We dont necessarily know how hes pulling in swing voters. And, again, its a fractured primary too. And youre only working within the Republican Party primary, so its not a great analog necessarily. But the organizational level is there for ted cruz. I think might marco rubios organization is pretty decent as well. Donald trump is, of course, the variable because if the Republican Party in 2008 and 2012 were at the 30,000foot level in terms of messaging, Donald Trumps really at the 40,000foot level, right . Hes very punchy. Concepts only and doesnt necessarily offer a detailed substance behind it, but he just talks about this is my commitment, im going to do this, im going to win, make this great, and people are responding to that in the primaries. So its interesting to see how that will work out. If donald trump is the nominee, does he switch to a ground game of the type that is described in going red, or does he try to stay at that 40,000foot level, 30,000foot level and see if he can bring in people through just sheer messaging and celebrity status alone . Be an interesting test. Host ed morrisseys new book is called going red the two million voters who will elect the next president and how conservatives can win them. This is booktv on cspan2. When i tune into it on the weekends, usually its authors sharing their new releases. Watching the nonfiction authors on booktv is the best television for serious readers. On cspan they can have a longer conversation and delve into their subjects. Booktv weekends, they bring you author after author after author that spotlight the work of fascinating people. I love booktv and im a cspan fan. All weekend long were bringing you panels from the National Black writers conference featuring several authors including paul beatty, michael eric dyson, dee watkins and many more. For a complete schedule, visit us online, booktv. Org. And starting now, a panel on hiphop and literature from medgar evers college, host of the 13th annual National Black writers conference. This program contains language that some may find offensive. Im now here representing, im an emcee invited here from york college. I will be associate professor in the department of teacher education, where i chair and ive been charged with talking to educators. And the job has to be having teachers, even some of whom who love our children, to start teaching from the love of our culture, from the love of our heritage, from the love of our soul of our children rather than judge them. Thats why this particular panel so, is just so important for us. I was in a situation, and im confessing because youre here, where i thought my job was, oh, hiphop anticipate this and this was in the 80s before i grew up. [laughter] and one of these people in the audience was a hiphop artist. And he said, well, miss, i wasnt even a doctor then. I wasnt even smart enough to know what i didnt know. He said, well, im a hiphop artist, and he started to tell the story of some of what it was in, was within the words, within the messaging of the art form. And it awoke in me, it awakened me, rather. And im still needing to be awakened, and thats what this is for, to awaken us to the depth of an art forbe we were not early form we will not be able to know all of, but we can get a glimpse of where our study must be be. Does that make sense . Our moderator is stuck in traffic, and you know new york, so need i say more . So when she does come, our new moderator in her place is the wonderful or, phenomenal michael [inaudible] miking, i thought it was a black i say this, you say that . Try one more time. Michael eric dyson theres a whole youre going to have to help em out. He will be introducing each of the panelists. And then following that introduction and after they speak, therell be time allotted for a questionandanswer period. Please give a hand for oh, im sorry, hiphop and youth culture. Im not going to spend a lot of time reading whats in the journal that describes the elements of poetry and creative word play figures prominently in the language of hiphop and in the various ways youth express themselves. This panel will be discussing that. All right. Thank you so very much, dr. Barron. [applause] im honored, im honored to be john morgan for a little bit joan morgan for a little bit. I always wondered what it would feel like to be joan morgan, you know, with a sex change and not as brilliant as she is, but were going to work with what we got. [laughter] these are all friends of mine. I happen to know some of the smartest people in the world. And this is just such an honor to extend this conversation that we often have offline in various fora into this particular situation. So let me introduce people who really need no introduction. To my right here, m. K. Assan today. And you all know this thats right, give it up for him right there. [applause] bestselling author, awardwinning filmmaker, hiphop artist and tenured professor at morgan state university. [cheers and applause] he can say what he want to say and still not get fired. [laughter] but it is a school that we know wouldnt do it anyway. Hes the author of four books, and im holding in my hand here his memoir. Hes serving at the Sundance Film Festival now as a feature film fellow for the movie adaptation of this book, buck. Its a brilliant book. Its a memoir. And you see how it pulls out right here [laughter] is that done . Huh . [laughter] yeah. Whatd you say . Robbing negroes of ignorance. Shooting you with this knowledge. Anyway, he and i were in the studio, and we were spitting together. We might freestyle up in here. Im looking at this book, it looks like a gun. I look and i say, is this you, son . [laughter] this just amateur. Anyway, but hes a brilliant, brilliant young man, a brilliant artist, a brilliant writer. And hes presented and performed in more than 40 countries and received a key to the city of dallas. Youve no doubt seen his film engaging with kwanzaa. Hes a remarkable artist and a man who operates in several different genres simultaneously, really knocking down these artificial barriers between the digital, if you will, expression and articulation of knowledge, the sonic articulation of knowledge and the literary one. So were honored to have him here today. That stuck to my