify the epistemological project of Western humanism, ¹ or white patriarchal ways of knowing/being/doing/feeling/moving; (b) to pose a cultural challenge to the paradox of mobility by offering alternative theorizations of affect/affective literacies; and (c) to privilege hip-hop principles that embrace Black movement↔feeling↔thought (Crawley, 2016), while affirming the lives, literacies, and humanity of all students.

Inspired by Rose's (1994) argument that hip-hop or Afrodiasporic approaches to movement, rhythm, and sound offer “a potential blueprint for social resistance and affirmation” (p. 39), we build on the hip-hop principles of flow, rupture, layering, and sampling to theorize literacies as affective flows. Following Petchauer (2015), we understand hip-hop here as an aesthetic form or set of philosophical theories, “rather than an amalgamation of culturally relevant, critical, and youth-oriented approaches that has characterized much of the important hip-hop education research and practice” (p. 79). We turn up the volume to attune to “in-the-red frequencies” (Rose, 1994), or “noisy” political philosophies and practices that Black people have used to create alternative realities to white supremacist patriarchal systems of oppression (Crawley, 2016). We do so to privilege Afrodiasporic approaches to mobility and sounding. These approaches pivot us away from humanist ways of knowing/being/doing/researching literacy and toward more creative, emergent, and fugitive modes (Snaza, 2019) that honor philosophical practices emerging from Black people's lived experiences—practices that, historically, have been coded out of legibility by white supremacist institutions (Crawley, 2016; James, 2020; Rose, 1994). Ultimately, we argue that theorizing affective literacies via the hip-hop principles of flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling enables ethical teaching, learning, and research practices that respect multiple perspectives, histories, and truths; account for affect, power, privilege, positioning, and complicity; and highlight otherwise social worlds (Crawley, 2016) not predicated on hegemonic whiteness, anti-Blackness, and sociopolitical violence.

In what follows, we first discuss our positionalities, not only in relation to this theoretical project but also the current sociopolitical climate, “reminding us of the interdependence of humans and nonhumans, of bodies, objects and entities” (Kontovourki et al., 2020, p. 381). We provide a brief historical context of hip-hop before situating ourselves within a second wave of hip-hop education. We then review current and seminal research on mobilities within the field of literacy education. We next introduce and build upon the hip-hop concept of flow, arguing that it is inextricably entangled with rupture, layering, and sampling, and theorize it as a mobile, affective force aligned with Black cultural frameworks. We conclude by considering the implications of thinking with these theoretical concepts for the field of literacy.

Researcher Sensibilities: Positioning Ourselves Within Current Sociopolitical Moments

STOP TEACHING CRITICAL RACIST THEORY

EDUCATION NOT INDOCTRINATION

—Protest signs (Waxman, 2022)

Instead of divisive woke-left ideology such as critical race theory (CRT), cancel culture, and age-inappropriate sex education, we are putting kids and the authority of parents back in charge of our education system.—Jason Kenney, Alberta premier (Magusiak, 2022).

DON’T SAY GAY

PROTECT CHILDREN—SUPPORT FAMILIES

—Protest signs (Wilson, 2022)

Legislation at the state and provincial levels over the past year has left us frustrated. Everyday media headlines are peppered with racist, homophobic, anti-trans, and antiabortion agendas set forth by local representatives. In Florida (where two of us reside and teach), bills have been introduced and signed into law that strictly limit what can be taught and discussed in pre-K–12 schools regarding race and gender. These incidents are not isolated and have manifested in similar iterations across many U.S. states (e.g., Georgia, Alabama).

As scholars, we recognize the affects and effects such legislation has the potential to produce. As humans who identify in a multitude of ways (Black, white, immigrant, working class, women), we are all too familiar with the material consequences legislation like this has on our bodies and the bodies of others. Therefore, our collective desire to think about affective mobilities within this political moment has taken on a deeper meaning for all of us. What is not permissibly discussed in pre-K–12 classrooms threatens our collective well-being as much as what is being discussed by politicians in support of this legislation. Furthermore, the intersections of CRT—which has been the main focal point for most of the current legislation—and hip-hop as an art form have been recognized by scholars as parallel movements critiquing American racialization by providing a “race-based interdisciplinary theoretical framework” (cummings, 2010, p. 519) with the goals of “radical realignment and societal recognition and change of race and law in America” (p. 500). As cummings (2010) asserts, the principles of hip-hop align with the basic tenets of CRT, namely that “racism is a normal and relentless fact of daily life” (p. 519).

This article represents our collaborative efforts to “think with” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) these hip-hop principles as we work across our own individual areas of research (e.g., hip-hop, affect, posthumanism) and contexts (American Southeast and mid-Atlantic regions, western Canada) within a period of deep upheaval, anxiety, uncertainty, and contemplation as to what such times potentially mean for us as educators, researchers, students, and human beings. Our hope is to offer alternative theorizations of mobilities in relation to affective literacies so that things may be otherwise. That said, following Harrison and Arthur (2019), we acknowledge “hip-hop's malleability and refusal to be neatly characterized,” which enables its mobility “across geographic and particularly sociological boundaries, and afford[s] a certain degree of resilience against efforts to demarcate it, devalue it, and/or contain it” (p. 1). Our aim is not to appropriate, co-opt, or neatly characterize hip-hop, but rather to recognize its potential for reenvisioning the role of literacies during these difficult, uncertain times.

