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Global Breakdancing and the Intercultural Body
Author(s): Halifu Osumare
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Dance Research Journal, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Winter, 2002), pp. 30-45
Published by: Congress on Research in Dance
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GlobalBreakdancingand the Intercultural
Body
HalifuOsumare
The experiences and perceptionsof the body are to a great extent immune to
the objective, analytic descriptionthat technology prefers;they can be hinted
at in poetry and art, but they always constitute a real and inexhaustible
resource against narrowrationality.
-Jonathan Benthall, The Body Electric
When I arrivedat nine o'clock, the deejay was spinning "triphop" style disks in the "chill
room"upstairsuntil the formal dance show was supposed to startat ten o'clock downstairs.'
Critical mass is important: the event did not begin until midnight; size of crowd and group
energy are the determining factors for starting time in hip hop culture. Eventually, the audience of about two hundred consisted of black, white, Asian, Hawaiian, military, and civilian
patrons who were mostly in their late twenties. "What's up, y'all? Y'all ready for the show?"
asked Jamal,Honolulu hip hop promoterand emcee, to open the event.
Jamal proceeded to read from a script about the beginnings of American society's acceptance of "African American culture in the 1920s Jazz Age," putting what was about to happen
in historical context and giving the event an informative purpose. This scripted narration of
hip hop's historical context at a club event reflected an interest in specific African American
origins of the pop culture form expressed by many global hip hop leaders. Thus began "Urban
Movement,"a November 1998 b-boy (breakdance)event producedat the WaveWaikikinightclub in Honolulu, on the island of Oahu. What followed was a demonstration of the current-
day variationsof hip hop dance that began in the 1970s with virtuosic athletic b-boying or bgirling and "popping,"the phenomenalmuscularcontrol of the rapid-firerhythmicisolations.
UrbanMovement provided several hip hop enactmentsthat illuminatedwhat I investigate in
this essay-the interdependenceof performanceand performativityas dual forces in global
breakdancing.
Hip hop culturehas come to constitutea majorforce in the contemporaryAmericanpopinternationalnetular culturemarket,while simultaneouslyproliferatingas an "underground"
work of loosely connected hip hop communities. African American music and dance have
Halifu Osumare holds a Ph.D. in American Studiesfrom the Universityof Hawaii at Manoa
and is currentlyAssistant Professor of Dance and American Studies at Bowling Green State
University.Her researchinterestsare the globalization of hip hop cultureand the use of popular dance by contemporarychoreographers. She recently published "Beat Streets in the
Global Hood: ConnectiveMarginalities of the Hip Hop Globe" in the Journalof American
and ComparativeCulturesand is currentlyunder contractfor a book on global hip hop culture by Wesleyan UniversityPress. Osumare is also a certified instructor of the Katherine
Dunhamtechniqueand was a soloist with the Rod Rodgers Dance Companyof New YorkCity
in the early 1970s.
30
Dance Research Journal 34/2 (Winter2002)
always been bought and sold accordingto the exigencies of a global supply-and-demand,capitalist marketplace.However, today's global reach of hip hop cultureexpands to ever-widening cultural spheres at a speed like never before. Whereas seventy years ago the Theater
Owners'Booking Agency could find audiencesfor Whitey's Lindy Hoppersonly in the United
States or Europe,today Rock Steady Crew's co-founder,CrazyLegs, can profitablytourJapan
and SoutheastAsia. In these new internationalsites, local audiences and performersabsorb
AfricanAmericanculturalforms, scriptingtheir own embodied spin on them.
In what follows, I argue that transnationalhip hop culture expands upon its basis in
African American performanceand poses new challenges to the once clear-cutparadigmof
culturalappropriationof black dance and music by European-Americans.I explore the intricacies of resultingculturalappropriativedimensions of hip hop's global trajectoryby investigating today's hip hop generationin the Hawaiian Islands, where I conducted field research
throughout1998 and 1999. While Hawai'i is, of course, a part of the United States, its local
culture is heavily inflected by its geographical location in, and historical relation to, the
Pacific region. I will bring into focus interculturalenactments of Hawai'i-basedhip hop professionals and high-school-age consumersof hip hop culture.
By enactmentsI mean those acts that bring forth, throughthe body, what has been previously invisible, submergedin the psyche. These enactmentscan take form throughtwo major
processes: performanceand performativity.The differentiationbetween performanceand performativityhas been discussed in diverse scholarly disciplines, such as philosophy (Jacques
Derrida 1978, 2000), gender studies and linguistics (JudithButler 1990a, 1990b), and performancestudies (AnthonyKubiak 1998). These theoreticalanalyses of performanceand performativity often explicitly insinuate embodied social praxis, and can be helpful in investigating the process of grafting of expressive physical characteristicsby one culture onto
another.Because bodily social practices can be made more visible through dance, when I
interrogatecultural appropriationthrough breakdance,I must consider hip hop expressive
style that includes body language, that is, attitudinaldispositions made visible throughposturing and gesturing. Furthermore,such an analysis must situate itself within the larger discussion of a hip hop culturethat exists sometimes in conjunctionwith, but often in opposition
to, the more obvious big business productionof rap music.