mind. You know, method man. [laughter] so [applause] some of the greatest artists ever, ghost face killer and the like. She is a professor in the department of african and africanamerican studies and founding director of the hiphop archives and Research Institute at Hutchins Center for around can and africanamerican american african and africanamerican research at harvard university. Thats right. Shes at the big h, right . [laughter] he bringing hiphop to harvard, son. [laughter] [applause] yall think yall got lyrics, we leave you in hysterics. But she earned both her b. A. And m. A. Degrees at the university of illinois in chicago. She also earned an m. A. In linguistics at the university of essex, england, and her ph. D. Through the graduate school in education at the university of pennsylvania. A very wellregarded authority in linguistics and race and culture and identity, social linguistics to be more specific. And shes an author of many works in those fields. Her books include the real hiphop, battling for knowledge, power and respect in the underground, and speech communities that was published in 2014 by Cambridge University press. Is shes currently launching projects for the hiphop archive web site and harvards lowe Music Library on the classic crates archive of 200 of the most influential hiphop albums. Man, 200, huh . Yeah, we going to have to talk about that today to see whats up on that list. See what they got up in there. Did future make it, or is Kendrick Lamar dominant . We gotta find out. I want to understand whats happening in hiphop culture now with the kind of dissonance, the kind of blews aesthetic blues aesthetic that is pervasive. The kind of inspired, nasembraced, monotone expression. But i want the find out what thats about. And finally, dr. James pettersson. Certainly one of the most brilliant, as i said earlier, younger scholars here in america on hiphop and on literary production. Hes the director of africana studies, an associate professor of establish at lehigh university. You see him on msnbc throwing it down, you know, wrestling with these people, taking the switch to bears and beating em. And hes the founder of hiphop scholars, an association of hiphop generational scholars dedicated to researching and developing the cultural and educational potential of hiphop, urban and youth cultures. Hes also been a journalist, youve read many of his essays in magazines and in newspapers where hes trying to articulate ideas that are of interest to the broader public. Hes written about the underground as weve already indicated. Also his book that will be published soon about, you know, headphones, and then his book on the prison industrial complex. But, you know, a gifted and wonderful scholar. All of them, of course, are. And were going to have a wonderful and rich conversation. I want to start with dr. Morgan. You know, some people think that hiphop archive is an oxymoronic statement in the sense that whats being archived might not be high culture high, right . Whats being archived is not worthy of a legacy of literacy that would perpetuate its presence and influence into the next decades and, indeed, arguably into the next century. So tell us the logic behind at one of the most elite9, if not most prominent, centers of learning in the western world. That at the heart of that institution, you have marked it in a memorable and ineradicable fashion with the power, the insight and the intelligence of predominantly young black creators who could never darken those ivy walls in terms of test scores, but whose lyrics are now studied by the smartest scholars weve produced . [laughter] well. All right. Yeah, right . You know, i pull the mic up to her. Thank you. You know, first of all, thank you so much for saying that and putting that that particular way, because i think what happens especially when you start a career, i was listening to james talk about the linguistic conference we were at. Linguistics is an elite field, and by elite i mean theres really nobody there. [laughter] and so you know everybody, you know . Theres just a small segment, section of people. And they spend most of their time like this just, you know, really studying system. And i am a system kind of person. I really can notice when people Say Something and are meaning Something Else and the different layers that you need to know to do that. I mean, i grew up on the south side of chicago in a very vibrant black community of art and culture and music. And so you had to listen, pay attention, all these things, or youre going to miss what was really going on. So the whole concept of whats really going on becomes really, really important. So i grow up automatically thinking we must be the most creative, most intelligent people on the, in the world. Because we understand our families, you know . Who are very complicated, very well educated, often selfeducated. Smartest people in the world, you know . We used to have us kids a category called smartest people in the world, and they were all coiz sins. [laughter] so cousins. So when you come out of that kind of environment and then you go into institutions, all you can think is, oh, they dont know. You know . They dont get it. And at a certain point you begin to think about the power of those institutions to stop you. To hurt you. To break you. To challenge you. Its that sort of background that sort of puts, put me in a position when i decided to do linguistics to be very interested in what we understood about, you know, speech, interaction, ideology, philosophies of africanamerican communities, african diasporan communities, african cultures. Because all these were studied by ohs, right . Others, right . Outside of those contexts. And were taught this is what we know about how we really mean, how we intend, how we communicate. And that this is the law. These are the rules on this. And when you realize they dont know, they actually dont know. Think they know, dont know. And so as you given to work in that capacity, you develop a real sense of i am not going to be stopped by their ignorance. But i also have a responsibility to do the job, do the work. And its not easy, and its not pretty all the time, you know, if you really look back at my career, you know . There have been some