Contextualization of Hip-Hop

Originating in the United States in the 1970s on the heels of the Black soul movement and contextualized by the 1960s fight for civil rights, hip-hop stood as a musical articulation that enabled Black and Brown voices to resonate within a disregarded urban landscape designed for their demise (Haile, 2018). Historically, hip-hop music and culture was “sonically, vocally, and visually birthed from a polycultural mix of influences” (Poulson-Bryant, 2013, p. 214) connected to forms of Black resistance that utilized musical, oral, visual, and dance forms as alternative spaces to practice freedom—for example, African griots and drums, improvisations, quilting, plantation chants (call and response), negro spirituals, blues, jazz, and R & B/soul (Asante, 1991; Poulson-Bryant, 2013; Rose, 1994). Characterized by five major elements, including DJ’ing, emceeing, break-dancing, graffiti, and knowledge of self, hip-hop was an amalgam of Afrodiasporic narratives and traditions (Rose, 1994) whose purpose was to engage in “real” conversations informed by the various entanglements of living, working, and existing in a society preoccupied with white sensibilities (Petchauer, 2015). For marginalized youth, hip-hop served as an exuberant outpour of verbal, sonic, and bodily expression that allowed physical and mental release beneath the pressures of historical trauma linked to centuries-long dispossession, dehumanization, and subjugation. As an unapologetic expression of lived experience, hip-hop connected the mind, body, and soul through various communicative repertoires that more authentically articulated Black ways of reading, knowing, and relating to the world.

Although hip-hop prioritizes Blackness to challenge white coloniality, it does not deny the inclusion and participation of other identities (Pennycook, 2005; Rose, 1994). Hip-hop connects to a larger body of decolonizing, critical approaches (e.g., Indigenous thought and methodologies: Tuck & Yang, 2014), African American-inspired art forms (e.g., jazz, street art: Asante, 1991; Poulson-Bryant, 2013; Rose, 1994), and social institutions (e.g., Black churches: Crawley, 2016) engaging in antiracist social justice work. Rose (1994) poignantly articulates such critical forms of expression in her characterization of hip-hop style and aesthetics. She classifies how hip-hop principles—specifically flow, rupture, layering, and sampling—coalesce to create “shared approaches to sound and motion found in the Afrodiaspora” (p. 38) that “set the stage for political mobilization” (p. 1), while not “deny[ing] the pleasure and participation of others” (p. 4). Whether through the scathing words of Public Enemy in the 1980s with their controversial song “911 Is a Joke,” the street battle cries of NWA and their song “F @#$ the Police” in the 1990s, or Kendrick Lamar's denunciation of the criminal justice system with his song “DNA” in 2016, over its 40-year life span, hip-hop has provided a critical ethnographic perspective that calls out the societal ills that have denied equitable access and opportunity for marginalized and underrepresented communities (Petchauer, 2015; Rose, 1994).

That said, following Love (2017), we recognize that hip-hop is not a unified concept with singular goals and aims. Although hip-hop has been lauded for its ability to attune to silenced voices, it has been taken up in ways that both support and undermine the struggle for justice. For example, major critiques levied against hip-hop cite the promotion of vulgarity, violence, drugs, and misogyny (Love, 2013; Rose, 1994). Other critiques problematize how youth across the world have co-opted hip-hop and Black cultural forms (Pennycook, 2005). Although Osumare (2001) contends that hip-hop's rise in popularity stems from a communal sense of connective marginalities, debates remain over who has the right to hip-hop. These debates highlight the controversial ways the medium has been commercialized and reconstituted for personal and economic gain (e.g., by white record labels). Overall, such associations are in tension with the goals of progressive hip-hop (Osumare, 2001), or how hip-hop's “culture, music, and elements, alongside an examination of issues within one's surroundings creates positive change in one's community” (Love, 2013, p. 8). Although we acknowledge hip-hop's plurality, critiques, and tensions, we focus here on its political, social, and progressive (Osumare, 2001) dimensions—that is, its potential for social resistance, affirmation, and possibility.

First-Wave Hip-Hop Studies

The academy's interest in hip-hop studies burgeoned in the early 90s, as scholar-activists began mining the aesthetic to legitimate research exploring Black liberation and social injustice. Early pioneers such as Toop (1984), Rose (1994), and Spady and Lee (1995) paved the way for first-wave hip-hop studies. First-wave studies connected the lyrical analysis of politically charged groups such as NWA, Public Enemy, Afrika Bambaataa, and the Soul Righteous Teachers to broader sociocultural conditions that illuminated the realities of urban life (Hill, 2009). Through the validation of first-wave studies, hip-hop was elevated as a productive frame to analyze the next iteration of Black youth cultural production and radical social justice movements (Zullo, 2018).

Particularly in pre-K–12 education, first-wave studies centered research that demonstrated the power of hip-hop as a culturally relevant approach to connect student experiences, cultural orientations, values, and worldviews to school curriculum for deeper learning (Hill, 2009). As the intersections between culturally relevant pedagogy and hip-hop matured, lyrical analysis evolved to address more nuanced topics, brokered through the lens of critical theory (McLaren & Kincheloe, 2007), to explicitly confront issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. With the influx of various critical hip-hop models (Alim, 2006; Duncan-Andrade & Morell, 2008; Pennycook, 2017), the potential for classrooms as sites of critical action, resistance, and dialogic inquiry heightened, which moved hip-hop educational practice beyond cultural relevance to a focus on amplifying student voices for social change.

Numerous scholars have conceptualized the intermingling materiality of hip-hop and literacy and its potential in academic and classroom settings (hip-hop literacy: Richardson, 2006; global ill-literacies: Alim, 2006; urban literacies: Kinloch, 2011; hip-hop lit: Hill, 2009; critical hip-hop literacy: Barrett, 2013; urban youth and literacy: Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008). From a language and literacy perspective, hip-hop is exceptional as it audaciously adopts multiple forms of Black language as the standard mode of communication (Smitherman, 1997), giving a metaphorical middle finger to white mainstream English (Baker-Bell, 2020). Hip-hop's bold denunciation of white mainstream English made clear that it didn’t care about entering mainstream music societies, as the voice(s) of hip-hop culture superseded the need for acceptance by the dominant culture (Rose, 1994; Smitherman, 1997). From this perspective, Morgan (2001) interprets hip-hop as a counter to dominant language ideologies, challenging “notions of correctness and creativity by linking [literacies] not to institutionally sanctioned norms but rather to Hip-hop cultural priorities and tastes” (Alim et al., 2011, p. 122). The power of hip-hop in literacy rests within a shared understanding of vernacular and social practices that connect reading and writing to students’ lived experiences. In direct opposition to traditionalized literacy models, hip-hop literacy bolsters a form of learning that reaches beyond technical skill to reflect the cultural and linguistic expressions of urban life through music, movement, rhythm, and voice (Nightengale-Lee & Clayton-Taylor, 2020).