In this essay, I view performance, and specifically dance performance,as a series of bodily enactmentsthat bring conscious intent and purposeto the physical execution of rhythmically patternedmovement. These performancesoften have resonance with codified, learned
systems of movement practices and specific dance styles that encompass gestures that represent implicit sociocultural values. In relation to performance,I define performativity as an
often unconscious but meaningful series of bodily postures, gestures, and movements that
implicitly signify and marka sense of social identityor identitiesin everydaypedestrianactivity.2The performativityof gestures and body language constitutes the mannerin which we
understandourselves throughour bodies, literally throughthe muscularand skeletal structure
as well as semiotically and metaphorically.Peformativitymight be understoodas the bodily
methodology by which we projectour sense of ourselves into the world, while performanceis
the technique of embodying innovations on historicized movement styles and their attendant
culturalvalues that representparticularcollectivities.
Using this model, I examine enactments of hip hop culture among youth in Hawai'i to
view the bodily "text"of appropriation.In doing so, I explore breakdancingas a clear exam-
34/2 (Winter2002) Dance ResearchJournal
31
pie of movement that, in the words of dance scholar Jane Desmond, is "primary,not secondary social text" (Desmond 1997, 31). In the process of conducting my research, a salutary
embodied intertext was revealed to me that I call the "InterculturalBody." I explore the
InterculturalBody as a tangible result of the globalizationof Americanpop culturein general
and hip hop subculturein particular.
Hip Hop's Global Proliferation
Hip hop culture, now nearly thirty years old, greatly facilitates the proliferationof a global
youth dance phenomenonthat has affected nearly every countryon the map. What startedin
the South Bronx in the mid-1970s among African American and Jamaican-bor deejays as
party music, using new turntabletechnology with booming base sounds in the percussive
"breaks"of the recordedsongs, has become the latest saga in the ongoing exportationof black
American culture;and what began as acrobaticand highly syncopatedbreakdancingto those
musical breakbeats among Bronx Puerto Ricans is now being expandedupon in an international conversationof danced text.
The global reachof hip hop culturehas spawnedboth a conscious and an unconscious cultural dialogue within societies far removed from its origins. Local emcees (rappers)in the
major capital cities of Asia, South America, and Africa may attemptexact imitations of Dr.
Dre's early gangstarap style, but eventuallythey must matureinto rap styles that addresstheir
own local issues, sung often in indigenous languages that draw on other oral-basedtraditions
(Perkins, 1996). In dance, the highly skilled moves of Rock Steady Crew, for example, are
both mimicked and expanded upon by local movement communities throughout Europe,
Canada,Polynesia, and anywherepenetratedby either MTV or Rock Steady Crew's network
of internationalchapters.The following extensive quote from a Hawai'i-born Japanese and
African American b-boy named Justin Alladin (betterknown in Honolulu hip hop circles as
TeN) documentsthe growing internationalencoded dance languagethatb-boying has become:
When I was last in Japan,there were two kids battling. One kid came in and
cut the other off before he was finished, and so they walked aroundin a circle looking at each other.And all of a sudden they jumped like this, boom,
together,at the same time, knowing exactly what they were doing. It was the
"Brooklynrock." Do you know what a "Brooklynrock" is? No, I can barely
do it. These two kids, one from Japan, one from Hawai'i, never met each
otherbefore, got to the parknot even an hourbefore,just starteddancing, and
cannot communicate [verbally] with each other. They walked in the circle,
jumped at the right time together and landed at the same time together, and
startedBrooklyn rocking together.That is internationalcommunication.That
is people of the same culture.
That is the difference between someone really from hip hop and someone
from commercializedhip hop. A person in commercializedhip hop cannot do
that, does not know what that is, don't know anythingaboutit, and could not
do it to save their life. That'sjust [the difference in authenticity]on the dancing level. The same difference exists on the emcee level, on the deejay level,
on the [aerosol] art level. That part about them knowing what to do is what
32
Dance ResearchJournal 34/2 (Winter2002)
you [I, the interviewer]are talking about:how traditionsare passed on. Who
passed it on? They didn't go to school. They lived it, you know. That's their
life, so they know it. They have the same values. That kid knows that he cut
the other kid off, and he should not have done that. That's why they jumped
into the Brooklyn rock. They knew and they were ready for it. They knew
what a [hip hop] battle was. (Alladin 1999)
Indeed, breakdancehas traditionallytaken place in an improvisationalcircle, allowing
each soloist to demonstratehis or her skills while encoding gestural messages into the executed movement phrases.These messages often comment with bravuraon other dancers'perceived lack of skill, while extolling one's own prowess as a performer.Breakdance"battles"
originally took place in lined-up opposing "gangs"facing each other.They executed the original uprock,or Brooklyn rock, that was used in TeN's Tokyo b-boy circle to settle the dispute
over the breach in b-boy protocol. Classic examples of this early breaking culture were
immortalizedin the subway scene between New YearCity Breakersand Rock Steady Crew in
the 1983 film Beat Street, and in the highway underpassgang scene in the 1984 Breakin'II.
