"Lupe Fiasco a critical identity"

As students of Cultural Studies we are interested in issues pertaining to subjectivity and identity.  We analyzed the song All Black Everything, by Lupe Fiasco, as a text of popular culture.  Lupe Fiasco is an American Hip-Hop artist.  His lyrical style, Conscious Rap, interrogates social issues such as poverty, racism, and violence.  By recounting an imaginary American narrative in All Black Everything, Fiasco implores us to imagine ourselves living in a world free of inequalities contingent on history and racism.

Postmodernists understand identity as fragmented, contingent on positionality, and always already a process in production.  An individual’s position in relation to the rest of society depends on a multitude of factors, including history.  The first verse critiques an oppressive American History by evoking it and envisioning an alternative narrative.  Fiasco utilizes historical texts such as Malcolm Little, W.E.B. Dubious, and Nelson Mandela to highlight the narrative of physical and linguistic violence experienced by people of African descent.  As Judith Butler (2004) reminds us, “ for those who are still looking to become possible [humans], possibility is a necessity”.  

  In producing an American History absent of slavery and racism Fiasco encourages us to deconstruct our past, understand the present, and rearticulate the future evident in:

I know it’s just a fantasy 

I cordially invite you to ask why can’t it be?

Now we can’t do nothing about the past

But we can do something about the future that we have

In discussion we identified this imaginary labor as positive, productive, and precarious.  Fiasco is critiquing identities in relation to oppressive historical apparati.  For this, we commend him.  However, by deconstructing and rearticulating history Fiasco runs the risk of conflating all difference, which could result in identity crises.  If we approach the last line of the third verse literally, “We just close our eyes ‘til it’s all black every-thing”, we become vulnerable as the outcome to eradicating difference is not secured.  Fiasco acknowledges this problem from his position as he states, “Hip-Hop ain’t got a section called conscious”.  Here Fiasco recognizes his subjectivity and identity as a Conscious Rapper is contingent on the presence of oppression. 

 Lupe occupies a vulnerable zone of uncertainty for the sake of social justice. He challenges us to resist being docile bodies by fantasizing alternative possibilities.  We must then embody these fantasies in accord with egalitarian principles to manifest distributive social justice.