“The position that they were offering is actually really unique, and is actually historic,” says akua naru, University of California Santa Cruz’s new assistant professor of music. naru will be focussing on the history and study of hip hop, a genre for which there is little to no academic research.
naru moved to California for this position, having spent her whole life on the east coast. “My entry point into California is through hip hop music,” she says, pointing out major artists including Dr. Dre, Kendrick Lamar, and Nipsey Hussle. If it were not for her new role at UC Santa Cruz, naru may have never decided to come to the west coast.
Growing up in New Haven, Connecticut, hip hop was an integral part of her daily life. “People were infected by hip hop when I was growing up,” says naru. “This is something you did outside, so I grew up seeing hip hop as a lived practice in a way that doesn’t really exist in the same way today.”
She started putting together her own lyrics when she was six or seven years old. Her family and community actively encouraged her to pursue her love of music. “At some point my little microphone in my bedroom became a stage with 30 people, with 100 people, with 500 people,” she says. naru gained a large following, especially in Europe, and has played shows in more than 50 countries, alongside her six-piece band. She has been described by Dr. Cornel West as the “Toni Morrison of hip hop.”
Alongside her hip hop, naru has taken on other projects including creating theKEEPER, the first archive dedicated to women and girls in hip hop over the past 50 years at Brown University while she was an artist-in-residence. Currently she is working on writing a play which adapts the book Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy by Tricia Rose.
Parallel to her creative career, naru is excited to continue her career in teaching. “I think teaching is learning, so being in that orbit and in that conversation is exciting to me,” she says. naru sees the classroom not only as a space to teach, but as a place where she can learn from her students as well. “I’m very much looking forward to meeting the students, being in community.”
She is looking forward to being in a place that has hosted other great thinkers in the Black community including bell hooks and Huey Newton. “When I saw that job post, I thought, “Wow, this is kind of historic,” says naru. “What does it say about the institution that would see the value in sort of this work or this community and create this opportunity. So I was just excited to apply.”