Although it took several decades of armor-piercing scholarship, now that the road is paved and rap has claimed its place within scholarly discourse, more central issues than the irritating (though inevitable) task of constantly proving rap’s (self-evident) artistic nature can finally be addressed. In this talk I will discuss Ice Cube’s track “I wanna Kill Sam” and Racionais MC’s’s track “Racistas otários.” The two tracks have in common the fact that they address the experiences of Black people through their relationship with public policies and institutions that claim to promote the emancipation of Black people in Brazil and in the USA. My goal is to show that the Racionais and Ice Cube symbolically (re)dimension contemporary “Blackness” as a result of the constant physical and symbolic clashes that started back in the slavery regime.

Professor Dutra has recently been announced as a 2020 semifinalist for the highly prestigious and internationally recognized Prêmio Oceanos, the Oceanos Prize for Literature in the Portuguese Language for his poetry book, Abliteraçōes, which was selected as one of 54 semifinalists out of 1,872 entries, only 17 of which were poetry books. The article can be found at: http://news.unm.edu/news/unm-professor-s-book-a-semi-finalist-for-portu…

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https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_90nM6G_URPGzl0ZIp3vReg