Second-Wave Hip-Hop Studies

In more recent years, a second wave of hip-hop studies has emerged (Petchauer, 2015). According to Petchauer, this second wave shifts the focus from “understanding hip-hop solely as content to understanding hip-hop also as aesthetic form” (p. 78; see also Brown, 2013; Pennycook, 2017). Building on first-wave work, second-wave studies provide a new conceptualization that considers how hip-hop's stylistic elements—flow, rupture, layering, and sampling—can be overlaid onto educational research as heuristics to analyze and interpret social phenomena within non/hip-hop educational settings. For example, within her research with the Black girl collective entitled Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths, Brown (2013) invites us to consider how ruptures and layering sound out to create (il)legibility that can protect community initiatives from external structures that threaten to dismantle them, such as cultural gentrification (Petchauer, 2015). Through a hip-hop lens, Brown (2013) supports the disruption of singular, linear understandings of race, gender, and community marginalization by elevating the knowledges, voices, and ideas of Black girls, showing that “their background and culture are just as relevant and worthy of study as those of the students whose cultural identities are traditionally represented in the classroom” (Kelly, 2013, p. 52).

Overall, Petchauer (2015) positions second-wave studies as work that (either directly or indirectly) takes up Rose's (1994) invitation to put the hip-hop principles of flow, rupture, layering, and sampling (which he discusses as flow/rupture and sampling/layering) to work within the field of education. In other words, Petchauer argues that educators might think of these aesthetic forms of hip-hop as heuristics or “theoretical tools that can guide [educational] analysis and interpretation” (p. 99), where there need not necessarily be a focus on hip-hop as content within educational spaces (as noted in first-wave hip-hop studies). Although Petchauer does invite consideration of affect, sound, and materiality in such analyses and interpretations, he devotes less attention to the theorizing of affect in relation to literacies, mobilities, and vibrations (as in-the-red frequencies), which is where we situate our theoretical project.

Mobilities and Literacies

Within the field of literacy, scholars have explored the concepts of movement/mobilities through both sociocultural and posthuman theories. Centering sociopolitical, local, and historical movements, Gutiérrez (2008) first introduced the term “learning as movement” to describe the learning that happens by and through movement across physical and social settings (specifically relating to migrant youth). Several other sociolinguistic literacy scholars have taken up movement in literacy, such as multilingual writers shuttling between languages (Canagarajah, 2006), rhetoric as movement between roots and routes (Crawford, 2010), and “language-in-motion” (Blommaert, 2010, p. 5). Yet, these movements of literacy practices across languages and locations do not always fulfill the promises of social mobility (Leonard, 2013). In fact, some have argued that socially situated and localized views of literacy undertheorize its “transcontexualizing potentials” (Brandt & Clinton, 2002, p. 338), both within local contexts and as a means to connect to global contexts.

To account for movement between the local and global, Sarroub (2008) uses the term “glocal” to explain how literacies move between contexts and people linguistically, culturally, and cognitively. Although this view of glocal literacy helps to widen the aperture for literacies, it is anthropocentric, positing that literacy is something that humans make and do by themselves, without expressing attention to the materiality of literacy practices. Furthermore, glocal powers are a complex web with differing power relations across genders, races, ethnicities, and geographies (to name a few), making it difficult for classical social theories to act as productive tools for navigating the complexities.

To move away from conceptualizations of literacies that are human-centric, some literacy scholars take up actor–network theory (Latour, 1996) to demonstrate the ways objects, as agentive matter, become networked actants with/in literacy practices (Brandt & Clinton, 2002; Leander et al., 2010). Less attention, however, has been given to how racialized histories and ideologies (whiteness in particular) function as actants, moving through official literacy curriculum (Ferguson, 2021).

While not exploring networks per se, Gutiérrez (2020) discusses how the concept of “learning-on-the move” (p. 428) unsettles what traditionally counts as learning and where learning occurs, as youth move across social spaces, taking up tools and practices that move with them. Gutiérrez's theoretical framework encompasses the spatiotemporal, relational, and agential nature of movement, while critiquing the ways mobilities have been mediated by race and class. However, within such a framework—which seeks to “expand the field's theoretical matrix of the sociohistorical, cognitive, sociopolitical, sociocultural, relational, and spatial” (p. 427)—Black philosophies are not explicitly privileged.

Although literacy scholars have been attending to mobilities or cultural flows within and across educational environments for more than a decade (Leander et al., 2010), there has been a renewed interest in such research, inviting posthuman considerations. A posthuman worldview of literacy not only accounts for the ways in which languages and literacy practices move as lively matter but also for affects and bodies (human and otherwise, e.g., race, gender) as force relations (Dernikos, 2018; Lenters, 2019). Leander et al. (2010) consider the possibilities for both virtual and physical mobilities to reimagine learning beyond classroom-as-container discourses that suggest learning only occurs within school structures. They instead envision classrooms as more-than-human “places-in-the-making” (p. 334), where cultural flows (e.g., of materials, histories) move with classrooms. In more recent years, however, educational scholars have expressed concerns that some research taking up posthuman theories has not adequately addressed the politics of mobility (Cresswell, 2010), particularly in relation to race (Thiel & Dernikos, 2020), often ignoring how more-than-human im/materialities can also work to perpetuate inequalities (see Dernikos, 2020; Hackett et al., 2020; Jocson & Dixon-Román, 2021; Truman, 2019).

