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Hip-Hop Education and Palestine Solidarity

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The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans

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Abstract

At Boise State University, I created an interdisciplinary course on First Nations and Palestinian literature, culture, and history. The last semester that I taught it, I included the hip-hop album Free the P on my syllabus accompanied by music videos. I asked an independent music store in downtown Boise to carry it for my students, but word of mouth spread beyond my classroom and it became a local bestseller. Students played it on their car stereos and began singing the lyrics. This text, more than any other, filled my students’ heads and Palestine clicked. It clicked, in part, because of the music itself, but also because the lyrics embodied joint struggle. Its message—one that connects imprisonment, slavery, and the genocide of First Nations people to the Arab world—seeped into students’ consciousness, and led them to organize street theater on campus about the Apartheid Wall and a scene about Israeli checkpoints for the annual Tunnel of Oppression, an interactive theatrical event linking sites of oppression.1

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Notes

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  1. Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman
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© 2011 Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman

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Knopf-Newman, M.J. (2011). Hip-Hop Education and Palestine Solidarity. In: The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137002204_5

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