Did you know that The Black & Brown Podcast Collective highlights Black & Brown content creators beyond podcasting? In honor of Pride Month, we are highlighting Content Creator, Author, and Professor Shanté Paradigm Smalls and their newly anticipated book "Hip Hop Heresies" to be released June 28th.
Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City by Shanté Paradigm Smalls centers New York City as a space where vibrant queer, Black, and hip hop worlds collide and bond in dance clubs, schools, roller rinks, basketball courts, subways, and movie houses. Using this cultural nexus as the stage, Smalls attends to the ways that hip hop cultural production in New York City from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century produced film, visual art, and music that offer queer articulations of race, gender, and sexuality.
To illustrate New York City as a place of experimental aesthetic collaboration, Smalls brings four cultural moments to the forefront: the life and work of the gay Chinese American visual and graffiti artist Martin Wong, who brokered the relationship between New York City graffiti artists and gallery and museum spaces; the Brooklyn-based rapper-singer-writer-producer Jean Grae, one of the most prolific and underrated emcees of the last two decades; the iconic 1980s film The Last Dragon, which exemplifies the experimental and queer Black masculinity possible in early formal hip hop culture; and finally queer- and trans-identified hip hop artists and groups like BQE, Deepdickollective, and Hanifah Walidah, and the documentary Pick Up the Mic.
Hip Hop Heresies transforms the landscape of hip hop scholarship, Black studies, and queer
studies by bringing together these fields through the hermeneutic of aesthetics. Providing a guidepost for future scholarship on queer, trans, and feminist hip hop studies, Hip Hop Heresies takes seriously the work that New York City hip hop cultural production has done and will do and advocates a form of hip hop that eschews authenticity in favor of performativity, bricolage, and pastiche.
You can purchase Hip Hop Heresies at Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, Google Books, or at your favorite bookstore on June 28th! You can find the ISBN number below (Release Date & Information)
About the Author: Shanté Paradigm Smalls (they/them) is an Associate Professor of Black Studies in the Department of English, Faculty in Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, and Co-Director of the LGBTQ+ Center at St. John’s University.
RELEASE DATE AND INFORMATION: NYU Press | Paperback | 9781479808205 | $28.00 | 6 x 9 | 216 pp. | 11 B&W illus. | Music | June 28th, 2022