Hip Hop Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement

Hip Hop's Inheritance arguably offers the first book-length treatment of what hip hop culture has, literally, "inherited" from the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts movement, the Feminist Art movement, and 1980s and 1990s postmodern aesthetics. By comparing and contrasting the major motifs of the aforementioned cultural aesthetic traditions with those of hip hop culture, all the while critically exploring the origins and evolution of black popular culture from antebellum America through to "Obama's America," Hip Hop's Inheritance demonstrates that the Hip Hop generation is not the first generation of young black folk preoccupied with spirituality and sexuality, race and religion, entertainment and athletics, or ghetto culture and bourgeois culture. Ultimately this means, then, that instead of representing a completely new black youth culture, in many ways rap music and hip hop culture have, however unwittingly, recycled several racial, sexual, and cultural myths and motifs bequeathed by antecedent African American and European American cultural aesthetic traditions and sociopolitical movements-perhaps, none more than the New Negro movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, the Black Arts movement, the Women's Liberation movement, and the Feminist Art movement. Taking interdisciplinarity and intersectionality seriously, Hip Hop's Inheritance employs the epistemologies and methodologies from a wide-range of academic and organic intellectual/activist communities in its efforts to advance an intellectual history and critical theory of hip hop culture. Drawing from academic and organic intellectual/activist communities as diverse as African American studies and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) studies, women's studies and postcolonial studies, history and philosophy, politics and economics, sociology and ethnomusicology, Hip Hop's Inheritance calls into question one-dimensional and monodisciplinary interpretations or, rather, misinterpretations of a multidimensional and multivalent form of popular culture that has increasingly come to include cultural criticism, social commentary, and political analysis that not only challenges previously-held conceptions of U.S. popular culture, but also longstanding and lethargic perceptions of African American culture, especially African American underclass and working-poor youth culture, African American women's culture, and African American homosexual culture.