Performing Identity/Performing Culture - Hip Hop as Text, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice

Performing Identity/Performing Culture: Hip Hop as Text, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice is the first book-length ethnography of young people and their uses of hip hop culture. Originally published in 2001, this second edition is newly revised, expanded, and updated to reflect contemporary currents in hip hop culture and critical scholarship, as well as the epochal social, cultural, and economic shifts of the last decade. 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 here that contemporary youth are fashioning notions of self and community outside of school in ways educators have largely ignored. His studies are broad-ranging: how two teenagers constructed notions of a Southern tradition through their use of Southern rap artists like Eightball & MJG and Three 6 Mafia; how young people constructed notions of history through viewing the film Panther, a film they connected to hip hop cultu re more broadly; and how young people dealt with the life and death of hip hop icon Tupac Shakur, constructing resurrection myths that still resonate and circulate today.

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«This is a powerful, richly nuanced, evocative work; a stunning and brilliantly innovative pedagogical intervention. The most serious ethographic analysis we have to date of hip-hop as a cultural formation. It provides ground zero - the starting place for the next generation of theorists who study youth, race, American popular culture, identity, and performance in everyday life. A stunning accomplishment by one of America's major social theorists.» (Norman K. Denzin, College of Communications Scholar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
«This book is signature Dimitriadis. The second edition offers us a museum of words and music, situated in politics and context, with the voice-over of Dimitriadis whispering theory into our ears so we can re-view and re-hear what young people are saying. Greg Dimitriadis invites educators gently and brilliantly into dialogue across generations and genres we might have thought were unbridgeable; linking communities misguided by the fant asy that we are separate.» (Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor of Social Psychology, Urban Education, and Women's Studies at the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York)
«Greg Dimitriadis moves us beyond the rigid pessimism and uncritical romanticism that has traditionally governed scholarship in the field. It also cements Dimitriadis' well-deserved reputation as one of the most original, insightful, and visionary scholars on the scene today.» (Marc Lamont Hill, Author of 'Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity')