H Samy Alim
Biographic Data
| ID | 86668 |
|---|---|
| NAME | H Samy Alim |
| GIVEN NAMES | H Samy |
| FAMILY NAME | Alim |
| SIGNATURE | ALIM H S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4664-021X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 317 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Honoring the Life, Legacy, and Linguistics of William Labov
This article honors the life, legacy, and linguistics of William Labov. It features a wide‐ranging, candid conversation with Labov in 1998, when the field of African American Language was at multiple, major crossroads. I offer a refreshing view of Labov, discussing personal and political issues with him, major debates in the field, and the persistence of racism both in sociolinguistic research and in the education of Black children. Further, we d…
The Past, Present, and Future of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies
In this Voices: Reflective Accounts of Education essay, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Django Paris, H. Samy Alim, and Na’ilah Suad Nasir speak to the past, present, and future of culturally sustaining pedagogies. This dialogue marks the tenth anniversary of the Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies Symposium, published in the Harvard Educational Review in 2014, where the authors illustrated how culturally relevant, sustaining, and revitalizing pedagogies ar…
Freedom Moves
This article theorizes Hip Hop as Black liberatory practice by explicating the links between Hip Hop knowledges, pedagogies, and futures. I draw on multiple research and classroom experiences, including co-teaching a course with pioneering Hip Hop artist Chuck D of Public Enemy. The course examined Hip Hop culture as an extension of Black freedom culture and delved into the politics and the poetics, as well as the activism and the aesthetics, of …
Inventing “the White Voice”
In this essay, I explore how paradigms like raciolinguistics and culturally sustaining pedagogies can offer substantive breaks from mainstream thought and provide us with new, just, and equitable ways of living together in the world. I begin with a deep engagement with Boots Riley and his critically acclaimed, anticapitalist, absurdist comedy Sorry to Bother You, in hopes of demonstrating how artists, activists, creatives, and scholars might: 1) …
Translocal style communities
This article addresses issues that lie at the intersection of debates about language, Hip Hop Culture, and globalization. Critically synthesizing a wide range of recent work on Hip Hop and foregrounding issues of youth agency as evidenced by Hip Hop youth’s metalinguistic theorizing, the article presents an empirical account of youth as cultural theorists. Hip Hop youth are both participants and theorists of their participation in the many transl…
Kom Khoi San, kry trug jou land
This article offers a broad and deep discussion of critical issues in the study of language, race, and political economy through an analysis of the verbal art, aesthetics, and performances of South African hip hop artists. In particular, we present an in-depth analysis of the Afrikaaps language movement in Cape Town, South Africa and theorize the language-race-land complex , the range of issues with respect to the co-constitution and refusal of t…
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy - 1 - A Critical Framework for Centering Communities
The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race
This handbook is the first volume to offer a sustained theoretical exploration of all aspects of language and race from a linguistic anthropological perspective. A growing number of scholars hold that rather than fixed and pre-determined, race is created out of continuous and repeated discourses emerging from individuals and institutions within specific histories, political economic systems, and everyday interactions. This handbook demonstrates h…
Oxford Handbook of Language and Race
Critical Youth Research in Education
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies in the Current Moment
This department explores how teachers can sustain students’ multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities
Linguistic creativity and the production of cisheteropatriarchy
Raciolinguistics
Raciolinguistics reveals the central role that language plays in shaping our ideas about race and vice versa. The book brings together a team of leading scholars—working both within and beyond the United States—to share research that helps us understand the increasingly vexed relationships between race, ethnicity, and language. Combining the innovative, cutting-edge approaches of race and ethnic studies with fine-grained linguistic analyses, chap…
Introducing Raciolinguistics
This chapter outlines the central goals and concerns of the emerging field of language and race, or raciolinguistics. It begins by articulating a commitment to analyzing language and race together rather than as discrete and unconnected social processes. The chapter then makes numerous calls for researchers to look comparatively across ethnoracial and linguistic contexts to better understand the role of language in maintaining and challenging rac…
Racio Linguistics
Raciolinguistics reveals the central role that language plays in shaping our ideas about race. The book brings together a team of leading scholars- working both within and beyond the United States- to share powerful, much-needed research that helps us understand the increasingly vexed relationships between race, ethnicity, and language in our rapidly changing world. Combining the innovative, cutting-edge approaches of race and ethnic studies with…
Invited Forum
This Forum provides a range of voices on the Language Gap, as our aim is to shed light on the need for more critical dialogue to accompany the proliferation of political initiatives, policymaking, educational programs, and media coverage. We highlight some relevant background on the Language Gap and describe some of the research used to support the concept. The diverse slate of Forum contributions that we have assembled approach the Language Gap …
