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DJ Muggs and Bambu, Los Angeles, Philippines (mixtape)

Professor Roderick Labrador presents “Los Angeles, Philippines: Toward a Transpacific Politics and Poetics in Bambu’s Musical Autobiography” on Wednesday, December 3, 11:30 a.m. in Hamilton Library Room 301. The final presentation of the Fall 2014 Faculty Lecture Series is free and open to the public.

Labrador examines the ways that Bambu, a second-generation Filipino-American rapper from Los Angeles, California, constructs his life narrative throughout his mixtape, Los Angeles, Philippines. It is a counterstory challenging majoritarian stories while simultaneously reinforcing and critiquing the operations of race, gender, sexuality, class, nation and empire in U.S. society.

Bambu is a well-known, prolific and respected Asian-American member of the independent hip-hop scene and was formerly one-third of the pioneering Filipino-American rap group, Native Guns. With its self-conscious, self-referential style similar to Chuck D’s Autobiography of Mistachuck, Los Angeles, Philippines works as a musical autobiography that connects individual and collective memory, narrative and engagement with the everyday world.

Labrador

More on Roderick Labrador

Labrador’s research and community work focuses on race, ethnicity, class, culture, language, migration, education, hip-hop and cultural production in Hawaiʻi, the U.S. and Philippines.

He hosts “Inside the Ethnic Studies Studio,” in which he and his students conduct interviews, workshops and forums with local, national and international hip-hop artists at UH Mānoa.

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