That breakdancingoriginatedas a creative dance alternativeto actual gang violence, as well
as party moves in the percussive breaks of the early 1970s hip hop mix of funk, soul, disco,
and salsa music, allows it to claim a discursive foundationas a particularizeddance form of
the signifying traditionso prevalent in African American popular culture (Gottschild 1996;
Gates 1988).
Breakdancing,as an embodied and particularizedsignifying tradition,became a global
phenomenon during the currentera of late capitalism. The significance of global economic
trends that dictate behavior from the individual to the national levels cannot be overemphasized. The transnationalsubcultureto which TeN refers goes beyond barriersof language and
is proliferatingthroughseveralprocesses. The era of late capitalismhas several interconnected
trajectories:increased personal internationaltravel; major multinationalcorporationsas purveyors of popularculture(e.g., Time-Warner,Microsoft,Viacom, the majorrecordcompanies
such as Columbia,WarnerBrothers,Arista, BMG, and others with their Europeanand Asian
divisions); and the increased economic interdependencyof nation states. Global capital and
evolving hip hop subcultureexist as parallel,yet intertwined,forces in this increasinglycomplex era. Before I probethe simultaneousdynamicsof the popularcultureindustryand the circulation of hip hop culturethroughits underground,I would like to use the UrbanMovement
Honolulu event-a collective enactment-to demonstratedimensions of both sociocultural
dynamics as they intersect.
UrbanMovementin Hawai'i
The Waikikihip hop event UrbanMovement, a short descriptionof which startedthis essay,
was a grassroots-organized,narrated,five-group performancethat situatedhip hop as a vivid
example of danced text. UrbanMovement linked four styles of contemporaryhip hop dance,
while the whole event demonstratedwhat hip hop scholarTricia Rose calls the reimagination
and "symbolic appropriationof urban space through sampling, attitude, dance, style, and
sound effects" (Rose 1994, 22).
Hawai'i, as a cultural crossroads of East and West, is an important site of hip hop's
transnationalism.With eight-five percent of the state of Hawaii's multiethnicpopulationliv-
34/2 (Winter2002) Dance ResearchJournal
33
ing on Oahu, along with several United States militarybases, and the big tourist"machine"of
Waikiki Beach, the culturaldynamics of any performancein Honolulu becomes a multilayered, multiculturalevent.
Continuing with my description of the event, the first dance group to perform was the
Evolution Dancers, a six-member "streetdance" girl group, predominantlyof Asian descent.
They were clad in baggy black and red sweat clothes and were accompaniedby an Asian drag
queen in a blue satin nightgown, a platinumwig, and athletic shoes and socks. The girls strutted with panache and rhythmicallyisolated their torsos, a la JanetJackson,in perfect sync to
the fast-thumpingtechno music. A shifting straightlinechoreographicfloor patterndominated,
with syncopatedbody movements in interestingcontrapuntaljuxtapositionto the music. The
drag queen vamped in front of the changing first line of dancers,tauntingthe audience with
voguing, a disco style of rhythmicdance posing that originatedin black male gay clubs of the
1970s. The Evolution Dancers representeda commercializedhip hop style that is more typically exhibited on MTV and BET behind current-dayrap stars, and is not considered "real"
hip hop dance by those who "live"hip hop undergroundsubculture.It was meaningfulthatthe
Evolution Dancers were included by the b-boys who organized Urban Movement, for it
reflected the power thatcommercializedMTV hip hop dance choreographyhas attainedin the
public presentationof so-called "underground"
hip hop events. The Evolution Dancers, however, were just the warm-upact.
Next, Josiah, a slight and nimble "local" guy of primarilyCaucasian descent, cut loose
with his freestyling "house"dance.3Having come of dance age in the late 1980s era of the
"runningman"and "the smurfi'fad dances, Josiah combined an eclectic arrayof highly individualized moves involving breakingfloorwork with popping and locking, reinterpretedinto
Josiah-speak.He demonstrateda smooth rag-doll style of moving within the small dance-floor
space that was circumscribedby a mesmerizedcrowd. Josiah's style seamlessly conjoined an
MTV cut-and-pastepastiche with a personal, improvised freestyle virtuosity thatjuxtaposed
the three majorhip hop styles: breaking,popping, and locking (plate 1).
At the same time, Josiah's embodied sense of self-expression was entirely his own. He
simultaneouslyblended a perfectedundergrounddance style with moves promulgatedby the
pop culture industryalong with his personal local style. His danced text was a lens through
which several layers of the global hip hop phenomenonwere made visible (plate 1).
