Abstract

Because the marketable products of Hip Hop have become nearly synonymous in the popular and scholarly imagination with Black expression and resistance, this chapter offers a close reading of Justin Adams Burton’s Posthuman Rap, in order to reveal the distorting and potentially dangerous consequences this erasure of the culture’s history has had on how Blackness is academically theorized in the postmodern age. Contextualizing Burton’s work in the historical reception of Hip Hop by the white gaze—within academia as well as popular culture—it argues that the purportedly ‘subversive’ account of Blackness affirmed through postmodernism’s reactionary framework imposes an exoticizing, one-dimensional, and nihilistic caricature onto the diverse, vibrant, and struggling communities within which the culture has sown its deepest roots.