really, really, incredibly rough times. But the key is that when youre around young people especially and theyre being incredibly creative, incredibly supportive of each other, it is not hike in a classroom like in a classroom where youre dealing with, you know, i Say Something, you Say Something back. I Say Something, you Say Something back. It can feel chaotic, but it is an incredibly powerful learning environment. And my interest became how do we really make sure that keeps happening. We want to keep turning that on, never let it turn off. Never let anybody take it down. And as we, i began to more and more look at the material people were giving me and talking about, it became even more important for me to keep going irrespective of what people didnt understand. I didnt think they hated hiphop or anything like that. Everybody in the beginning hated hiphop who was old, okay . [laughter] all right . Everybody did, okay . They just didnt get it. That was always you didnt get it. And so thats how it becomes the archive. Lets call it something they value as a name and make them have to deal with it right up front. Its not like the collection or Something Like that. And there were a group of very young people who worked with me on what to call it, how to do it, etc. , to make sure it kept the sense of really about hiphop and not about my needs as in a job or whatever. And theyre the ones who are, like, lets call in archive call it an archive. Let me just one more thing before we have joan take over. Hiphop kids, especially in the beginning, collected everything, okay . You think about the piece books, you think about all these things that mattered that they saw as being part of i mean, they couldnt articulate it at this point, but its the culture they were building. And so you had this material culture, and anyone whos an anthropologist knows you dont throw away material culture. Youre like, oh, look whats happening. You begin to see the patterns and the beauty and development of it. So thats how it became clear to me that it belonged in this world, because its serious. And its about us. And its something we should take seriously. [applause] hi, everybody. Im joan morgan. I actually am the panels moderator and very grateful to be that. My apologies for being late. If any of you are speaking of hiphop, home of the bronx, it is also my home and very difficult to get to brooklyn if there is no 5 train running. [laughter] i had to uber here, and it took a minute. It took three ubers and a minute, but thats a whole other story. So im not thank you. [applause] thereby. You know, in this panel is full of folks that i have worked with, and if i havent, i admire and hope to work with at some point. So im not even sure where we are. I know you just it should speaking. That was the first question. First question, okay. Yeah. So joan, can i add one piece to the archive . You can absolutely. Drsm morgan is being very humble in her discussion of what the archive is and what it means. And its really important to know folks like dr. Morgan laid out a certain foundation for younger scholars to be able to follow. And its so interesting to see how this has developed over time. At first it was dr. Morgan, you know, supporting graduate students. I dont even know if we can keep count of the number of graduate students that have harvard [laughter] but to think about how that has evolved over time is amazing so that now the archive has resources to support artists, to bring in scholars who are nontraditional, to work around certain themes that are important to the hiphop generation and important to our community. I mean, you have evolved the resources at the archive over i dont know exactly how long its been around, but its over a decade. And you have helped and shaped and informed the careers for, at least by my count, scores of scholars in almost every discipline across the pantheon of the academy. And now even folks who we think of as being scholars even outside of the academy. So there is important professional work, important mentorship and important platforming for younger scholars that the archive has done under your leadership and under [applause] thank you. Theres also now a hiphop archive at cornell. So the idea has had some traction yes. And, you know . Emulation is a good thing, right . My heart goes out to anyone who ever wants to do that, because its really hard to keep that kind of thing going and do it. And i really am so proud of everyone and, you know, just happy to see as people keep pushing on this. You know, james, can i ask a question . Yeah, yeah. [laughter] you know, the panel were talking, were doing some decoding, so were talking about the links between hiphop and literature. But i also wanted to expand it somewhat to the idea of hiphop being in the academy as a form of scholarship and making different disciplinary inroads. But i also wanted to really talk about that relationship that it had early to journalism. And so i was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about the back and forth between hiphop journalism, actually, as a form and what we see now in terms of hiphop scholarship. Sure, absolutely. You know, i think its pretty safe to say that early on the relationship between hiphop journalism and hiphop scholarship was really tight. I dont think its as tight now as it was early on. You know, we were reading the as young folks who were consuming hiphop in that first generation, one of the things that was not marked well enough was how deeply influenced and inspired we were by the young journalists that were writing at that time. Thats joan morgan, dream hampton, bones malone. Theres so many folks. But they were writing across a number of different platforms. This was back in the day when magazines were still really popular, people went out and bought magazines on a regular basis. But i cant tell you how joans writing or how dreams writing influenced me as a thinker and as a scholar. What happens in hiphop is that there are a lot of discourse communities, as dr. Morgan talked about, within hiphop culture. So there are a lot of people in barbershops and at homes or clubs, wherever, who sit around and talk about hiphop. And theres a lot of folks, you know, there are a lot of stock conversations; w