Affective Mobilities in Relation to Blackness

The scholarship of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) has become an important touchstone in shaping how the field of education conceptualizes posthuman mobilities (Dernikos et al., 2020). In particular, this scholarship has opened up possibilities for literacy scholars to consider a theory of movement that maps flows of affective energy. Literacy scholars taking up Deleuzoguattarian philosophies tend to theorize these flows as parts of dynamic, everchanging assemblages of more-than-human bodies (e.g., humans, sounds, books) saturated with affect (Dernikos, 2018, 2020; Leander et al., 2010; Lemieux, 2020; Lenters, 2019; Thiel & Dernikos, 2020). By affect, we mean nonconscious, visceral embodied vibrations, and forces: flows that energetically reverberate across/within bodies of all kinds to create new im/possibilities and in/capacities for subjects.

By mapping out how bodies are re/produced relationally, literacy scholars taking up affect theories seek to engage in nonrepresentational analyses that trouble the representational logic of Western humanism:

Representation refers to the idea that hierarchical binaries order the social world, where Man (White male, class privileged, heterosexual, able-bodied, etc.), as an autonomous, rational subject, is positioned as the definitive human being…presumably superior to all other people (e.g., folks of color or women) and things (e.g., animals or rocks)…. [R]epresentation does not allow for difference, movement, emergence, and newness. (Dernikos et al., 2020, p. 20)

Yet, as Thiel and Dernikos (2020) remind us, Deleuzoguattarian conceptions of affective literacies may unintentionally work to perpetuate the exclusionary humanist frameworks they hope to trouble, namely by dismissing or transcending race, racial violence, and anti-Blackness (Palmer, 2017). These concerns have been expressed both within the field of literacy and across the larger humanities, particularly in reference to new materialist theories, which include theories of affect. According to Ahmed (2013), new materialism's “founding gesture” (p. 25) is its claim of newness. By claiming to offer a new philosophical practice that privileges material vibrations/resonances over representational hierarchies/abstractions, new materialist theories propose an idealized yet dehistoricized onto-epistemology of reality, movement, and sound. This gesture functions to supersede, progress past, or simply ignore Black people's theorizations of mobility, which offer alternative practices and critiques of humanity. James (2020) adds that because Black theories of mobility do not necessarily center Man or whiteness—that is, by situating themselves as a new theory that overcomes the representational logic of Western humanism—they are often discounted, which we contend erases Afrodiasporic understandings of movement and sound as vibrational forms of affect. In this way, new materialist theories—and literacy research shaped by such theories—can, contrary to their aim, serve to reinforce Western humanism, which continues to remain resilient, in part, because it aligns with a market-centered, neoliberal model of education that discounts past inequities and privileges newness/ progress (Snaza, 2019).

In the next section, we build on the hip-hop concept of flow, which we argue is inseparable from rupture, layering, and sampling, to privilege affective theories of movement and sound aligned with Black intellectual frameworks for knowledge production. Here, flow neither aims to abstract from the lived realities and experiences of minoritized youth, nor to reinvest in whiteness, neoliberal grammars, or idealized models of vibration/sound. We offer flow as a specific sociohistorical concept of movement/sound/vibration that embraces otherwise possibilities (Crawley, 2016) for literacies/literacy learning, namely, by troubling the re/production of colonizing, white supremacist, and patriarchal modes of existence.

Affective Mobilities “In-the-Red”: The Workings of Flow

As a central element of hip-hop (Petchauer, 2015), flow refers to energy associated with “rhythmic motion, continuity, and circularity” (Rose, 1994, p. 39). These flows of energy are vibrational, moving across/within bodies of all kinds. Even when there appears to be silence and stillness (e.g., when a break-dancer freezes), movement is always occurring, as “sounds are already in motion; they are always reverberating, bouncing off objects” (Gershon, 2018, p. 56). Although flow is present across the various styles of hip-hop (e.g., rap music, graffiti, break dancing), it is most often associated with the rhythmical features of a rapper's or MC's (master of ceremonies) expression, emotion, and oral delivery of words, lyrics, beats, and so on (Krims, 2000). According to Krims, this rhythm can be marked by “sing-songy[ness]”—that is, “repetition, on-beat accents (especially strong-beat ones), regular on-beat pauses…and strict couplet groupings” (p. 50)—or metrical violations, which may involve using the rapper's voice as a kind of percussion instrument to stagger “the syntax and/or the rhymes,” subdivide the beat, repeat off-beat accents, and deliver “sharp, staccato attacks” (p. 50). Krim's point about the violation of the meter highlights Rose's (1994) argument that flow cannot be separated from ruptures, as these momentary breaks in flow still manage to sustain rhythm. Unlike Western classical music's privileging of harmony, hip-hop sound does not seek to resolve dissonance, which is welcomed and expected. As such, hip-hop aligns with Afrodiasporic ways of moving, knowing, and sounding (Rose, 1994). Within Black aesthetic practices, “the presence of rhythm and lack of symmetry are paradoxical, but they are there…. There is always rhythm, but it is the rhythm of segments” (Hurston, 2000).

This rhythm of segments becomes more apparent when we consider that, along with ruptures, layering and sampling are also an integral part of flow, all contributing to hip-hop's rhythmic force (Rose, 1994). As Harrison and Arthur (2019) note (drawing upon Krims), hip-hop producers bring “incompatible layers of sound…into conflict with each other,” resulting in affective “sensations of beauty, fear, hardness, and ultimately realness” (p. 54). This practice of layering (i.e., a stacking/building effect that moves energy, here in relation to sound) and sampling (i.e., remixing a segment from already existing work) “different media and performative modes is pervasive across a range of hip-hop expressive practices” (Harrison & Arthur, 2019, p. 39) and contributes to hip-hop's syncopated rhythms by increasing volume; distorting, remixing, and moving vibrational energy around; and crossing frequency spectrums so as to rupture↔push sound “into the red” (Rose, 1994).

