John D. French was exhausted but happy enjoying a hip hop show by rappers from the Brazilian NGO Instituto Enraizados (The Rooted). The March 3 performance concluded a daylong conference on “Hip Hop, Faith, and Citizenship,” the closing chapter of a week of activities organized as part of the Bass Connections Project “Activism, Culture and Education for Citizenship in Brazil and the U.S.”
Co-led by French, a Duke professor of History whose research centers on Brazilian culture and politics, and Duke alumna Gladys Mitchell-Walthour, the NCCU Dan Blue Endowed Chair in Political Science, as well as two Duke Romance Studies graduate students, Lucas Lopes and Courtney Crumpler, the two-year project brought together scholars, artists and students from Duke, North Carolina Central University (NCCU), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Instituto Enraizados and the Federal Rural University in Rio de Janeiro to investigate key forms of activism and cultural organizing.
Through the week, students interacted with five Brazilian visitors from the Instituto Enraizados. Established in the Baixada Fluminense, an economically depressed region of Rio de Janeiro, Enraizados’s mission is to use arts, and hip hop in particular, as a tool for education, activism and societal transformation.
One of these visitors was the artist Dudu do Morro Agudo, Enraizados’ founder and executive director and French’s long-time community collaborator. Born and raised in the Baixada Fluminense, Dudu brought music and activism into academia, recently defending his doctoral dissertation at the Universidade Federal Fluminense on using rap as an educational tool. In this third visit to Duke, Dudu performed the music at the center of his Ph.D.
"The University changed me, but I changed it too,” he said in a previous interview.
For more information on the team’s work and its long-standing collaboration with Enraizados, visit their website.
