Performing Identity/Performing Culture: Hip Hop As Text, Pedagogy, And Lived Practice

This is the first book-length ethnography of young people and their uses of hip-hop culture. Drawing together historical work on hip hop and rap music as well as four years of research at a local community center, Greg Dimitriadis argues that contemporary youth are increasingly fashioning notions of self and community outside of school in ways that educators have largely ignored. After exploring the historical evolution of hip hop through analysis of important artists and groups such as the Sugarhill Gang, Run-D.M.C., Eric B and Rakim, Public Enemy, N.W.A., and the Wu-Tang Clan, Dimitriadis demonstrates the ways rap texts have been picked up and used by young people at a local community center in the Midwest. His studies show how two teenagers constructed notions of a Southern tradition through their use of Southern rap artists like Master P and Eightball & MJG; how young people constructed notions of history through viewing the film Panther, a film they connected to hip-hop culture more broadly; and how young people dealt with the life and death of icon Tupac Shakur through the construction of resurrection myths. Drawing on the best impulses of cultural studies, Performing Identity/Performing Culture opens new spaces at the intersections of education, media studies, communication, and anthropology – broadening the questions we ask about young people and their often misunderstood relationship to and with popular culture.