Skip to product information
1 of 1

Click to look inside

Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes by Kyle T Mays

Regular price
Checking stock...
Regular price
Checking stock...
Summary

Argues that Indigenous hip hop is the latest and newest assertion of Indigenous sovereignty throughout Indigenous North America.

The feel-good place to buy books
  • Free US shipping over $15
  • Buying preloved emits 41% less CO2 than new
  • Millions of affordable books
  • Give your books a new home - sell them back to us!

Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes by Kyle T Mays

argues that Indigenous people use hip hop culture to assert their sovereignty and challenge settler colonialism. From rapping about land and water rights from Flint to Standing Rock, to remixing "traditional" beading with hip hop aesthetics, Indigenous people are using hip hop to challenge their ongoing dispossession, disrupt racist stereotypes and images of Indigenous people, contest white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, and reconstruct ideas of a progressive masculinity. In addition, this book carefully traces the idea of authenticity; that is, the common notion that, by engaging in a Black culture, Indigenous people are losing their "traditions." Indigenous hip hop artists navigate the muddy waters of the "politics of authenticity" by creating art that is not bound by narrow conceptions of what it means to be Indigenous; instead, they flip the notion of "tradition" and create alternative visions of what being Indigenous means today, and what that might look like going forward.
"Mays' authorial voice is a striking one … His melding of scholarly and vernacular language is the great strength of the book, a stylistic choice that comes out of a desire to bridge his academic readership and his Indigenous interlocutors" — Transmotion

"This book is incredibly important and will change the fields of Native American, African American, gender, and sound studies. It is the first full-length monograph on the rich, diverse, and complex field of Indigenous hip hop. This is the text against which all other studies in the field will be compared." — Michelle Raheja, University of California, Riverside

Kyle T. Mays is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies and the American Indian Center, UCLA.

SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9781438469461
ISBN 10 1438469462
Title Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes
Author Kyle T Mays
Series Suny Series Native Traces
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher State University of New York Press
Year published 2018-04-01
Number of pages 194
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.