Spectacular Vernaculars
Description
Viewing hip-hop as the postmodern successor to African American culture's Jazz modernism, this book examines hip-hop music's role in the history of the African-American experience.
Spectacular Vernaculars examines hip-hop's cultural rebellion in terms of its specific implications for postmodern theory and practice, using the politics of reception as its primary rhetorical ground. Hip-hop culture in general, and rap music in particular, present model sites for such an inquiry, since they enact both postmodern modes of production-the appropriation of tropes, technologies, and material culture-and a potential means of resistance to the commodification of cultural forms under late capitalism. By paying specific attention to the historical and cultural context of hip-hop as a black artform and locating its practice of resistance in terms of a postmodernist reading of consumer culture, this book offers a complex reading of hip-hop as a postmodern practice, with implications both for theories of postmodernism and cultural studies as a whole.
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Person
Russell A. Potter is Assistant Professor of English at Colby College. He hosts a weekly radio program, Roots-n-Rap, in Waterville, Maine.
Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction-Coming to Terms: Rap Music as Radical Postmodernism
1. Gettin' Present as an Art: A Signifyin(g) Hipstory of Hip-hop
2. Postmodernity and the Hip-hop Vernacular
3. The Pulse of the Rhyme Flow: Hip-hop Signifyin(g) and the Politics of Reception
4. History-Spectacle-Resistance
5. "Are You Afraid of the Mix of Black and White?" Hip-hop and the Spectacular Politics of Race
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