After Josiah's solo, Skill-Roy and Strategy,two membersof the Hawai'i Chapterof Rock
Steady Crew, followed with more traditionalb-boying. Their breaking style representsthe
"new school" that includes faster footwork and swifter, lower-to-the-grounddirectionalturns
than did the early days of b-boying. Following the entranceinto the dance circle, four basic
sections of b-boying are the tools of good improvisation:(1) uprocking(standingfootwork of
rapid weight shifts); (2) six-stepping (feet and hands working together while crouched close
to the floor); (3) improvised acrobaticscontaining a myriad of spins and flips (seen in plate
2); and (4) an ending "freeze"pose. It is the repeatedjuxtapositionof the second and thirdsections thatmarkthe "new school."The thirdsection, which may containtraditionalmoves such
as "flares"(spinning on the back with legs above the head), the "turtle"(rhythmicalhopping
on both hands while the rest of the body is suspended close to the floor), one-handedhand
spins, or back flips, is interspersedthroughoutthe entire rhythmicimprovisedmix. This combination renders a more danced emphasis along with the acrobatic b-boy style. The new
34
Dance Research Journal 34/2 (Winter2002)
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school takes greaterinspirationfrom the subtle texturesof the music than does the more athletic-focused old school breaking.
Breakdancingis embodied text just as rap music is oral poetry. Dance as narrativethat
indicates, identifies, imagines, and subvertsnormativesocial narrativesin the context of hip
hop culturewas elucidatedearly on by Sally Banes's descriptionof the potentialof the freeze
in b-boying in Fresh Hip Hop, Don't Stop:
Another importantset of motifs in the freeze section was the explorationof
body states in a subjunctivemode-things not as they are, but as they might
be-comparing and contrastingyouthful male vitality with its range of opposites: women, animals (dogs, horses, mules), babies, old age, injury and illness...and death.4(Banes 1985, 97)
The innovative freezes executed in UrbanMovement testified to the eloquent articulationof
both direct (text) and subtle (subtext) nuances throughdance (plate 2).
The democracy of the b-boy circle demonstrateshow the individualismof dance styles,
styles that speak, works together with good b-boy form, all renderinga cool Africanist aesthetic (Gottschild 1996).5All b-boys or b-girls take their turn soloing as the energy builds.
Each new dancerknows the etiquetteof just the rightmomentto enterthe circle when the previous dancerexecutes his or her final freeze. This was the particulardanced social process of
good form and cultural etiquette to which b-boy TeN alluded. In true Africanist expressive
style, it is the collective energy of the circle to which each individualhas contributedthat is
evaluatedas success or failure.Therefore,this communalaestheticpromotesa particularkind
of socialization. Part of that socializing process in the global era of hip hop culture is the
developmentof an InterculturalBody thatis representedboth similarlyand differentlyin various partsof the globe. I tu now to the dynamics of performativityand its implicationsin an
interculturalcontext.
Performing Race: Performativity as Complex Embodiment
Clearly,breakdanceis a dance genre requiringtremendousskill and extensive practice.As an
improvised dance form, it is a conscious willing of the body to representpersonal and cultural identity. The conscious signifying involved in hip hop performance, however, takes
place within a larger breakdancerepertorythat scripts sometimes unconscious but assimilated messages-what I earliertermedperformativity.Further,this complex bodily language
is created throughimprovisation,in which moment-by-momentchoices are made that allow
performativityand performanceto merge. As we observed in the case of Josiah, these performance decisions represent the agency that the dancer practices in order to mediate the
vicissitudes of global pop culture influences in relation to his or her individual personality.
A perplexing question, however, remains:how exactly does the mix of conscious and unconscious culturalreferencing inflect the way we understandthese expressions in relation to the
notion of appropriation?
In orderto furtherunderstandhip hop's particularizedculturalappropriationin Hawai'i, I
conducted a high school study on the extent of hip hop culture among youth on the island of
Hawai'i.6PahoaHigh School, in the ruralvillage of Pahoa,is aboutfifteen miles south of Hilo
on the Big Island of Hawai'i. Pahoa's populationis only about 1,300 people, located in the
36
Dance ResearchJournal 34/2 (Winter2002)
Plate 2. B-boy in action, executing an acrobatichead spin for an enthusiasticcrowd in Honolulu.
Photographby HalifuOsumare. 1999.
district of Puna whose population is approximately 28,000. The demography includes
Caucasian, Filipino, Japanese, and Hawaiian mixtures, with African Americans representing
less than one percent of the population. It is from this population of Puna that the Pahoa High
students are drawn.7
Within three classrooms at Pahoa High, grades ten through twelve, I conducted group
interviews with students. They were given a choice of designating class spokespersons or
using a group response approach; all classes unanimously chose the group response approach.
The collective voice format created an interactive environment that encouraged collaborative,
and sometimes contradictory, answers to questions that included their taste in music, the influence of media and the marketplace, and cultural identity and social turf, as well as ethnic and
class issues.
Although Pahoa is relatively small in size, the high school students' responses qualified
Pahoa Village as what I call a "hip hop diaspora" site. An affirmation of the importance of rap
music and hip hop style became the dominant finding in my research. Rap lyrics have even
lodged themselves in the students' discourse of identity and self-image. The "N" word, for
example, is pervasive among the Pahoa youth. When I asked them what they meant when they
referred to each other by using the "N" word, responses such as "It's like my homey" emerged.