What Are We Seeking to Sustain Through Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy? A Loving Critique Forward
In this article, Django Paris and H. Samy Alim use the emergence of Paris's concept of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) as the foundation for a respectful and productive critique of previous formulations of asset pedagogies. Paying particular attention to asset pedagogy's failures to remain dynamic and critical in a constantly evolving global world, they offer a vision that builds on the crucial work of the past toward a CSP that keeps pace w…
Moving the crowd, ‘crowding’ the emcee
This article shows how participants in freestyle rap battles coproduce and contest hip hop as a black space. Through discourse analysis of long-term ethnographic fieldwork at an open mic venue in Los Angeles, we show how black normativity is co-constructed and sometimes challenged by non-black emcees and audience members. Specifically, we examine videotaped data of verbal artistic duels between a black and a Latino emcee, analyzing instances in w…
Introduction
This introduction to the special issue, ‘Complicating Race: Articulating Race Across Multiple Social Dimensions’, situates the collection of articles with respect to the wider body of sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological work on race in US contexts. The articles not only explode the myth of the ‘postracial’, but also seek to recast the relationship between language and race by demonstrating how race is inextricably bound with multiple, …
Lost in Translation
African American Language, AAL, Ebonics, sociolingistics, education, race and racism
Critical Language Awareness
Whatever (Neck Roll, Eye Roll, Teeth Suck)
This article examines the argumentative talk of a preadolescent girls' peer group demonstrating both the co-construction of microinteractional identities as well as the coproduction of macro-social identity categories, such as race, class, and gender. Activities of social aggression are performed through embodied styling and stancetaking in the midst of oppositional moves towards a "tagalong" girl. Through transmodal stylization girls openly mock…
Short Fried-Rice-Eating Chinese MCs" and "Good-Hair-Havin Uncle Tom Niggas
This article shows how emcees create local meanings of race and ethnicity in freestyle rap battles. We demonstrate how performers attach new social meanings to race and ethnicity in verbal duels, even as they also reproduce normative meanings around gender and sexuality. Further, we suggest that the construction of local, alternative meanings around race and ethnicity might actually help support dominant racial hierarchies by relegating "blacknes…
Critical Hip-Hop Language Pedagogies
This article addresses two long-standing tensions in the education of linguistically marginalized youth: (a) the cultural tension, or cultural combat, that such students engage in as they form their linguistic identities, and (b) the tensions between the development of critical language pedagogies and the lack of their broader implementation due to disinterested and discriminatory teachers. This article presents critical Hip-hop language pedagogi…
Glocal Linguistic Flows
Invited Forum
This Forum provides a range of voices on the Language Gap, as our aim is to shed light on the need for more critical dialogue to accompany the proliferation of political initiatives, policymaking, educational programs, and media coverage. We highlight some relevant background on the Language Gap and describe some of the research used to support the concept. The diverse slate of Forum contributions that we have assembled approach the Language Gap …
Critical Language Awareness in the United States
As scholars examine the successes and failures of more than 50 years of court-ordered desegregation since Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas , and 25 years of language education of Black youth since Martin Luther King Elementary School Children v. Ann Arbor School District Board , this article revisits the key issues involved in those cases and urges educators and sociolinguists to work together to revise pedagogies. After reviewing wh…
Whatever (Neck Roll, Eye Roll, Teeth Suck)
This article examines the argumentative talk of a preadolescent girls' peer group demonstrating both the co-construction of microinteractional identities as well as the coproduction of macro-social identity categories, such as race, class, and gender. Activities of social aggression are performed through embodied styling and stancetaking in the midst of oppositional moves towards a "tagalong" girl. Through transmodal stylization girls openly mock…
Introduction
This introduction to the special issue, ‘Complicating Race: Articulating Race Across Multiple Social Dimensions’, situates the collection of articles with respect to the wider body of sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological work on race in US contexts. The articles not only explode the myth of the ‘postracial’, but also seek to recast the relationship between language and race by demonstrating how race is inextricably bound with multiple, …
Street-Conscious Copula Variation in the Hip Hop Nation
Research Article| August 01 2002 STREET-CONSCIOUS COPULA VARIATION IN THE HIP HOP NATION H. SAMY ALIM H. SAMY ALIM Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Speech (2002) 77 (3): 288–304. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-77-3-288 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation H. SAMY ALIM; STREET-CONSCIOUS COPULA VARIATION IN THE HIP HOP NATION. American Speech 1 August …
Short Fried-Rice-Eating Chinese MCs" and "Good-Hair-Havin Uncle Tom Niggas
This article shows how emcees create local meanings of race and ethnicity in freestyle rap battles. We demonstrate how performers attach new social meanings to race and ethnicity in verbal duels, even as they also reproduce normative meanings around gender and sexuality. Further, we suggest that the construction of local, alternative meanings around race and ethnicity might actually help support dominant racial hierarchies by relegating "blacknes…
