About Marcyliena Morgan
I grew up in a working class black community where everyone's mother, father, aunt and uncle read books (or wanted to read), talked to each other about what was happening in the world and cared about their community. I'm not talking about an ideal neighborhood - far from it. Most of those adults worked hard for little or no pay, struggled to support their families, were poorly educated and dealt with the meanest forms of racism everyday. It affected them. As hard as it was, they weren't weak, but strong. And no matter what was happening to them, the thing that my community never forgave was 'not knowing.'
There was a time when if you acted like you wanted to know something and that you should know things important to you, racists and self-haters would get angry, try to hurt you and say "You think you're too good." They might take away your job, hurt you and your family and destroy your reason for living. Everyone took great pride in making sure they knew about things. You couldn't touch my neighborhood when they could finally, openly reveal how much they knew. No one could make you not read, not think, not question, not discuss, and not speak up. There were still consequences when you were informed, but we knew that at the very least, the one thing we could do was to know what in the hell was going on. Fighting to know and control your life was the beginning of everything. I want that community back. I think Hiphop is that community.
Marcyliena Morgan is a Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and the Executive Director of the Hiphop Archive. Professor Morgan earned both her B.A. and her M.A. degrees at the University of Illinois in Chicago. She obtained an additional M.A. at the University of Essex, England and her PhD through the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include: 1) Urban speech communities: identity, migration, interaction, language use, discourse styles, urban youth language, verbal performance, hip-hop culture; 2) The African Diaspora: continuity and innovation in language and communication styles of peoples of African descent residing in the Americas and throughout the African Diaspora; 3) language, culture and identity: how language both constitutes and works in the construction of gender, national and other group identities, especially in urban areas; 4) Discourse strategies: intentionality and responsibility in discourse; construction of gender in discourse and narrative style and; language socialization; 5) verbal performance: in urban African Diaspora speech communities with special emphasis on African American toasts, signifying and hiphop; 6) hiphop language and culture; 7) language and education: language policy and planning regarding social class varieties and African American English in the US , literacy instruction, language education policy and programs for bilingual creole language speakers.
Marcyliena Morgan has conducted field research on the African Diaspora, identity and language in the USA , England and the Caribbean . She has received major grants from the Ford Foundation, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She is the author of many publications that focus on youth, gender, language, culture, identity, sociolinguistics, discourse and interaction, including Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and her latest book The Real Hiphop - Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the Underground (Duke University Press, 2008). Professor Morgan founded the Hiphop Archive at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University in 2002. Professor Morgan teaches classes on hip hop, the ethnography of communications, representation in the media, language and identity, race, class and gender.