Description
Book SynopsisHip-hop as survivor testimony? Rhymes as critical text? Drawing on her own experiences as a lifelong hip-hop head and a philosophy professor, Dr. Lissa Skitolsky reveals the existential power of hip-hop to affect our sensibility and understanding of race and anti-black racism. In each chapterkeenly titled with a notable hip-hop phraseshe examines how the academic exclusion of hip-hop from discourses around knowledge, racism, white supremacy, genocide, white nationalism and trauma reflect the very neoliberal sensibility that hip-hop exposes and opposes. At this critical moment in history, in the midst of a long- overdue global reckoning with systemic anti-black racism, Skitolsky shows how it is more important than ever for white people to realize that our failure to see this systemand take hip-hop seriouslyhas been essential to its reproduction. In this effort she illustrates the unique power of underground hip-hop to interrupt our neoliberal and post-racial sensibility of current ev
Table of Contents
Introduction: It’s Bigger Than Hip-Hop
Chapter One: Know What I’m Sayin?
Chapter Two: Can I Get a Witness?
Chapter Three: Claimin I’m a Criminal
Chapter Four: But You Don’t Hear Me Tho
Chapter Five: You Feel Me?
Chapter Six: Fuck Tha Police
Conclusion: The Aesthetic Politics of Underground Hip-Hop
Playlist by Chapter
Discography
