A Matter of Life and Def: Poetic Knowledge and the Organic Intellectuals in Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation unpacks the poetry, performances, and the production of Def Poetry Jam to explore how a performative art embodied and confronted racial discourses, including stereotypes and also, addressed the racism, patriotism, and imperialist discourses that circulated after 9/11. Def Poetry Jam contributes to the intellectual capacity of spoken word and performance poetry, and poets as intellectuals, where poets produce and disseminate knowledge, ideas, and data, in the form of narratives, that contribute to critical consciousness. The effectiveness of the series lay in the consistent blurring of entertainment, knowledge, anti-capitalism, and capitalism. This research demonstrates how Def Poetry Jam provided organic intellectuals, through poetry, a space to name the pain of history, demonstrate pleasure amid structural inequality, and to imagine themselves in liberatory ways. The following questions guided this exploration of Def Poetry Jam: from which poetic traditions did Def Poetry Jam originate and thus represent to television audiences; how did the on-screen representation of performers and poetry contribute to the production of cultural consciousnesses; and finally, how did Def Poetry Jam offer an archive of knowledge about the United States, particularly those experiences of African-Americans and people of color, in the early twenty-first century? Following a content analysis of the three hundred ninety-four performances on the series, supplemented by interviews with talent coordinators as well as poets, this research found Def Poetry Jam, as a commercial project, negotiated cultural resistance within the controlling images of Black bodies and people of color on television.
abstract: This dissertation unpacks the poetry, performances, and the production of Def Poetry Jam to explore how a performative art embodied and confronted racial discourses, including stereotypes and also, addressed the racism, patriotism, and imperialist discourses that circulated after 9/11. Def Poetry Jam contributes to the intellectual capacity of spoken word and performance poetry, and poets as intellectuals, where poets produce and disseminate knowledge, ideas, and data, in the form of narratives, that contribute to critical consciousness. The effectiveness of the series lay in the consistent blurring of entertainment, knowledge, anti-capitalism, and capitalism. This research demonstrates how Def Poetry Jam provided organic intellectuals, through poetry, a space to name the pain of history, demonstrate pleasure amid structural inequality, and to imagine themselves in liberatory ways. The following questions guided this exploration of Def Poetry Jam: from which poetic traditions did Def Poetry Jam originate and thus represent to television audiences; how did the on-screen representation of performers and poetry contribute to the production of cultural consciousnesses; and finally, how did Def Poetry Jam offer an archive of knowledge about the United States, particularly those experiences of African-Americans and people of color, in the early twenty-first century? Following a content analysis of the three hundred ninety-four performances on the series, supplemented by interviews with talent coordinators as well as poets, this research found Def Poetry Jam, as a commercial project, negotiated cultural resistance within the controlling images of Black bodies and people of color on television.
author: Blacksher, Anthony
keywords: Slam, Spoken Word, Poetry, Black Popular Culture, Hip hop, Television, African American Studies, Africana Studies, American Literature, American Popular Culture, Critical and Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication, Inequality and Stratification, Race and Ethnicity, Social History, Sociology of Culture, United States History
date published: 2019-01-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:40:28Z
provider: Claremont Graduate University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Claremont Graduate University