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

This series publishes critical scholarship that seeks to engage and transcend the disciplinary isolationism and genre confinement that now characterize so much of contemporary research in communication studies and related fields. It focuses on studies that address the broad intersections and hybrid trajectories that define the encounters between human groups in modern institutions and societies and the way these intersections are represented in contemporary popular cultural forms of knowledge.

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 culture 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.