Hip Hop's Inheritance

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 (and white) folk preoccupied with spirituality and sexuality, race and religion, entertainment and athletics, or ghetto culture and bourgeois culture. 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 women's studies, postcolonial studies and sexuality studies, history and philosophy, politics and economics, and 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.

Reiland Rabaka is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is also an affiliate professor in the Women and Gender Studies Program and a research fellow at the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA). He is the author of several books on W.E.B. Du Bois. He is also the recipient of the Cheikh Anta Diop Distinguished Career Award.

Chapter 1 Preface and Acknowledgments: Of the Black Souls Who Sang Neo-Sorrow Songs at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century Chapter 2 Chapter 1: "It's Bigger Than Hip Hop!": Toward a Critical Theory of Hip Hop Culture and Contemporary Society Chapter 3 Chapter 2: "Civil Rights by Copyright" (Da ReMix!): From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Generation Chapter 4 Chapter 3: "Say It Loud! - I'm Black and I'm Proud!": From the Black Arts Movement and Blaxploitation Films to the Conscious and Commercial Rap of the Hip Hop Generation Chapter 5 Chapter 4: "The Personal Is Political!" (Da Hip Hop Feminist ReMix): From the Black Women's Liberation and Feminist Art Movements to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement Chapter 6 Chapter 5: Is Hip Hop Dead? or, At the Very Least, Dying?: On the Pitfalls of Postmodernism, the Riddles of Contemporary Rap Music,and the Continuing Conundrums of Hip Hop Culture