Critical Hip-Hop Language Pedagogies
This article addresses two long-standing tensions in the education of linguistically marginalized youth: (a) the cultural tension, or cultural combat, that such students engage in as they form their linguistic identities, and (b) the tensions between the development of critical language pedagogies and the lack of their broader implementation due to disinterested and discriminatory teachers. This article presents critical Hip-hop language pedagogi…
Glocal Linguistic Flows
Kom Khoi San, kry trug jou land
This article offers a broad and deep discussion of critical issues in the study of language, race, and political economy through an analysis of the verbal art, aesthetics, and performances of South African hip hop artists. In particular, we present an in-depth analysis of the Afrikaaps language movement in Cape Town, South Africa and theorize the language-race-land complex , the range of issues with respect to the co-constitution and refusal of t…
Moving the crowd, ‘crowding’ the emcee
This article shows how participants in freestyle rap battles coproduce and contest hip hop as a black space. Through discourse analysis of long-term ethnographic fieldwork at an open mic venue in Los Angeles, we show how black normativity is co-constructed and sometimes challenged by non-black emcees and audience members. Specifically, we examine videotaped data of verbal artistic duels between a black and a Latino emcee, analyzing instances in w…
Re-inventing Islam with Unique Modern Tones
This article explores the complex relationship between Hip Hop Culture and the Islamic Faith, which have both been constructed by dominating discourses as “threats to American civilization.” Like the Muslim umma, the Global Hip Hop Nation functions as a worldwide network of “believers” who have created “nationhood” through cultural, ideological, and imaginary means. I view Hip Hop artists as “verbal mujahidin,” with their speech activities servin…
Inventing “the White Voice”
In this essay, I explore how paradigms like raciolinguistics and culturally sustaining pedagogies can offer substantive breaks from mainstream thought and provide us with new, just, and equitable ways of living together in the world. I begin with a deep engagement with Boots Riley and his critically acclaimed, anticapitalist, absurdist comedy Sorry to Bother You, in hopes of demonstrating how artists, activists, creatives, and scholars might: 1) …
Linguistic creativity and the production of cisheteropatriarchy
The Natti Ain't No Punk City
"The Natti Ain't No Punk City":Emic Views of Hip Hop Cultures H. Samy Alim (bio) Writing in Twisted Tales in the Hip Hop Streets of Philly, James G. Spady claimed: "In the '95, Hip Hop scholarship continues to go unchecked." More than a decade later, as we celebrate thirty-plus years of Hip Hop, Hip Hop scholarship has entered a new phase of expansion and maturation (see Forman and Neal's That's the Joint! The Hip Hop Studies Reader). Hip Hop cul…
Street-Conscious Copula Variation in the Hip Hop Nation
Research Article| August 01 2002 STREET-CONSCIOUS COPULA VARIATION IN THE HIP HOP NATION H. SAMY ALIM H. SAMY ALIM Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Speech (2002) 77 (3): 288–304. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-77-3-288 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation H. SAMY ALIM; STREET-CONSCIOUS COPULA VARIATION IN THE HIP HOP NATION. American Speech 1 August …
Critical Language Awareness in the United States
As scholars examine the successes and failures of more than 50 years of court-ordered desegregation since Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas , and 25 years of language education of Black youth since Martin Luther King Elementary School Children v. Ann Arbor School District Board , this article revisits the key issues involved in those cases and urges educators and sociolinguists to work together to revise pedagogies. After reviewing wh…
Roc the Mic Right
Complementing a burgeoning area of interest and academic study, Roc the Mic Right explores the central role of language within the Hip Hop Nation (HHN). With its status convincingly argued as the best means by which to read Hip Hop culture, H. Samy Alim then focuses on discursive practices, such as narrative sequencing and ciphers, or lyrical circles of rhymers. Often a marginalized phenomenon, the complexity and creativity of Hip Hop lyrical pro…
Re-inventing Islam with Unique Modern Tones
This article explores the complex relationship between Hip Hop Culture and the Islamic Faith, which have both been constructed by dominating discourses as “threats to American civilization.” Like the Muslim umma, the Global Hip Hop Nation functions as a worldwide network of “believers” who have created “nationhood” through cultural, ideological, and imaginary means. I view Hip Hop artists as “verbal mujahidin,” with their speech activities servin…
The Natti Ain't No Punk City
"The Natti Ain't No Punk City":Emic Views of Hip Hop Cultures H. Samy Alim (bio) Writing in Twisted Tales in the Hip Hop Streets of Philly, James G. Spady claimed: "In the '95, Hip Hop scholarship continues to go unchecked." More than a decade later, as we celebrate thirty-plus years of Hip Hop, Hip Hop scholarship has entered a new phase of expansion and maturation (see Forman and Neal's That's the Joint! The Hip Hop Studies Reader). Hip Hop cul…
African American English
African American English: Linguistic Introduction By Lisa Green. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 2002
Critical Hip-Hop Language Pedagogies
This article addresses two long-standing tensions in the education of linguistically marginalized youth: (a) the cultural tension, or cultural combat, that such students engage in as they form their linguistic identities, and (b) the tensions between the development of critical language pedagogies and the lack of their broader implementation due to disinterested and discriminatory teachers. This article presents critical Hip-hop language pedagogi…