Realizing that the use of this word carries a dangerous history, one Pahoa male quickly added
the hip hop revisionist distinction that is reflected in the spelling of the word: "We not putting
nobody down; it's just like 'What's up, nigga?"' The last statement was made with "black" hip
34/2 (Winter2002) Dance Research Journal
37
hop body language, complete with tilted head and the arm pushing backwardby his side for
emphasis. Although not surprisedat the use of the word, I was taken aback at the obvious
internalizingof the attitude behind the word that could be read in bodily gestures that came
all too naturally.This was performativityin action-an enactment of identity that was not
indigenous, but assumed, yet not contrived.
Black music, dance, and style traditionallygeneratedfrom the black working class (e.g.,
blues, jazz, rhythm and blues) have long been cultural image definers of America. Norman
Mailer's essay "TheWhite Negro" capturedthe American appropriativedynamic as a partof
the 1950s-era Beat generationand white jazz buffs.8Presently,this culturaltrend has vastly
expandedthroughthe expediency of global technology.The new kind of Americanrebel with,
or without, a cause-the gangsta rapper-is promulgated by high-paid Madison Avenue
advertisingexecutives and MTV programmersto young hip hoppers globally. What is more,
in the late capitalistera, the entire process happens stunninglyeasily at the level of the body.
Recording artists, for example, are packaged with image-setting body language, wardrobe,
and dance moves to match iconic marketingrepresentationsthat are as much a part of the
internationalmarketingof a new compact disc as the music itself. Global hip hop "heads"
begin to imitate the slick mack-daddyimage of dancer-singerUsher, the playa-pimpimage of
rapperJay-Z, or the thug image of the late Tupac Shakur,all as American cool.
On the other hand, I found other evidence demonstratingthat indigenous culture is also
important.The PahoaHigh studentsacknowledgedcontemporaryHawaiianmusic, often sung
in the Hawaiian language, as also giving them significant listening pleasure. Local youths'
identificationwith rap music and the hip hop lifestyle reflects the hegemony of United States
mainlandpop music promulgatedby MTV. Yet it became obvious to me that contemporary
Hawaiian musicians, who themselves participatein contemporaryglobal culture'sintertextualization of musical styles, ensure that the Hawaiian side of the equation stays vital and relevant for today's youth in Hawai'i. Against the rubricof the importedhip hop vernacular,continuing Polynesian-Asianindigenous styles are also embodied in gesture and posturing,such
as martialarts gestures and local Hawaiiangaits. The synthesis of globally proliferatingpopularculturebody styles with local movementpredilectionsthathave been presentfor centuries
forms what I call the InterculturalBody. It is to this concept I now turn.
Hip Hop's Two-Pronged Bodily Text
As mentioned earlier,feminist theoristJudithButler has been one of the most prolific scholars in conceptualizingand explicatingthe multipledimensions of performativity.She has used
the concept to explore how gender is performed(Butler 1990a), as well as to investigate contextual speech acts (Butler 1997). Butler's theories can be directly applied to physical enactments as performedtext or bodily speech acts. In her essay "Performativity'sSocial Magic"
she interrogatesperformativityfrom the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus.
Habitusis the accumulationof culturaland individuallearnedpatternsthat are unconsciously
enacted. But what Bourdieucalls "thefield," the various social domains in which the individual has to interact,influences habitus.The most importantof the social domains of the field is
the economic marketplace.Butler explains:
Practice presupposes belief where belief is generated by the habitus and,
specifically, the dispositions out of which the habitus is composed. And yet,
38
Dance Research Journal 34/2 (Winter2002)
as a necessary counter to this apparentlysubjectivistic account of practice,
Bourdieu argues that a set of fields and, indeed, the marketas ultimate field
will inform and limit practicesfrom an objective direction.(Butler 1996, 30)
Butler's use of Bourdieu's "habitusand field" is a compelling model through which to
view the processes by which global hip hop youths constructtheir performedidentities. My
fieldwork revealed that Hawai'i's local styles of bodily posturing and practices, developing
out of almost two hundredyears of Polynesians' and Asians' social and biological mixing on
Hawai'i's sugarcaneand pineappleplantations,is meeting headlong with the bodily practices
that are generic to today's MTV and BET generation. Movement styles generated out of
Hawai'i's multiculturalpast as habitus are profoundly impacted by the virtual space of the
Internet,the trendsettingbodily images of the printmedia, and the youth-orientedpopularculture of satellite-projectedmusic videos.
The resultingInterculturalBody is dramaticallyillustratedthroughthe prismof what I call
hip hop's two-prongedbodily text. The breakdancer'suse of his or her own individualbody
language is mandatoryif the improviser,in the moment, is going to "keep it real" within the
b-boy circle. Everydaybodily gestures, drawnfrom the habitusand the field, become embodied social identity, forming the often unconscious performativityof social practice. When
these embodied habits are situated within the act of dancing in the b-boy circle, the dual
process of performanceand performativitymerge. Such social praxis demonstratesperformance and performativityas two components of enacted bodily text throughthe prism of hip
hop dance. The body language of ordinarylife of a hip hop practitionerprojectsencoded cues
thatallow otherb-boys or b-girls to literallyrecognize him/her,in the mannerthatTeN's Japan
example demonstrated.