According to Rose (1994), in-the-red frequencies refer to the frequencies created when rap producers manipulate those established boundaries of musical engineering that reflect white, Western ideals of what counts as proper musical aesthetics, namely, the emphasis on harmony and resolution of any harmonic dissonance. As Rose (1994) argues, Western classical music has served as the architectural blueprint for what constitutes real music/sounding, as well as musical complexity and composition. Alternatively, in-the-red frequencies work to organize sound in ways that both align with and affirm Afrodiasporic aesthetic values.

We argue that in-the-red frequencies are affective in that they are a force: a lived vibrational disturbance that creates its own embodied feelings, truths, and space-times—a rhythmic force that makes us process the social differently. Instead of a world oriented toward and organized by whiteness (James, 2020), in-the-red frequencies reveal and build “otherwise worlds” (Crawley, 2016) from within “the world” of Man, that is, worlds not predicated on white supremacist values, aesthetics, and priorities. However, for those who are tuned into frequencies aligned with white supremacy, these worlds, movements, and soundings may appear to be disorienting, discomforting, and altogether noisy (James, 2020; Rose, 1994). Stoever (2016) writes, “White supremacy has attempted to suppress, tune out, and willfully misunderstand some sounds and their makers and histories” (p. 6). In other words, we have learned to perceive some sounds and literacies (performances, events, practices, etc.) as noisy/excessive/improper and, in turn, the bodies that re/produce such sounds as irrational, incomprehensible, and/or unintelligible (Crawley, 2016; Dernikos, 2020; Stoever, 2016).

In sum, Rose (1994) uses properties of hip-hop to offer up an alternative set of philosophical practices emerging from the lived experiences of Black communities within postindustrial New York City (NYC), experiences that are situated in specific historical and institutionalized relations of domination. According to Rose, such “undisciplined” practices emerged because of Black youth's inability or refusal to assimilate into a white supremacist patriarchy that not only denied them opportunities but also devalued their sounds, movements, and personhood. Taken together, then, we contend that the segmented rhythms of flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling serve as a “resource for thinking about a critical, anti-racist white disorientation” (James, 2016, p. 220) by redirecting us to rhythms, rationalities, habits, and practices that are perceptually coded out of white normative conceptions of movement, sound, knowledge, literacies, and personhood (Dernikos, 2020). Although Rose (1994) does not specifically reference affect in her conceptualization of flow, rupture, layering, and sampling, she does align with Afrodiasporic sonic priorities that embrace feeling and imagine sound as “energies,” “forces,” and “frequencies” (pp. 19, 67, 160). She also highlights the crucial role of NYC and technology in shaping hip-hop, even calling technology a “colleague in the music creation” (p. 66), thereby suggesting place, objects, and sounds have a degree of affective agency.

Despite the fact that many Black scholars such as Rose—particularly women writing from a critical, postcolonial perspective—have centralized feeling in their work (e.g., Crawley, 2016; Sharpe, 2016; Spillers, 1987), few, if any, have been acknowledged as affect theorists. As such, their work has often been overlooked within affect studies as a field (Yao, 2021). As literacy scholars, our intent is to disturb Western intellectual traditions that historically have refused to acknowledge the contributions of people of color and other marginalized populations (Sharpe, 2016; Yao, 2021). Building on Rose (1994), we, therefore, offer a conception of mobilities that theorizes affect in relation to Black aesthetic↔intellectual frameworks for moving, feeling, and sounding and what these things have the potential to produce for literacies. In what follows, we discuss how flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling are relationally entangled and mutually co-constituted, involving affective structures of feeling, feeling as connected to embodied truths or subjectivity, and alternative space-time frequencies. These concepts enable alternative affective possibilities that do not take whiteness as a starting point and refuse white neoliberal patriarchal onto-epistemologies.

Structures of Feeling

Hip and hop is more than music…. Hip and Hop is Intelligent movement.—KRS-One (1989)

The hip-hop concepts of flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling involve affective structures of feeling, or “different ways of thinking vying to emerge at any one time in history” (Williams, 2010). Hip-hop performances (e.g., rapping, break dancing, graffitiing) are intense feelings of being in the social that honor Afrodiasporic-centered onto-epistemologies. Unlike Western anti-Black colonial modes of existence, which privilege thinking as a self-contained act of cognition that affirms the “superiority” of Man, flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling honor feeling as forms of intelligence. Feelings flow energetically to constantly shape and transform us, as they distribute agency among various bodies. Yet, as ruptures remind us, affective energies do not simply flow smoothly across bodies, where human beings (e.g., students in classrooms) feel environments in the same way (Dernikos, 2018). In other words, we do not move through social spaces as neutral bodies devoid of distinct social and historical legacies. As such, the things that we encounter daily have the power to affect or stick to us differently (e.g., racialized and gendered histories flowing with/in literature may differentially impact children of color; Dernikos, 2018). Unlike a humanist view, then, the concept of the body here is a complex mobile network of more-than-human relationalities that include sounds, thoughts, images, histories, spaces, identities, ideologies, feelings, and so forth.

Figure 1.

Artwork by Stik, Danielle Mastrion, and Michel Velt - The Bushwick Collective, NY.

