Rap e conscientização: o legado de Paulo Freire no hip-hop cearense

Abstract

This paper analyzes the rhetoric of rap in Fortaleza, Brazil in the context of the philosophy of “pedagogy of the oppressed” proposed by Paulo Freire in order to elucidate the relationship between rappers and their communities. Combining ethnographic research and analysis of lyrics, and considering the relation between politics and esthetics, we examine the way rappers construct an alternative pedagogy for their communities: a discourse constituted (as Freire would have it) by the oppressed, for the oppressed, and with the oppressed. With this in mind, we evaluate the way hip hop performances can create spaces of union and dialectic learning between performer and public. In the performative act of “pronouncing the world,” the rapper transforms it, becoming orator and educator for the public and demonstrating the capacity of hip-hop culture to change people’s lives, offer alternatives to violence, create communities and counter-hegemonic networks, and deconstruct power asymmetries, both geopolitically and in urban geography.