Africana Studies / Rites and Reason Theatre

Nasir Marumo grew up in New Orleans and Atlanta. He received his BA in Afro-American Studies from Smith College and his MA in Afro-American Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst before coming to Brown as a Presidential Fellow. Nasir is interested broadly in black popular music and social change and is particularly invested in understanding hip hop’s shifting capacity to act as a vehicle for counter-hegemonic struggle. His dissertation investigates how ideological struggle in trap music reveals shifting social and economic practices and relations in twenty-first century Atlanta, and he explores how these shifts have given rise to new conditions, possibilities, limitations, and modes of manipulation and escape. Nasir’s work draws primarily from black cultural studies, black feminist thought and queer studies, Marxist political economy, and the sociology of race and racism in the post-Civil Rights era. Nasir also raps under the name Caliban Speaks.