“Imbedded” Belonging and Black Being: A Critical Analysis of Blackness in Kendrick Lamar’s 2016 Grammy Awards Performance

This article argues that in a space of artistic performance Black people can fully imbed themselves in the space, despite the temporality of the performance itself. Therefore, in the act of performing, Black people are able to fully be recognized as a human whole. The goal of this article is to think of a Hip Hop beingness that fuses the temporal/body, consciousness/beyond the body, and the ancestral connections of orality and genetic memory. I do so by looking at how black performance disrupts dominant narratives of black bodies as being just flesh. This article brings together, Hip Hop studies, Africana philosophy and performance theory to argue that the space of performativity moves beyond the notion of blackness as void and does not solely focus on the constraints of corporeal blackness. Instead, the black body imbeds the space it occupies. In doing so, it disrupts and reconfigures space, time, and narratives of belonging