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From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement

By Reiland Rabaka, associate professor of ethnic studies

Lexington Books

“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.

“‘Hip-Hop Inheritance’ is an extraordinary journey through the last decade of hip-hop criticism that situates the contemporary hip-hop moment into the historical continuum of black political, cultural and gender struggles in the U.S. With unflinching compassion, piercing intellect and unwavering scholarship, Reiland Rabaka advances a long overdue critical theory of hip-hop culture.”

—Bakari Kitwana, author of The Hip-Hop Generation

“Reiland Rabaka demonstrates, with great agility, that hip hop has wide-reaching artistic and intellectual roots in the history of African American cultural production. This book is an essential addition to an expanding corpus of rich scholarship on hip hop. It is a welcome contribution with fresh perspectives on the dynamics of gender, sexuality, class and race in the context of hip hop—beyond beats and rhymes!”

—Jeffrey Ogbar, author of Hip Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap