PLAS Graduate Works-in-Progress: Charlie Hankin and Patrick J. Signoret

Raplove: The Politics of Recursion in Latin American Hip-Hop

Charlie Hankin (Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton)

This paper explores a widespread tendency toward mise-en-abyme by rappers in Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti: the common gesture of rapping about rap or in apostrophe to hip-hop in quasi-religious veneration. Listening closely to song lyrics, I explore the ways self-reflexive or recursive rap recalls ars poetica and self-referential music, as well as religious rhetoric associated with the African diaspora. How and why do Latin American rappers incessantly seek to describe their practice in their practice? In what ways does this self-theorization legitimate rap’s literariness? What are the politics of the rap song’s recursive lyric present?

Charlie Hankin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He is interested in intermedial, transnational resonances between music, poetry, and performance in the non-Anglophone Atlantic world: how writers influenced by the African diaspora return to and revise sonic and literary traditions. His dissertation, Break and Flow: Hip-Hop in Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti, listens to the way the syncopated, repeated breakbeat constitutive of rap music moves through Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti as artists innovate hip-hop with distinct poetic flows, theorizing a complex relation between the sonic and the literary, neighborhood and world, art and politics.

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Cohesion, Capacity, or Stability? The State’s Role in Ending Violent Criminal Competition

Patrick J. Signoret (Politics, Princeton)

This talk is free and open to the public. Lunch provided.