Skip to main content
French Moves: The Cultural Politics of Le Hip Hop (Oxford Studies in Dance Theory)

French Moves: The Cultural Politics of Le Hip Hop (Oxford Studies in Dance Theory)

Current price: $58.79
This product is not returnable.
Publication Date: May 30th, 2013
Publisher:
Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
9780199939978
Pages:
240
Usually Ships in 1 to 5 Days

Description

For more than two decades, le hip hop has shown another face of France: danced by minorities associated with immigration and the suburbs, it has channeled rage against racism and unequal opportunity and offered a movement vocabulary for the expression of the multicultural difference that challenges the universalist discourse of the Republic.

French hip-hoppers subscribe to U.S. black culture to articulate their own difference, but in France hip-hop was championed by a Socialist cultural policy, subsumed into the cultural heritage, and instituted as a pedagogy. France supported hip-hop dance as an art of the suburbs: a multicultural mix of North African, African and Asian forms that circulate with classical and contemporary dance performance. French hip-hop develops into concert dance, becoming a civic discourse and legitimate employment, not through the familiar model of a culture industry, but within a Republic of Culture. It nuances an Anglo-Saxon model of identity politics with a francophone identity poetics and grants its dancers a national profile as artists who develop dance techniques and transmit body-based knowledge.

This book, the first in English to introduce readers to the French hip-hop movement, analyzes the choreographic development of hip-hop into la danse urbaine, touring on national and international stages, as hip-hoppers move beyond the suburbs, figuring new forms within the mobility brought by new media and global migration.

About the Author

Felicia McCarren is Professor of French at Tulane University. From hip-hop dance classes in the Paris suburbs to the national staging and international touring of French urban dance companies, she follows the French "mouv'" of a state-funded choreographic phenomenon.