Dance theoristRandy Martintellingly articulatesthe importanceof dance as social practice when he explains that "Dance is best understood as a kind of embodied practice that
makes manifest how movement comes to be by momentarilyconcentratingand elaboratingin
one place forces drawn from beyond a given performancesetting" (Martin 1998, 5). Social
process, reflective of history, politics, economics, and interculturaldynamics, can be drawn
into the center of the b-boy circle with a well-articulatedbreakdancesolo. But, as Martin
remindsus, "it cannot presumeto be the [theoretical]scene itself' (Martin1998, 5).
The improvisatorybreakdancecircle allows both performativity,determinedby both habitus and field, to connect with performance,the movement skills of the recognized subculture.
In hip hop, it is the Africanist aesthetic of polyrhythmicisolations, narrativegesture, signifying, and, most importantly,improvisationthat facilitates the movement-by-movementmix.
The InterculturalBody, in the increasinglycomplex historical moment of economic and culturalexchange, emanatesas a naturalflow from embodied culturalpracticesthathave as their
centerthe objectified "black"body. The MTV-generatedexternalized"black"body is another
revision of the historicalminstrelimage, and is promotedby the field of the marketplaceas it
has been historically.In the era of globalization,the objectified"black"body is now combined
with indigenous bodily practicesfrom the local habitus.Yet the entire amalgamis allowed to
fuse througha particularizationof the age-old African aesthetic.
The skills needed for the Africanist aesthetic in breakdancingextend a path of enculturation thatwas originally opened duringthe Atlantic slave trade.Emergingsocial practices,with
the Africanist aesthetic as integratingprinciple, eventually formed what Paul Gilroy calls the
34/2 (Winter2002) Dance ResearchJournal
39
black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993). However, unlike the Du Boisian double-consciousness of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black and white social practices and migrations that Gilroy
explores, the cultural multiplicity of the globally defined twenty-first century offers more
polyvalent possibilities, such as the commingling of the black Atlantic and the yellow Pacific.
Contemporary hip hop culture allows us a vision of how intercultural processes can push us
beyond the social construction and objectification of "race" inculcated over the last three hundred years.
Hawaiian b-boys, for example, do not employ studied and conscious African dance elements in their b-boying and house styles. However, Asian martial arts are viewed as important cultural source material. Martin emphasizes the component cultural characteristics of
dance styles that render habitus more intelligible:
The constituent features of any given dance work include technical proclivities and aesthetic sensibilities that elaborate and depend on aspects of physical culture and prevailing ideologies. While dance is neither language nor pol-
itics, it is clarified and qualified throughthese means. (Martin1998, 5)
Hawaiiansarejust beginning to understandthe inherentAfrican aestheticprinciplesat play in
hip hop dance, so unconsciously exhibited in demonstrationslike UrbanMovement.
African American emcees also appropriateother global culturalinfluences. On the other
side of the Afro-Asian equation,New York's well-known Wu Tang Clan, as their name indicates, consciously place a high value on the strength,discipline, and brotherhoodof kung fu
that was proliferatedthroughHong Kong-producedmartialarts B-movies. Bruce Lee flicks,
for example, became a 1980s and early 1990s staple on Saturday-morningtelevision, and
thereforea partof the socializationprocess of many young black rappersgrowing up in New
York and Los Angeles. Twenty-first-centuryhip hop culture, therefore,becomes a potpourri
of culturalpractices informed by the intersection of habita of indigenous cultures that have
been mediatedby the field accordingto the exigencies of the global capitalistmarketplace.
Hip Hop and Postmodernity:
Dimensions of Late Capitalism and Cultural Studies
Hip hop functions as a central site of the ongoing battle in popularculture between marketplace hegemony and subculturecounterhegemony,a centraltenet of British-initiatedCultural
Studies as an academic discipline. How economics and subcultureco-optationwork together
to create marketablepopularculturestyle is a centralconnection in CulturalStudies analyses.
