Samuel Lamontagne (UCLA, African American Studies & History)

Hiphopography aims at centering hip-hop participants’ perspectives as grounded in experience and expertise. Placing the engagement with hip-hop participants at the heart of its methodology, hiphopography acknowledges and includes participants’ agencies, reflexive capacities, and active theorizations on their own hip-hop practices and involvements in hip-hop cultural worlds as central to the production of knowledge on hip-hop. Hiphopography offers ethical, and socially justice-oriented ways to engage in the knowledge and power relationship. Taking my research with Los Angeles hip-hop communities and the 2022 class “Rap, Race, and Reality” taught by Chuck D of Public Enemy at UCLA as examples, this talk considers the possibility for the co-production of hip-hop knowledges in academia. Further, it explores how the extension of hiphopography to the university teaching environment can impact music studies and assert a commitment to epistemic decolonization.

Samuel Lamontagne is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow with the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and the Department of History at UCLA. His research focuses on hip hop and electronic dance music in Los Angeles, and in the African diaspora more generally.

Organized by the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music, co-sponsored by Ethnomusicology Forum.