Michael P. Jeffries: Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop (2011)

Hip-hop has come a long way from its origins in the Bronx in the 1970s, when rapping and DJing were just part of a lively, decidedly local scene that also venerated b-boying and graffiti. Now hip-hop is a global phenomenon and, in the United States, a massively successful corporate enterprise predominantly controlled and consumed by whites while the most prominent performers are black. How does this shift in racial dynamics affect our understanding of contemporary hip-hop, especially when the music perpetuates stereotypes of black men? Do black listeners interpret hip-hop differently from white fans?

These questions have dogged hip-hop for decades, but unlike most pundits, Michael P. Jeffries finds answers by interviewing everyday people. Instead of turning to performers or media critics, Thug Life focuses on the music’s fans—young men, both black and white—and the resulting account avoids romanticism, offering an unbiased examination of how hip-hop works in people’s daily lives. As Jeffries weaves the fans’ voices together with his own sophisticated analysis, we are able to understand hip-hop as a tool listeners use to make sense of themselves and society as well as a rich, self-contained world containing politics and pleasure, virtue and vice.

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2011
ISBN 0226395855, 9780226395852
280 pages

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Tom Wolfe: Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970)

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, Tom Wolfe’s fourth book of social commentary, consists of two devastatingly funny essays, closely related in theme and substance, dealing with political stances and social styles in a status-minded world. In “Radical Chic,” Wolfe describes an intriguing phenomenon of the late Sixties: the courting of romantic radicals-Black Panthers, striking grapeworkers, Young Lords-by New York’s socially elite. He focuses primarily on one symbolic event: the gathering of the radically chic at Leonard Bernstein’s duplex apartment on Park Avenue to meet spokesmen of the Black Panther Party, to hear them out, and to talk over ways of aiding their cause. Tom Wolfe re-creates the incongruous scene-and its astonishing repercussions-with high fidelity. But he gives us more than just a wry account of life among the Beautiful People; he also provides a historical perspective on that impulse of the upper classes to identify themselves with what they imagine to be the raw, vital lifestyle of the lower orders.

In the companion essay, Wolfe travels west to San Francisco to survey another meeting ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment: the newly emerging art of confrontation developed by young blacks, Chicanos, Filipinos, Chinese, Indians, and Samoans in response to the bureaucracy that grew up in and around the poverty program. Wolfe’s account of the performances of such masters as the Mission Rebels, the Youth for the Future, and the New Thang, and the responses of the catchers of the flak, including the Mayor himself, makes for uproarious farce. But the points he makes about racial and ethnic game-playing in America’s class wars are inescapably valid.

Radical Chic article first published in the Jun 8, 1970 issue of New York
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970
ISBN 9780312429133

commentary (Michael Bracewell, Frieze)

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Cary Wolfe: Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (2003)

In Animal Rites, Cary Wolfe examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, Žižek, Maturana, and Varela. Through detailed readings of how discourses of race, sexuality, colonialism, and animality interact in twentieth-century American culture, Wolfe explores what it means, in theory and critical practice, to take seriously “the question of the animal.”

With a Foreword by W.J.T. Mitchell
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2003
ISBN 0226905144, 9780226905143
237 pages

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