{"id":216850,"date":"2022-11-20T12:44:39","date_gmt":"2022-11-20T17:44:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/inserra-chair\/?p=216850"},"modified":"2023-07-16T13:18:15","modified_gmt":"2023-07-16T17:18:15","slug":"afro-italian-rapper-amir-issaas-concert-and-workshop-power-to-the-words-mon-oct-3-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/inserra-chair\/2022\/11\/20\/afro-italian-rapper-amir-issaas-concert-and-workshop-power-to-the-words-mon-oct-3-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"Students from Different Disciplines and Language Backgrounds Interact with Afro-Italian Rapper Amir Issaa During Visit on Campus"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some time has passed since Afro-Italian rapper Amir Issaa presented a concert and workshop on campus but his personal story and powerful songs are still part of conversations among students of different disciplines and cultural\/language backgrounds. An internationally renowned hip-hop artist who has creatively collaborated with several artists over the decades, Amir is also a passionate supporter of the BLM agenda in Italy and regularly holds rap writing workshops in schools, prisons, and colleges across the world. It is this combination of being an artist and having a concrete commitment to social justice that impressed the students who had a chance to interact with him in various forms on Oct. 3, 2022, as part of his Power to the Words\/Potere alle Parole<\/em><\/a> program, supported by the Inserra Endowment<\/a> (Italian Program, WLC Department) included in the Hip Hop Residency Week<\/a> of the Cali School of Music.<\/p>\n

\"Amir<\/a>
Photo credit: Lynise Olivacce<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The workshop didn’t just give students the opportunity to learn how to write lyrics to a beat in Dr. Miele’s and Dr. Antenos’ classes. Amir himself turned into a very relatable teacher of some apparently anachronistic subjects in today’s academia: metric and rhetoric. As he explains, rap is all about quantification of syllables and individuation of rhymes, not to mention apt choices of rhetorical figures. Amir, in his unique blend of tradition and innovation, describes his approach as \u201craptorical\u201d (rap and rhetoric): students listen and absorb complex structures without consciously realizing it, while they rap stories about themselves, often interlacing Italian, Spanish and English. As Vittoria Iellimo, a student in the Italian Teaching Certification, put it, “I never would have imagined myself writing a rap prior to the workshop: we were using rhyming techniques that helped us expand our vocabulary, or known words to express new emotions. Amir made the experience enjoyable and memorable.”<\/p>\n