For example, in a work of graffiti by Stik et al. (n.d.), the artists created three relational vignettes (Figure 1). Each vignette—the first, hip-hop rap star and NYC legend Notorious B.I.G., who was tragically murdered at an early age yet lives on in spirit here; the second, a young woman with a blank yet hopeful expression; the third, a bird taking flight—conveys three different messages that energetically move within/across/between embodied perspectives. Although these messages are open to multiple interpretations, collectively they work to refigure public spaces as agentive matter that transmits various perspectives about how Black communities both differentially feel/experience environments and reimagine “the world.” Despite some distinct lines dividing the panels, such perspectives become entangled, as the various bodily parts (faces, eyes, wings), ruptured lines, facial expressions, overlapping colors, histories, and so forth produce/elicit complex feelings (e.g., connection amid ruptures, hope within the darkness of death/loss) that reflect the distinct yet contradictory realities of Black life in America. As a more-than-human mode, graffiti works to subvert white legitimations of what constitutes art/knowledge, who is allowed to create it, and how it is disseminated. Moreover, as a hip-hop style and literacy modality, graffiti ruptures mainstream deficit understandings of urban life, here creating alternative narratives/messages/knowledges/worlds that privilege feelings, while highlighting the realities, hopes, sorrows, and triumphs that envelop Black and Brown communities.

Feelings, therefore, implicate the body—“the material stuff of identity and affect” (Pennycook, 2017, p. 270)—in thinking/language and are the building blocks on which knowledge is constructed, validating affect as how one comes to know and understand literacy, as well as world-making practices. Such an exploration not only centers Afrodiasporic onto-epistemologies but also refuses the idea that there is only one (white supremacist) world and one way to be human (read: Man).

Embodied Truths

I’m totally contradictory…cause in essence, it means I’m human.—Nas (as cited in Mubirumusoke, 2016, p. 197)

Taken together as concepts, flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling destabilize white supremacist orientations by problematizing the notion that the body is a site of control—rather than experiential “free play” (James, 2016, p. 211)—and reality/the world is objective and singular. As James (2016) so aptly puts it, “Whiteness has a body problem…. [It] disorients people from bodily pleasure and sensuousness, and other non-instrumental attitudes to the body” (p. 211). Within hip-hop performances, more-than-human bodies emit not only multiple affects but also truths. Take the expression “realness” or “keeping it real,” which refers to the idea of hip-hop artists sharing personal experiences in authenticated ways. Hip-hop's relationship to realness and truth is much more complex than Western humanist conceptions. When rappers truth tell or testify (Smitherman, 1997), they are not adhering to a kind of truth resting on Eurocentric/Enlightenment epistemologies centering colonial ideas of rationality, reason, and distance. Within such humanist epistemologies, objectivity and subjectivity are “separable, and reason…[is] neutral [where]…subjectivity contaminates the quest for truth and must be rationally controlled” (Ramazanoglu & Holland, 2002, p. 48). Conversely—as first-wave scholars have argued—subjectivity is central to truth-telling in hip-hop, where truth becomes a mode of rhetorical communication used to share many facets about living within structures that have silenced, shut out, and surveilled Black bodies. As such, realities and subjectivities are incoherent, contradictory, and shifting.

We build on this work to assert that hip-hop artists embrace an embodied truth that is both contradictory and connected to other bodies—for example, histories, discourses, affects, and places. No longer seen as a container of the truth controlled by the autonomous, rational subject, the body becomes a force relation that moves/vibrates in ways that put pressure on us to acknowledge alternative worlds, subjectivities, literacies, and realities not predicated on Man (James, 2020). In other words, hip-hop artists “keep it real” by both privileging and undermining reality, that is, by narrating about the conditions of living as a Black person within an anti-Black world, even when the narration of events or experiences may be untruthful. According to Mubirumusoke (2016), it is this “attunement to self-expression that…negotiate[s] sometimes fictitious, illusory, and even contradictory narrative perspectives that nevertheless remain honest to the experiences of black folk in anti-Black America” (p. 177). For example, in the song “Thief's Theme,” when Nas (2004) asserts that he's a “philosophical gangsta with violent priors,” he is not telling a singular/literal truth, as he has not been convicted of the particular crimes contextualized in the song (Mubirumusoke, 2016).

When rappers such as Nas tell their truth, it may not simply be their own truth but a blurring of perspectives that “speaks to larger social, cultural, and historical realities shared within the ‘black’ diaspora” (Haile, 2018, p. 491)—a truth that has the capacity to affectively “resonate in different register[s]…[so as to] challenge the will to truth of White supremacy in an anti-black world” (Mubirumusoke, 2016, p. 176). The production of subjectivity, then, involves an encounter with affect; the powerful intensity of this encounter marks the hip-hop artist's/subject's capacity to act. Thus, affect is not just a feeling or an emotion but a bodily force influencing the subject's mode of existence. Nas may describe himself as a “gangsta” here, but he also refers to himself as a philosopher, a subject position previously made unavailable to him as a Black man in a white supremacist, racist world (Mubirumusoke, 2016). Additionally, by telling untruths here, he blends his voice with the voices of other marginalized subjects in a way that helps their stories resonate “without subsuming their voice[s]” or speaking for them (Haile, 2018, p. 491).

Thinking with flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling enables a theory of mobility that embraces the emerging, fluctuating, relational, and transcorporeal nature of knowledge, truth, and subjectivity, which emerge within affective encounters and are co-constituted within relational/dynamic bodily intra-actions. Such theory opens up the possibility of seeing the world, humanity, literacies, and subjects differently. Although Rose (1994) reminds us that the majority of people do not have the resources or power to “structurally transform the worlds they live in,” they can, she says, attempt “microscopic responses” (Dery, 1994, p. 213) (e.g., literacy educators noticing/disrupting sonic frequencies that re/produce racialized habits/practices of listening/hearing; Dernikos, 2020) that work to affectively jam the system (Truman, 2019) that keeps Man, white supremacy, and humanist metanarratives in place.

