Description
Book SynopsisThis book shows how le hip hop reflects a republic of culture rather than a culture industry; a minority identity politics that takes shape as a movement poetics or figural language; and the public valorization of dance as a technique, meriting unemployment compensation and understood as a high-tech knowledge practice.
Trade ReviewFelicia McCarren has succeeded brilliantly in taking dance out of its disciplinary confines, showing how vital a consideration of hip-hop is to any attempt to understand the dynamics of race and identity in contemporary France; the progress of the globalization of culture; the transformational power of moving bodes; and the mutually constitutive relation between bodies and technologies. McCarren makes it impossible for semiotics or cultural theory to remain indifferent to dance. * Carrie Noland, author of Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture *
The strengths of McCarren's research lay both in the cross-disciplinary structural analysis of national ideology and state funding of the arts (and research on the arts) insofar as they relate to particular communities and individuals in complex national, social, and cultural situations. Likewise, McCarren's introduction to works that might not be widely known to scholars bring new perspectives on French concert dance and the ways in which dance might be read as part of debates on national and global politics. * H-France Review *
...Offers an original perspective on contemporary hip-hop theatre. * Dance Review Journal *
Table of ContentsContents ; Introduction: "French?": Circulation, Immigration and Assimilation ; Part I: Politics and poetics ; Chapter 1: Hop Hop Citizens: politics, culture and performance ; Chapter 2: Hip Hop Dance "speaks" French: droit de citer ; Chapter 3: Hip Hop as post-colonial representation: Farid Berki's Invisible Armada and Exodust ; Part II: Technology and techniques ; Chapter 4: Dancing In and Out of the Box: Frank II Louise's Drop It!(2000) and Compagnie Choream's Epsilon (1999) ; Chapter 5: Breaking history: Helene Cixous' L'histoire terrible mais inachevee de Norodom Sihanouk, Roi du Cambodge and Yiphun Chiem's Apsara (2007) ; Chapter 6: Techniques: French urban dance in intellectual context ; Conclusion
