University Library News Release
Date: October 16, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Jeanette Smith, NMSU Library, (575) 646-7492, jcsmith@lib.nmsu.edu
NMSU Library Celebrates All Things Hip Hop in November
The NMSU Library and NMSU alumni, community educators and Hip Hoppers Lee Rhyanes and Justin De Senso announce a celebration of National Hip Hop History Month in November at NMSU's Branson Library.
The free public celebration includes the grand opening of a Hip Hop exhibit on November 7 at 2 p.m. in the Branson Library lobby and a 4 p.m. screening the same day of the film "Inventos: Hip Hop Cubano" at the Creative Media Institute Theater in Milton Hall. The exhibit will run throughout November.
At the grand opening of the exhibit, Rhyanes and De Senso will introduce the Hip Hop Stacks book display. With Humanities Librarian Mardi Mahaffy, they will describe and discuss the history, importance and relevance of Hip Hop Stacks, a partnership of the NMSU Library and the Hip Hop Alumni. The discussion will connect Hip Hop scholarship to varied academic disciplines across NMSU, ranging from Critical Race Theory to Musicology as well as the connection of Hip Hop to the Las Cruces community. Rhyanes and De Senso will then present selected texts from the collection. The books will demonstrate the importance of Hip Hop scholarship and provide information on the explosive academic power of Hip Hop studies.
A trendy topic for reality television shows, Hollywood films and talk shows, Hip Hop has also fueled several academic theses, documentary films, ethnographic studies, community programs, fiction and non-fiction books and television series. From Adam Mansbach's "Angry Black White Boy," Byron Hurt's "Beyond Beats and Rhymes," Jay Z's "Blueprint 3" and much more, Hip Hop studies is forever eager to analyze the offerings of Hip Hop cultural production across genres and tastes.
Spawned from a 1970s South Bronx in disrepair, Hip Hop has become this century's most dominant global culture. Rearticulated by millions, Hip Hop continually finds itself at the center of cultural production, whether it be through dance, music, scholarship, fashion, novels, poetry, films or performance.
In addition to the NMSU Library's Hip Hop Stacks, other university programs include the Cornell University Hip Hop Collection, McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul, the Hip Hop archives at Harvard and Stanford University, and course studies at Bucknell University, the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown, North Carolina Central, Princeton and Purdue.
Above all else, the partnership of the NMSU Library and the Hip Hop Alumni aspires to promote the interdisciplinary field and culture of Hip Hop as it continues to be implemented in classrooms across academic levels and community spaces worldwide.
For more information, please contact Mahaffy at (575) 646-6925 or email mmahaffy@lib.nmsu.edu. Visit the Hip Hop Alumni web page at http://hiphopalumni.com.
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