Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (Suny Series, Postmodern Culture) [Paperback]

Russell A. Potter (Author)

Book Description

Series: Suny Series, Postmodern Culture | Publication Date: July 31, 1995

Viewing hip-hop as the postmodern successor to African American culture's Jazz modernism, this book examines hip-hop music's role in the history of the African-American experience.

Spectacular Vernaculars examines hip-hop's cultural rebellion in terms of its specific implications for postmodern theory and practice, using the politics of reception as its primary rhetorical ground. Hip-hop culture in general, and rap music in particular, present model sites for such an inquiry, since they enact both postmodern modes of production--the appropriation of tropes, technologies, and material culture--and a potential means of resistance to the commodification of cultural forms under late capitalism. By paying specific attention to the historical and cultural context of hip-hop as a black artform and locating its practice of resistance in terms of a postmodernist reading of consumer culture, this book offers a complex reading of hip-hop as a postmodern practice, with implications both for theories of postmodernism and cultural studies as a whole.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Russell A. Potter is Assistant Professor of English at Colby College. He hosts a weekly radio program, Roots-n-Rap, in Waterville, Maine. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: State University of New York Press (July 31, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791426262
• ISBN-13: 978-0791426265
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #955,868 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting; really, April 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (Suny Series, Postmodern Culture) (Paperback)

I find it incredible that this affluent and priviledged white male with a two hundred thousand dollar education could possibly know so much about hip-hop. Of course no one should take seriously his claim that this is in some way a 'risky' undertaking, especially from a well-paid academic. Still, Potter knows his stuff, is capable of taking in a great variety of the cultural discourse surrounding hip-hop and making sense of it (at least sometimes). I suppose this is just the kind of dull-as-driftwood analysis of a vibrant musical culture, but, as he points out, what else did you expect from an academic? I recommend this book to anyone who wishes to be conversant in everything hip-hop; just try not to sound like a rich white guy worshipping at the fount of Black creativitiy, won't you?

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Negro Please ..., October 30, 2006

By 

Kuassivi Mensah "Gareth" (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (Suny Series, Postmodern Culture) (Paperback)

...Drop your Baudrillard's, your Derrida's and other twisted old white men's tales, pomo doesn't have to be that hard. I think it's safe to say that outside Academia, most people interested in postmodernism are in it for the politics of reception: how we interprete and then reconstruct reality.
White America has been trying to put this 'Black Noize' in its place for quite a while, w/o much success, and this book goes in depths, to connect Hip Hop within the African Diaspora, as another practice to reconstruct 'Blackness' and 'Whiteness', both from within and outside the Eurocentric discourse.
The amazing thing about this book is its simplicity, no esoteric object-oriented writings, where each term convolutes into a web of meanings, no arcane knowledge or phD in phenomenology required here. Yet, it does get to the bottom of it all, Russel Potter reveals the constructed, mythic and dynamic form(s) of hip hop, or in postmodern terminology, Russel Potter signifies the tropes to reveal the symbolic exchange taking place within the various hip hop simulacra, and seduces the essentially simulated 'nature' of urban hyppereality imploding within the void of eurocentric and capitalistic discourses.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THIS IS A DoPE BOOK, November 1, 2005

By 

B. Garvey "N Visible Man" (Wheaton, IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (Suny Series, Postmodern Culture) (Paperback)

This is the crack of hip hop books. it will put your postmodern mind in a vernacular that is gonna make you bangin' mixtapes like its going outta style. after i read ths book in my senior year of college i changed my career path, and now i run a hip hop record label. now thats crack.