Across the ever-humming terrain of New York City, an infrastructure dedicated to five boroughs’ and five decades’ worth of hip-hop history is blossoming under the steadfast cultivation of fans, artists, scholars, entrepreneurs, and communities working and living in the music’s birthplace. And yet, contemporary accounts of the march of gentrification through the city are often measured in terms of its effacement of New York’s hip-hop landscape, as well as other black urban centers that inflect the national imagination around Black Music and hip-hop. According to these accounts, the accessibility of this music culture’s local legacies is affected by the ways urban wealth inequality overlaps with the spatial inheritances of race.
With these considerations in mind, in this dissertation I trace the relationship between genre, sound, memory, and displacement. At a broader level, this research attends to the impact of gentrification on the historical, sensory, and aesthetic ecologies of neighborhoods and cityscapes, asking how in turn they can curate a sense of recognition, and thus belonging, for both longstanding and recently arrived residents. With a neoliberal contextualization of New York City’s official sound and cultural policies serving as a top-down, place-based framework, I chart local-level encounters between the aural boundaries and aesthetic imaginaries that inflect the habitus of musical genre workers—and the inhabitants of neighborhoods they do work in—and the imagineered sonic assemblages developers seek to impose in courting a well-heeled, white demographic. Keeping an eye on the ways past and present discourses on hip-hop, and the minstrelized legacies of genre in the United States, mediate such encounters, I specifically view locality in this work through commemorative hip-hop projects emerging within the shifting habitus and regulatory regimes of transitioning neighborhoods. Such an exploration demands attentiveness to the racial and right-to-the-city politics these projects serve as they engage the symbolic aura hip-hop has accrued since the early 1980s as a focal point for heated public debates (Rose, Hip Hop Wars).
At length, I illuminate how these politics, and projects that anchor them, signal a heightened moment of American genre drama, as hip-hop historicity, canonization, and memorialization interface directly with urbanization, manifesting: a particular anxiety around the potential that contemporary rap partakes in gentrification through a resurrection of the pained-but-jolly black body of minstrelsy, producing scenes of genre subjection; the potential to inhabit, territorialize, and reconstruct racialized property at the level of the individual; possibilities for evading a reinscription of corporeal politics that, as in the heyday of minstrelsy, leave open room for the counter-genre praxes established under it; forms of lyricism and vocality important to such counter-genre praxes and narratives; and finally, approaches to mediating the overlap between economic inequality and the spatial inheritances of race, and the social production of place. Ultimately, this research makes a strong case for the way musical affect and affectation carry the potential for an enduring and powerful influence on gentrification’s revisionary structuring of the body politic.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/992n-h011 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Radishofski, Kathryn Anne |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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