Space-Time Frequencies

They been tryin’ hard just to make us all vanish

I suggest they put a flag on a whole another planet

Jane Bond, never Jane Doe

And I Django, never Sambo —Monáe (2018)

Theorizing mobilities via flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling invites Afrodiasporic framings of space-time(s) that trouble Western humanist conceptions of time as linear. According to Massey (1994), humanist time has become equated with “History, Progress, Civilization, Science, Politics, and Reason” (coded as male), and space with “absence, lack,” stasis (coded as female) (p. 73). Although there is a focus on the future, it is a future that ignores the past (e.g., historical injustices and the constraints they potentially place upon particular people) and is a result of the present—that is, how well humans can rationally use their minds to make the right choices that will progress them forward along a unidirectional trajectory. In fact, within Western music, time functions to “dissolve the past and the future into one eternal present in which the passing of time is no longer noticed” (Small, 1996, p. 55). Black conceptions of space-time do not seek to dissolve the past, which is thought to be an inextricable part of the present. According to Rose (1994), this remembrance of the past within the present and simultaneously the future—a form of “ancestor worship” (Dery, 1994, p. 215)—works to counter the historical erasure of African-descendent people through slavery, paying homage to Black folks as a collective of people. That is, despite living in the ongoing wake of slavery or the ways that the afterlives of slavery continue to shape and animate Black life (Sharpe, 2016), Black folks insist on their existence by refusing to forget the violence of the past and how it impacts—but does not necessarily determine—their social worlds.

Although Deleuzoguattarian conceptions of affect/assemblages do not necessarily dissolve the past by framing space-time as a linear progression from past→present→future, they—unlike flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling—assume a flat ontology. That is, bodies are assumed to be nonhierarchical. There is also a concern that researchers thinking with these horizontal assemblages focus on what emerges within the present much more than past histories enfolded into the present (Thiel & Dernikos, 2020). And while there is an acknowledgment that the past can seep into the present with discussions of actual versus virtual realities, the emphasis is not on the ongoing effects of (racialized, gendered, etc.) histories, multiple space-times unfolding at once, or the building of alternative worlds/realities/literacies (Dernikos, 2020; Thiel & Dernikos, 2020). For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), through the virtual realm, the body can escape the material realm of the actual. For example, recalling the sensory experiences of a summer vacation—the feel of warm sand and ocean breezes, the scent and taste of summertime foods—can transport us to another time and space and may evoke a needed sense of calm on a cold and hectic winter day. Yet, since affects are thought to be both outside structure and conscious awareness, once the subject becomes aware of its affective capacity to act—for example, once affect is felt or experienced as an emotion (e.g., here as a sense of calm)—the virtual potential of affect is understood to be contained (Dernikos et al., 2020).

Unlike a Deleuzoguattarian concept of assemblage, the layered effects of flow offer otherwise worlds that trouble the humanist world of whiteness by privileging historical identities and legacies that refuse to be contained. Such refusals do not smoothly flow through space-time; they are released into the normative world to (a) rupture “the institutionalization and abstraction of thought that produces the categorical distinctions of disciplinary knowledge” (Crawley, 2016, p. 3) and personhood, and (b) reveal otherwise worlds not predicated on white supremacy. For Black folks, as well as other marginalized groups of people, these space-time ruptures produce sensations or productive pivots (James, 2020) that open spaces for alternative associations of what might be possible—to become someone and something other than the limited possibilities prescribed within a white supremacist world. For example, as noted above in the discussion of “Thief's Theme,” Nas's embodied performance creates an otherwise world where he affectively intra-acts with more-than-human others (e.g., droplets of water, broken-down cars, balloons) to become a philosopher—that is, a new subject position made available to him within an alternative reality, or in-the-red frequencies not predicated on white hegemony.

According to James (2020), flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling produce “slo-mo time,” which offers alternative conceptions of space-time by interrupting the pace of neoliberalism. She argues:

Rappers use serial repetitions of a lyric to create an effect similar to slow-motion film…. [I]t captures a hugely long series of iterations of the phenomenon, creating the effect of slowed-down time and intensified sensory impact, carving out space within the ongoing hustle and bustle of everyday life that continues apace…. [It] create[s] an alternative reality, a parallel universe, within hegemonic reality. (p. 75)

Although James is referencing rap specifically, we argue that slo-mo time can be understood across a range of hip-hop modes. Hip-hop artists aim to “articulate a mode of existence that interferes with the production of a White supremacist patriarchal social order” (James, 2020, p. 75). Rather than take up neoliberal metanarratives that emphasize whiteness, linearity, efficiency, rationality, and disembodiment (among other things), hip-hop artists use “lightning fast” artistic and linguistic innovation (Krims, 2000) to disrupt the flows of space-time by paying homage to the past while simultaneously creating new alternative realities. Hip-hop artists primarily take up these ideas when sampling the works of others. That is, they pay homage by invoking another's words, voice, image, and movement to help them say what they want to say so as to build otherwise worlds—“a parallel universe, within hegemonic reality” (James, 2020, p. 75). As philosophical practices, flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling remind us that these affective frequencies not only move/break/build energetically but they are also multilayered.

In a video titled “Best Breakdance Ever Compilation 2016 (BBoy Battle),” these more-than-human space-time concepts are vividly embodied and portrayed (DuckOnTrack, 2016). In the fight for Black humanity, hip-hop dance is positioned as a form of resistance performance, utilized as an articulation of physical, spiritual, and mental liberation from anti-Black racism. In the video, bodies move in unbounded ways to tell alternative stories of lived reality within space-times that disrupt the logic of white supremacy. Here, hip-hop dancers attune to in-the-red frequencies by resisting white mainstream interpretations of movement, as each dance move energetically moves/breaks/builds upon the next via processes of flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling. As DeFrantz (2018) notes, unlike the controlled movements of more traditional dance forms (e.g., ballet) that adhere to white aesthetic values (e.g., following set rules related to physical line/linearity that are achieved via disciplined body training), we “witness the body challenged to its extremes: whirling, twisting and bending on the ground, balancing against itself, catapulting in the air” (p. 89). Unbounded bodies become entangled within more-than-human relations of power: Literacies of liberation are conjured and communicated through authenticated (breaking, popping, locking, footworking, spinning) as well as inspired movements (sampling from elements of Afrodiasporic dances) that mobilize performance as a platform to reimagine and restore histories, identities, freedoms, and so on (Zullo, 2018).

