Manifest Technique by Mark R. Villegas

Author:Mark R. Villegas [Villegas, Mark R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Ethnic Studies, American, Asian American Studies, Music, Genres & Styles, Rap & Hip Hop, Popular Culture
ISBN: 9780252052682
Google: VgkyEAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 55466149
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2021-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 13. Pamphlet for Universal Zulu Nation All Tribes chapter event.

But before hip hop is transmitted to other planets, as Bambaataa and UZN exemplify, it must first reach earthly saturation. As “Planet Rock” prophesied, UZN’s mission of peace, unity, and having fun would soon reach around the world, with UZN chapters in the Philippines, Japan, France, and Germany. Vague on political goals and maintaining an esoteric recruitment process, the UZN has attracted an array of mostly male members, including talented DJs and dancers, Afrocentric purists, and celebrities. In the early 1990s, when UZN attempted to build membership in the West Coast, it met an already thriving Filipino American hip hop cultural infrastructure.36 Filipino American practitioners were drawn to UZN’s reclamation of the street, dance floor, and their own bodies for the purpose of pleasure, competition, and expression. They also absorbed UZN’s pedagogical imperative to learn about obscured histories and civilizations. Largely thanks to the active fostering of West Coast breaking and DJ crews in the early 1990s by the New York–based Rock Steady Crew, whose formation of the Rock Steady DJs enhanced the presence of South Bronx–born “purist” hip hop culture, as well as the educational efforts by West Coast UZN chapters, Filipino Americans from San Diego to Seattle became cultural vanguards of UZN’s empowering and fun-centered brand of hip hop, serving at times as international ambassadors for the organization, traveling to teach hip hop classes around the world.37 Filipino Americans have been active members in UZN chapters; some join by completing an initiation process consisting of mastering “lessons,” and others are inducted into the group by virtue of their exceptional contributions to hip hop culture. Filipino Americans in the Bay Area are key leaders and artistic visionaries in UZN and have become woven into the region’s rich African American music and dance community.

Early in UZN’s creation, Bambaataa crafted the intentional interplay between aesthetics and transformative pedagogy. UZN espouses the saying “knowledge of self,” a mantra issued earlier by the Nation of Islam’s Elijah Mohammed.38 In his “Message to the Youth and Young Adults of the World” on the UZN website, Bambaataa declares: “You must seek knowledge: Knowledge is to know and is the foundation of all things in existence. Knowledge is infinite. Knowledge is to know thyself and to know others. Knowledge is to know your surroundings, environment, the nature of life and death, animals, the solar system, the universe, the past, present, and the future. Knowledge is to know The Supreme One.”39 As already mentioned, Bambaataa inherited the legacies of Black Power, funk music, and African American Islam. “Knowledge of self” for the organization, therefore, is strongly linked to a larger legacy of Afrocentric spiritual redemption. As Chang notes, “rather than rebelling against an unjust society by accomplishing externalized movements against systems and institutions, seeking one’s own truth, ‘having a true reckoning with one’s god within,’ and ‘overstanding’ injustice in the world has always been the UZN’s method of ‘politics.’”40 Within UZN’s pedagogical discourse, alongside the mix of

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