Sampling and Remixing Blackness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance

Sampling and Remixing Blackness explores the social implications of non-Black and non-African American artists adopting Hip-hop culture in theater and performance, highlighting the dangers and opportunities of such engagements in the age of Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 296 pages
Publication date: 25 October 2021
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press

Sampling and Remixing Blackness is a thought-provoking and accessible book that delves into the profound social implications of cultural borrowing and personal appropriation of Hip-hop culture by non-Black and non-African American Black artists in theater and performance. In a cultural landscape where Hip-hop theater productions, such as Hamilton, provide glimpses of Black popular culture to non-Black individuals through musical soundtracks, GIFs, popular Hip-hop music, language, clothing, singing styles, and embodied performances, people worldwide are embracing a Blackness that is simultaneously connected to African American culture and freely assumed and discarded by artists and consumers as they please. As Black individuals across the globe navigate a racial identity that remains unshaken, in a time of social unrest against anti-blackness, this book poses the question of how such engagements with Hip-hop in performance can be both perilous and a potential space for forging cultural alliances. Featuring the work of visionary Hip-hop theater artists, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Sarah Jones, and Danny Hoch, this book explores the groundbreaking contributions of Hip-hop theater and performance artists who have engaged Hip-hop's Blackness through popular performance. The book challenges our understanding of race, Hip-hop, and Blackness in the age of Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. In a cultural moment where racial identity is performed through Hip-hop culture's resistance to the status quo and complicity in maintaining it, Hodges Persley prompts us to contemplate who has the rightful claim to Hip-hop's blackness, considering that blackness itself is a complex mixtape that encompasses both consent and resistance to transgressive and inspiring acts of performance.

Weight: 528g
Dimension: 153 x 228 x 30 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780472055111