As a neo-Marxiantheoreticalframeworkthat first examined punk culture as a part of working-class Britain, it has generated its American academic adherents. A Cultural Studies
approachhelps to explain how popularculture is absolutely crucial to the era of late capitalism. FredricJameson's Postmodernism,or, The CulturalLogic of Late Capitalismis a neoMarxianeconomic understandingof postmodernity.Jameson's seminal text, as such, investigates the shift in the AmericanculturalZeitgeist and economic emphasis since the 1960s that,
in turn,has affected the world.Postmodernityfollowed the era of modernityand, accordingto
Jameson, it is not "the cultural dominant of a wholly new social order.. .but only the reflex and
the concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism itself' (Jameson 1992,
xii).9
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The popular culture industries-Hollywood, MTV, the recording industry,and much of
the Internet-facilitate the interdependencyof pop culture and economics as the crux of the
postmodernera. Therefore,Jameson's concept of late capitalism "is not merely an emphasis
on the emergence of new forms of business organization (multinationals,transnationals)
beyond the monopoly stage, but above all, the vision of a world capitalist system fundamentally distinctfrom the older imperialism,which was little more than a rivalrybetween the various colonial powers" (Jameson 1992, xvii-xix).'0
This new form of "benign"imperialismthat pop culture multinationalcorporationshave
become has furtherdefined the transnationalundergroundhip hop movement. In true counterhegemonicsubculturestance,undergroundhip hop positions itself in proprietaryopposition
to the commercializationof rap music and hip hop dance. Yet, in reality, global pop culture
commerce and the network of hip hop's subculturecommunities both socialize youth and
affect their bodily identities, and thereforehip hop enactmentsin every part of the globe. Hip
hop's undergroundhas formed its own habitus, in a sense, which seeks to protect itself from
the all-encompassingfield of late capitalismin the postmodernera. Transnationalhip hop culture has become a primarysite for the working out of the dynamics of habitus and the field,
with the body as a fundamentallocus of the battle. Whetherin Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Dakar,
New York, or Honolulu, both ancient and contemporaryidentities are mapped into the muscles and manipulatedby the agency and creativityof the hip hop dancer.Furthermore,hip hop
culture's dialectic of global and local-as well as its complicity with, and aesthetic and contextual resistanceto, late capitalism'shegemony-all point to it as a complex sign of the postmodem era.
Conclusions
Global breakdance offers poignant answers to Butler's question about the relationship
between habitusand the field in the age of postmodernism.For the hip hop generation,a generation indoctrinatedby MTV as well as by local styles, these interdependentprocesses are
facilitated through the central Africanist aesthetic of improvisation. Dance improvisation
allows for the minute-by-minutenegotiation of personal and collective identity-the playing
of the many rhythmsof the self. MTV may very well be exportingvirtualizedand racialized
body imagery, advanced out of America's invidious history of the enactments of the black
body since nineteenth-centuryminstrelsy.But the original hip hop street dance form is also
being kept alive in vital global breakdancecommunities of the hip hop underground.These
communities'leaders, like TeN, travel and circulate myriad personal variationson b-boying,
therebyestablishinga counterhegemonicinternationallanguage as differentbodily dialects of
the same b-boy language. Internationalcompetitions are held in Japan,Germany,New York,
and other global sites with participantsfrom every continent. It is in these internationalsites
of undergroundhip hop, less mediated by American pop culture big business, that the
InterculturalBody is flourishing.
My conception of the InterculturalBody is by no means the first theoreticalparadigmof
global hybrid dance. Just as MTV's "pop-up"windows complicate the choreographicscreen,
several theoreticalexplanationsseem to pop out of this dance scenario,helping to capturethe
increasing global and cross-culturalcomplexity of hip hop dance. Randy Martin'stheory of
the "compositebody" places the discussion of intertextualityclearly within an embodiedcontext that is positioned within the multiculturalUnited States itself:
34/2 (Winter2002) Dance Research Journal
41
In particular,hip hop moves are constituted across very different kinds of
space laminatedtogetherto configure a composite body. While the electronic
media provide a mapped virtual space in which bodies can circulate, these
composite bodies always seem to be getting away, disappearing in the
moment of receptiononly to reappearin alteredform in that virtuality.... For
multiculturalismas a critical perspectiveratherthan a governmentpolicy, the
composite body allows us to focus on how difference is associated among
those assembled in the nation, ratherthan being forced to sort out one body
from another.(Martin1998, 109-110)
Although Martin's composite body concept may invoke visions of a "cybemetic hybrid,"a
caveat that he disclaims, I preferthe term InterculturalBody, which posits the humanform as
partof a sentientbeing interactingin socioculturalspace.
Other differences also separateour conceptions. Martinis concerned with "popularculture situatedin, and figurative of, a certain multiculturaland national context... [where] persons who attachthemselves to practicalinstances (songs, video dance or fitness clubs) never
actually meet except in the present scene of writing where I attemptto imagine their connection" (Martin1998, 110-111). I am interestedin experiencingthe InterculturalBody in the act
of producingitself duringlive enactmentscontainingthe improviseddancingbody situatedin
the largerframes of ethnicity, indigenous cultures, and global popularculture.Where Martin
focuses on contrivedsites of the field like music videos and aerobicsstudios, I try to bringinto
focus the complexities of street or undergroundclub sites that are removed from the gaze of
the television cameraor appropriatingmultimilliondollar venues.
Viewed within this context, global breakdancingis a potentially subversivemeans of culturally transgressingthe nation-state,as well as transcendingthe controlling and racializing
aspects of capitalism.The InterculturalBody is where "natural"appropriationcan take place
on the streetand in the clubs by practitionersof all nationalitiesdrawnby the powerful improvisatory Africanist aesthetic. Yet these same b-boys and b-girls are allowed to "keep it real"
by negotiating throughmovement their personal and indigenous culturalidentities.