Glocal Linguistic Flows
Critical Language Awareness
Whatever (Neck Roll, Eye Roll, Teeth Suck)
This article examines the argumentative talk of a preadolescent girls' peer group demonstrating both the co-construction of microinteractional identities as well as the coproduction of macro-social identity categories, such as race, class, and gender. Activities of social aggression are performed through embodied styling and stancetaking in the midst of oppositional moves towards a "tagalong" girl. Through transmodal stylization girls openly mock…
Short Fried-Rice-Eating Chinese MCs" and "Good-Hair-Havin Uncle Tom Niggas
This article shows how emcees create local meanings of race and ethnicity in freestyle rap battles. We demonstrate how performers attach new social meanings to race and ethnicity in verbal duels, even as they also reproduce normative meanings around gender and sexuality. Further, we suggest that the construction of local, alternative meanings around race and ethnicity might actually help support dominant racial hierarchies by relegating "blacknes…
Moving the crowd, ‘crowding’ the emcee
This article shows how participants in freestyle rap battles coproduce and contest hip hop as a black space. Through discourse analysis of long-term ethnographic fieldwork at an open mic venue in Los Angeles, we show how black normativity is co-constructed and sometimes challenged by non-black emcees and audience members. Specifically, we examine videotaped data of verbal artistic duels between a black and a Latino emcee, analyzing instances in w…
Introduction
This introduction to the special issue, ‘Complicating Race: Articulating Race Across Multiple Social Dimensions’, situates the collection of articles with respect to the wider body of sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological work on race in US contexts. The articles not only explode the myth of the ‘postracial’, but also seek to recast the relationship between language and race by demonstrating how race is inextricably bound with multiple, …
Lost in Translation
African American Language, AAL, Ebonics, sociolingistics, education, race and racism
What Are We Seeking to Sustain Through Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy? A Loving Critique Forward
In this article, Django Paris and H. Samy Alim use the emergence of Paris's concept of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) as the foundation for a respectful and productive critique of previous formulations of asset pedagogies. Paying particular attention to asset pedagogy's failures to remain dynamic and critical in a constantly evolving global world, they offer a vision that builds on the crucial work of the past toward a CSP that keeps pace w…
Invited Forum
This Forum provides a range of voices on the Language Gap, as our aim is to shed light on the need for more critical dialogue to accompany the proliferation of political initiatives, policymaking, educational programs, and media coverage. We highlight some relevant background on the Language Gap and describe some of the research used to support the concept. The diverse slate of Forum contributions that we have assembled approach the Language Gap …
Raciolinguistics
Raciolinguistics reveals the central role that language plays in shaping our ideas about race and vice versa. The book brings together a team of leading scholars—working both within and beyond the United States—to share research that helps us understand the increasingly vexed relationships between race, ethnicity, and language. Combining the innovative, cutting-edge approaches of race and ethnic studies with fine-grained linguistic analyses, chap…
Introducing Raciolinguistics
This chapter outlines the central goals and concerns of the emerging field of language and race, or raciolinguistics. It begins by articulating a commitment to analyzing language and race together rather than as discrete and unconnected social processes. The chapter then makes numerous calls for researchers to look comparatively across ethnoracial and linguistic contexts to better understand the role of language in maintaining and challenging rac…
Racio Linguistics
Raciolinguistics reveals the central role that language plays in shaping our ideas about race. The book brings together a team of leading scholars- working both within and beyond the United States- to share powerful, much-needed research that helps us understand the increasingly vexed relationships between race, ethnicity, and language in our rapidly changing world. Combining the innovative, cutting-edge approaches of race and ethnic studies with…
Linguistic creativity and the production of cisheteropatriarchy
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy - 1 - A Critical Framework for Centering Communities
The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race
This handbook is the first volume to offer a sustained theoretical exploration of all aspects of language and race from a linguistic anthropological perspective. A growing number of scholars hold that rather than fixed and pre-determined, race is created out of continuous and repeated discourses emerging from individuals and institutions within specific histories, political economic systems, and everyday interactions. This handbook demonstrates h…
Oxford Handbook of Language and Race
Critical Youth Research in Education
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies in the Current Moment
This department explores how teachers can sustain students’ multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities
Sociology (22 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (18 works) · Political science (13 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Politics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Music History and Culture (9 works) · Anthropology (8 works) · Pedagogy (7 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (6 works)