Art as Public Knowledge and Everyday Politics: The Case of African American Spoken Word

Summary: African American spoken word art offers a window through which to explore how a cultural site of creative and artistic inquiry can simultaneously serve as a site of social analysis and change. Specifically, moving beyond the realm of pure aesthetics, the author explores the ways African American verbal art has functioned as a site of public knowledge and everyday politics—important though commonly overlooked features of social change projects. To make this case, the author conceptualizes culture, knowledge, and politics as a tightly connected trinity of social phenomena, thereby opening the door for an analysis of how a cultural object such as spoken word can simultaneously operate as a site of knowledge production and political practice. Next, using a genealogical approach, the author identifies patterns that appear across different black American verbal art forms in order to develop a typology of features characteristic of African American spoken word traditions. This typology highlights a constellation of themes that, collectively, shed light on how public knowledge and everyday politics can contribute to social change. Throughout this analysis, the author considers how this typology provides a broader framework for understanding the specialized political practices and public knowledge projects employed by present-day young adult spoken word performance poets, drawing upon her ethnographic fieldwork for support. Such a framework can encourage us to rethink existing models of social activism and invite us to consider the unique role of art in the pursuit of social justice and change.