Full Description
Now a global and transnational phenomenon, hip hop culture continues to affect and be affected by the institutional, cultural, religious, social, economic and political landscape of American society and beyond. Over the past two decades, numerous disciplines have taken up hip hop culture for its intellectual weight and contributions to the cultural life and self-understanding of the United States. More recently, the academic study of religion has given hip hop culture closer and more critical attention, yet this conversation is often limited to discussions of hip hop and traditional understandings of religion and a methodological hyper-focus on lyrical and textual analyses.
Religion in Hip Hop: Mapping the Terrain provides an important step in advancing and mapping this new field of Religion and Hip Hop Studies. The volume features 14 original contributions representative of this new terrain within three sections representing major thematic issues over the past two decades. The Preface is written by one of the most prolific and founding scholars of this area of study, Michael Eric Dyson, and the inclusion of and collaboration with Bernard 'Bun B' Freeman fosters a perspective internal to Hip Hop and encourages conversation between artists and academics.
Contents
Preface: Turning Nothing Into Something is God Work': Holiness and Hurt in the Hood, Michael Eric Dyson (University of Georgetown, USA)
Introduction: Context and Other Considerations, Anthony B. Pinn (Rice University, USA) & Monica R. Miller (Lehigh University, USA)
Part 1: Hip Hop on Religion as/for the Embodied Self
1. Searching for Self: Religion and the Creative Quest for Self in the Art of Erykah Badu, Margarita Simon-Guillory (University of Rochester, USA)
2. Methods for the Prophetic: Tupac Shakur, Lauryn Hill, and the Case for Ethnolifehistory, Daniel White-Hodge (North Park University, USA)
3. Existentialist Transvaluation and Hip-Hop's Syncretic Religiosity, Julius D. Bailey (Wittenberg University, USA)
4. God Complex, Complex gods, or God's Complex? Jay Z, Poor Black Youth, and Making 'The Struggle' Divine, Michael Eric Dyson (Georgetown University, USA)
Part 2: Hip Hop on Religion and the 'Other'
5. A PARTICULAR PAC: Ontological Ruptures and the Posthumous Presence of Tupac Shakur, James Braxton Peterson (Lehigh University, USA)
6. *iRoamThruZones* Follow Me! #NOWTHATSRELIGIONANDHIPHOP: Mapping the Terrain of Religion and Hip Hop in Cyberspace, Elonda Clay, Archivist and Digital Librarian (Philander Smith College, USA) & Ph.D. Candidate (VU University, The Netherlands)
7. Mapping Space and Place in the Analysis of Hip Hop and Religion: Houston As An Example, Maco L. Faniel, author of Hip Hop in Houston: The Origin and the Legacy (Houston, Texas, USA)
8. Imperial Whiteness Meets Hip-Hop Blackness: A Spiritual Phenomenology of the Hegemonic Body in 21st Century USA, James W. Perkinson (Ecumenical Theological Seminary, USA)
9. Bun B on Religion and Hip Hop, Bernard "Bun B" Freeman (Rice University, USA)
Part 3: Approaches to Religion in Hip Hop on the Margins
10. Hip Hop and Humanism: Thinking Against New (and Old) Fundamentalisms, Greg Dimitriadis (University at Buffalo, SUNY, USA,)
11. Conspiracy is the Sincerest Form of Flattery: Hip-Hop, Aesthetics, and Suspicious Spiritualities, John L. Jackson, Jr. (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
12. Constructing Constellations: Frankfurt School, Lupe Fiasco, and the Promise of Weak Redemption, Joseph Winters (UNC Charlotte, USA)
13. Zombies in the 'Hood: Rap Music, Camusian Absurdity, and the Structuring of Death, Anthony B. Pinn (Rice University, USA)
14. Real Recognize Real: Aporetic Flows and the Presence of New Black Godz in Hip Hop, Monica R. Miller (Lehigh University, USA)
Concluding Thoughts: The Future of the Study of Religion in/and Hip Hop, Monica R. Miller (Lehigh University, USA) & Anthony B. Pinn (Rice University, USA)
Afterword: An Insider Perspective, Bernard 'Bun B' Freeman (Rice University, USA)