Within the various hip-hop modes, then, when rhythmic flow is ruptured, affective energies are redirected away from the white Western logic of rational humanism and toward other social realities and space-time frequencies. Flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling invite opportunities to tune in to alternative philosophical practices that provide resources for thinking about a kind of white disorientation (James, 2020) by embracing Afrodiasporic approaches to feelings, embodiment, truth, space-times, movement, sounding, and literacies.

“Don’t Believe the Hype”: Otherwise Possibilities in the Midst of Chaos

We are living in uncertain times. To date, we continue to endure ongoing racial and social upheaval, gun violence in schools, and other humanitarian and economic crises. Such issues remind us of the intraconnectedness of human and nonhuman bodies, and how histories, objects, and affects work together to produce and, at times, obscure social and economic in/equities—to create, in the words of Public Enemy (1988), “hype.” These matters have connections to the recent bills coming out of Florida (e.g., Individual Freedom Bill, Don’t Say Gay Bill), as well as other similar bills across the United States that forward a message of justice yet im/mobilize particular bodies in different ways, calling attention to how “certain types of bodies are dehumanized through daily microaggressions and outright violence” (Kontovourki et al., 2020, p. 381). What we find particularly troubling is the way these political momentums are often positioned as acts of goodwill, wherein there is little attention given to the affective forces that often do violence (e.g., racism, misogyny, homophobia) to bodies out of tune with white supremacy.

These narratives, arguments, and affects, playing out in the current sociopolitical arena, extend relationally into literacy classrooms/spaces. The effects often continue to reinforce Eurocentric sensibilities and white mainstream language/literacy practices (Baker-Bell, 2020), affective assimilation to whiteness and feeling white (Dernikos, 2020), and an attunement to space-time frequencies that make social and cultural discriminations possible for diverse students (Dernikos, 2020; Thiel & Dernikos, 2020), thereby shutting down a child's right and need to both critically engage with their social worlds and to learn in an educational environment that makes space for multiple ways of knowing, being, and doing. An illustrative example, which we explore in depth in a companion article (Dernikos et al., 2023), is the way particular reading practices are labeled as noisy, distracting, and unsuccessful when Al, a young Black boy in a NYC first-grade classroom, decides to read Silverstein's The Missing Piece in an embodied singsong voice, rather than quietly in his head. Although the sounds emitting from Al's body felt bothersome to some students, they call our attention to how Al embodied literacies in ways that both refused anti-Blackness and honored Afrodiasporic ways of knowing/being/doing. Refusing to produce/consume the “sounds of whiteness” by adhering to those classroom literacy norms (e.g., privileging silence, stillness) that often served to negatively position him (e.g., as off-task, distracting, struggling), he refocuses sonic, visual, tactile, kinesthetic, and affective knowledges away from the literacies, histories, discourses, affects, and so on that feel/are harmful and toward those that feel/are pleasurable and life-affirming (McKittrick & Weheliye, 2017).

Thinking theoretically (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) with the philosophical principles of flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling enables us to refuse deficit interpretations of children like Al by redirecting us to those frequencies that push literacies into the red. One way to think about in-the-red frequencies, then, is as an invitation to sonically re/attune to educational environments in order to listen otherwise: that is, to bend our physical, aural, and affective orientations so as to refocus what we see, think, hear, and feel. In this article, our aim has been to redirect literacy educators and researchers to alternative rhythms, feelings, habits, and practices that challenge theoretical and methodological blind spots, namely those that reinforce neoliberal, heteropatriarchal, and white supremacist conceptions of literacy, knowledge, and personhood. To account for the paradox of mobility and the oft-hidden histories that travel alongside, it is more vital than ever that we attune to alternative flows by thinking with theoretical concepts that privilege and embrace Black feeling↔thought, while affirming the lives, literacies, and humanity of all students. Theorizing literacies as affective flows provides ways of sensing and navigating the political hype, in/equities, intensities, and complexities of the present historical moment—the normalized neoliberal rhetoric of goodwill that often oppressively pervades social and educational environments. Yet, at the same time, it is about recognizing our own complicities in violence, so as to better understand that what emerges in the present cannot be disentangled from past histories that are far from neutral—working to both subtly and overtly contain literate bodies. And, it is a way of honoring political philosophies and practices that Black people have used to create alternative realities to white supremacist patriarchal systems of oppression, so that literacies and literacy learning may be otherwise.

By inviting educators and researchers to tune in to hip-hop's in-the-red frequencies, we hope to offer alternative theorizations of affective literacies that may move us into otherwise worlds in our classrooms, educational systems, and educational research—worlds in which white sensibilities are no longer the default and where being someone and something other than the limitations prescribed within the world of white supremacy becomes a possibility. That said, attuning to otherwise cannot be done alone; it is an ongoing, messy, nonlinear, collaborative process that invites more-than-human considerations (e.g., attuning to other people, places, spaces, books, and histories). As such, we do not seek or even offer final closure here. Instead, we invite you to dwell in, further develop, and perhaps reimagine the theoretical concepts of flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling introduced here, as we embrace the endless unfolding of otherwise possibilities…

Caught you lookin’ for the same thing

It's a new thing, check out this I bring….

Don’t believe the hype.

—Public Enemy (1988)

Yeah. Don’t just think outside the box. Think outside your blocks…

Philosophical gangsta.

—Nas (2004)

Supplemental Material

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