Hip hop makes evident how habitusand the field exist simultaneouslyto shape individual
identity.Alongside this personal, and potentially subversive, agency, b-boying and hip hop
culture is also dispersed in innovative ways by the virtualityof a cut-and-pastepotpourriof
global culturepromulgatedby cable television and satellitebroadcasts.However, it is also disseminatedby disparatebreakdancecommunities, the membersof which are negotiatingtheir
complex identities in the moment throughtheir bodies within the dynamic and energetic bboy/b-girl circle. In the words of Schatzki and Natter,"Thevery existence andperpetuationof
society amounts largely to the existence and reproductionof socioculturalbodies" (Schatzki
and Natter 1996, 3). Global breakdancingis producingsocioculturalbodies moving in often
subversiveways. Theirmovementtranscendsnation-statesand generatesa global Intercultural
Body that we are only beginning to fathom.
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Notes
1. Triphop is a style of rap music originatingin Englandthat is more laid-back,cool, and, some
perceive, more reflective than the majorityof American rap. Trip hop's existence testifies to
the globalizationof rap music, in that some internationalsites have adaptedthe genre to their
own cultural sensibilities. Two of trip hop's major proponentsare the Bristol group Massive
Attack, and their spin-off soloist, Tricky (AKA AdrianThaws).
2.
JudithButler's use of performativitydiffers from my usage here in that she emphasizes bodily enactmentsas "fabrications"of identity to explicate her notion of the fictitious natureof a
gender essence (Gender Trouble, 1990, Chapter 2, "Bodily Inscriptions, Performative
Subversions").In my investigation of performativityas unconscious gesture to explain performed culture that combines these gestures of the self with practiced dance, I am not concerned about fictitiously constructedelements of ethnicity or cultureof a given people, as she
is with gender. I take it for grantedthatculture,and for sure "race,"are learnedprocesses and
are therefore conceived through various manufacturedpractices that come to represent a
group.Whatmost concernsme here, however, is how the individualcreateswith inherited(yet
often unconscious) body languagesto negotiate his/her identity in conjunctionwith inculcated
dance styles of the marketplacethroughthe improvising,dancing body.
3.
House dancing is done to house music, a derivativeof techno music that originatedin Europe
and became popularat rave events in the U.S. House music is driven by a strong thumping
bass beat. House dancingdoes not necessarily lend itself to the acrobaticbreakdance style, but
ratherutilizes some b-boy moves with a more uprightdance style.
4.
For the most complete theoretical text on the language-like semantic features of dance see
JudithLynne Hanna, To Dance is Human: A Theory of Nonverbal Communication,2nd ed.
(Chicago:The University of Chicago Press), 1987.
5.
Brenda Dixon Gottschild explains that principles such as Embracing the Conflict,
PolycentrismlPolyrhythm,High-Affect Juxtaposition, Ephebism or youthfulness, and the
Aesthetic of the Cool, all add up to a process-basedaestheticthat originatedin variousAfrican
culturesand has been revised and re-encodedthroughoutthe Americas.All of these principles
are significantly evident in hip hop culture.
6.
I would like to thankthe Hawai'i Committee for the Humanitiesfor their belief in the timeliness of my research and for providing me with an individual grant to conduct my research
projecttitled "HipHop YouthCulture:Local HawaiiansandAfricanAmericansin Dialogue."
Also, my gratitudeis extended to the Pahoa High School administratorsand faculty for their
supportand cooperation.
7.
Big Island population figures are taken from the 1996 County of Hawaii Data Book,
Departmentof Researchand Development, June, 1997.
8.
Norman Mailer's "The White Negro," about the beatnik generation and its participationin
bebop jazz era, was first publishedin Dissent IV (Spring): 1957.
9.
Modernity originated for EuropeanAmericans during the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth
century and for African Americans, as Houston Baker argues, during the New Negro
Renaissanceof the 1920s. Periodization,thoughoften binding us to the Westernconception of
time as a linear,fixed progression,is useful for understandingthe culturaland political dynamics at the beginning of hip hop in the Bronx. It is also importantto understandinghip hop's
34/2 (Winter2002) Dance ResearchJournal
43
subsequentdevelopmentinto an often mind-boggling global display by the end of the twentieth century.
I am well aware that there have been other ways of periodizing modernity and postmodernity.Some scholars, for example, date modernityfrom the Renaissanceof the sixteenth
century and others place its beginnings in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.
However, for my contemporarypurposes, Jameson's positioning of modernity in the nineteenth century,from the industrialage throughWorldWarII, allows me to periodize hip hop
culture within a culturaltime frame relevantto it.
10. Jamesondoes not discount Marx's own engagementof the "worldmarket"in the Grundrisse,
nor does he ignore Wallerstein's"worldsystem" as other possible explanationsof the current
phase of capitalism.However, he emphasizes a particularunderstandingof late capitalismthat
"turn[s]on this matterof internationalizationand how it is to be described"(xix).
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