Masterclass - CONVIVIAL CULTURES | XI Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture - Adriana Martins

HIP-HOP CULTURE, CIVIC IMAGINATION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF GEOGRAPHIES OF PROXIMITY IN LISBON

Abstract

According to Saskia Sassen, cities are traditional sites of conflict (Sassen, 2012) that have mirrored urban geographies of injustice, anger and surveillance in the last decades. In the Lisbon metropolitan area inhabitants of problematic neighborhoods are often stigmatized when their address is known. Because these urban spaces are mostly connoted with violence, crime and conflict, they are transformed into a kind of non-places delimited by an “abyssal line” non-dwellers fear to cross.

This presentation examines how hip-hop culture, due to its disruptive, iconoclastic and playful character that rests on processes of appropriation and transgression, denounces and calls into question the abyssal line through a dual hermeneutics – of place and of the Other. The discussion of this dual hermeneutics will put into relief Bhabha’s concept of interlocution (Bhabha, 2007) as a key element in the construction of geographies of proximity. Moreover, it will reveal the potentialities of hip-hop culture to shape civic imagination and civic engagement (Jenkins et al., 2020), and to transform non-places into places of conviviality in the Lisbon metropolitan area through grassroots forms of expression (Augé, 1995).

Biography

Adriana Martins is currently Assistant Professor with Habilitation at the Faculty of Human Sciences (FCH) at Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP) in Lisbon, Portugal, where she teaches courses on culture and globalization and Portuguese culture and film at BA, MA and PhD levels. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCP, where she also obtained her Habilitation in Culture Studies. She has coordinated the scientific area of Culture Studies since 2019. She is a Senior Member of CECC (Research Center for Communication and Culture), integrating the team of the research line on Culture, Art and Conflict. She has published widely on Culture Studies with a focus on Film Studies and on Comparative Literature. She can be reached at adrimartins@ucp.pt