Asked about the nineteenth-century poet Adam Mickiewicz, widely considered the bard of Poland, the Polish rapper Doniu suggested, “If Mickiewicz was alive today, he’d be a good rhymer.”  This statement, echoed by Polish hip-hop fans and media, exemplifies the sort of interpretation through reading and performance that I examine in my research.  I am a scholar of cultural history, Polish literature, and contemporary popular music.  In particular, my work is concerned with the ways in which musical and literary texts are reanimated in their reception and come to shape perceptions and understandings of contemporary experience and identity.  My current research on Polish hip-hop’s engagement with the nation’s literary tradition—the sampling of poets and remixing of archives—shows how in turning to the past, the community is engaged in a broader discourse on authenticity within a national community and a global genre. 

My current book project, Cultural Remix: Polish Hip-Hop and the Sampling of Heritage focuses on the use of appeals to national literary history by a Polish hip-hop community that looks to position itself as a voice both within the global genre and national conversations about contemporary Polishness.  The formal aspects of rap—rooted in sampling, intertextuality, decontextualizing the familiar, and privileging poetic prowess—create a music that is itself a performance of reception and invites artists to rethink the cultural texts of their community.  Drawing on these elements of the music, my project theorizes hip-hop sampling of archival audio and artists’ “shout outs” to canonical Polish poets as a means to understand the relationship between documentary citation and narrative association in shaping the ways contemporary readers create meaning from the texts of the past.  Hearing Mickiewicz as “a rhymer” or Public Enemy as a group that speaks directly to Polish concerns is not born solely from texts, but from their reception—a reception informed by national narratives about the artists, current political and social concerns, and the conventions of hip-hop.  I argue that in drawing on the texts and mythology of the Polish artists who memorialized the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Polish hip-hop sustains a traditional lineage of national struggle and poetic resistance—a lineage in which it presents itself as a contemporary incarnation.  In so doing, Polish rappers revive the nineteenth-century characterization of Poland as a “Christ of Nations” and offer a nationally-specific performance of hip-hop’s conventional stance as critical and anti-establishment, unique here in its affirmation of a traditional nationalist discourse. With recourse to documentary evidence and national mythology, Polish rappers frame Poland itself as an oppressed subject, repeatedly abused by its eastern neighbors, denigrated and let down by the West, and buoyed by the rebellious spirit of its artistic agitators.  The poetic texts of partitioned Poland thus become the hip-hop texts of a contemporary Poland increasingly at odds with both the European Union and its neighbors to the east.  This project thus addresses not only questions of Polishness and the role of history and heritage in shaping national consciousness that have long animated both popular and political discourse in the country, but also offers a novel perspective on how literature is reframed in the process of reading and performance to influence the shape of contemporary communities.  
 
Cultural Remix addresses conversations that span musicology, literary history, and Slavic Studies.  Addressing the relative scarcity of English-language scholarship on Polish hip-hop, I offer a reading of Poland’s hip-hop scene that invites comparative and collaborative work on the practices of localization and community storytelling within the study of global music.  The engagement of rappers with the political and literary past is not unique to Poland, and my work contributes to the conversation on the ways in which hip-hop’s formal language of sampling, remixing, and rapped commentary writes community histories and draws on recordings both as formal and spiritual links to the artistic lineage. Additionally, my work contributes to conversations in hip-hop studies about credibility in the genre, as well as questions about whiteness.  These are always sites of negotiation and performance, and the Polish case speaks to how socio-economic disadvantage and national narratives of oppression are privileged over race as a marker of membership and credibility in the genre.  Within Polish studies, this project offers a novel perspective on the mobilization of Romantic myths and national literary heritage.  In my analysis of how texts are selected, read, and performed, I offer insight into not only the circulation of literary and archival material, but also the national and global discourse that shapes what it means to speak to and for Poland.  In negotiating a global genre to voice national identity, Polish rappers expose the tensions inherent in contemporary articulations of Polishness. 
         
In all my scholarship, my research is motivated by questions of how creative work “lives” in the world—how the details of its composition find meaning in the processes of reading, remixing, and circulation.  Framing reception as a creative act, my work illuminates the political debates, community affiliations, and existing narratives that motivate and guide contemporary readings of artists from the past.  Bringing together canonical texts with emerging artists in varied genres, I strive to offer a nuanced understanding of the stories we tell about ourselves and to reveal the ways in which they reflect the needs and desires of individuals and communities.