The Rhizome of Blackness ─ A Critical Ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity, and the Politics of Becoming

This book describes how immigrant and refugee French and English-speaking continental African students in three middle and high schools experienced the process of becoming black in North America (focusing on those living in Ontario, Canada) through hip-hop culture, language, and identity, and the cultural, linguistic, and sociopsychic implications of what it means to be black in North America. Detailing the results of a study he conducted between 1996 and 2011, the author discusses the relationship between race, identity, and culture, especially youth popular culture; the racial climate of three schools in Canada; questions of pedagogy, the lack of black teachers, and the absence of black people from history books; the students' language and culture learning through hip-hop and rap; and the intersection between race, language, culture, and identity through linguistic and cultural performance. Annotation c2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Awad Ibrahim is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa. He is a curriculum theorist with special interests in cultural studies; Hip-Hop; youth and Black popular culture; social foundations (i.e., philosophy, history and sociology of education); social justice and community service learning; diasporic and continental African identities; ethnography; and applied linguistics. He has researched and published widely in these areas. Among his books are Global Linguistic Flows: Hip-Hop Cultures, Youth Identities and the Politics of Language (2009; with Samy Alim and Alastair Pennycook); Critical Youth Studies: A Reader (Peter Lang, 2014; with Shirley Steinberg); Provoking Curriculum Studies: Strong Poetry and the Arts of the Possible (forthcoming; with Nicholas Ng-A-Fook and Giuliano Reis); and The Education of African Canadian Children: Critical Analyses (forthcoming; with Ali Abdi).