What's Free?: The Struggle for Liberation Out of the Tradition of the Oppressed in Hip-Hop Nation

The aim of the present project is to work out the potential for contemporary liberation struggles emerging out of a unique constellation of the thought of Walter Benjamin and hip-hop alongside relevant sources from the fields of political theology and hip-hop studies. More specifically, I take up key concepts from Benjamin—including shock-experience, the tradition of the oppressed, citational practices, and translation—to work out how they might help make sense of the political work that the form—sampling and scratching—and content—lyrics—of hip-hop have always performed. With this in mind, the present project is neither a comparative work nor a Benjaminian reading of hip-hop (or vice versa). Rather, it is an attempt to draw out the political insights and a potentially viable political project out of my reading of Benjamin and continued engagement with hip-hop.