Spectacular Vernaculars

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Spectacular Vernaculars
Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism

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Russell A. Potter - Author

SUNY series in Postmodern Culture

N/A
Hardcover - 208 pages

Release Date: September 1995

ISBN10: 0-7914-2625-4
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-2625-8

Price: $31.95
Paperback - 208 pages

Release Date: August 1995

ISBN10: 0-7914-2626-2
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-2626-5

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Summary

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.

Russell A. Potter is Assistant Professor of English at Colby College. He hosts a weekly radio program, Roots-n-Rap, in Waterville, Maine.

Table of Contents

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

Related Subjects

African American Studies
American Culture
Cultural Studies
Music
Popular Culture
Postmodernism

30271/30272(CFS/DG/)

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