Hip Hop's Inheritance

Hip Hop's Inheritance arguably offers the first book-length treatment of what hip hop culture has, literally, "inherited" from the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts movement, the Feminist Art movement, and 1980s and 1990s postmodern aesthetics. By comparing and contrasting the major motifs of the aforementioned cultural aesthetic traditions with those of hip hop culture, all the while critically exploring the origins and evolution of black popular culture from antebellum America through to "Obama's America," Hip Hop's Inheritance demonstrates that the Hip Hop generation is not the first generation of young black folk preoccupied with spirituality and sexuality, race and religion, entertainment and athletics, or ghetto culture and bourgeois culture.

Reiland Rabaka is an associate professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he is also an affiliate professor in the Women and Gender Studies Program and a Research Fellow at the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA). He is the author of several books, including: Du Bois's Dialectics (2008); Africana Critical Theory (2009); Forms of Fanonism (2010); and, Against Epistemic Apartheid (2010).