Beyond Ghetto-Centricity: Black Capitalism and African American Masculinity in Heru Ptah's A Hip Hop Story
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Su, Yu-I
Abstract
Heru Ptah’s A Hip Hop Story is one of the first novels to specifically deal with hip hop music, rappers, and their impact on African American culture. Like the novel, this thesis will discuss this relatively new cultural phenomenon within the field of literature. This thesis takes on a historical approach combined with various literary and cultural theories to the studies of hip hop culture in terms of rap, rappers, the music industry, and their influence on African American male identity delineated in A Hip Hop Story. The first chapter studies the historical factors, including governmental politics, policies, and historical events, behind the inception of hip hop and the change of sounds and themes throughout rap’s development. Through a chronological historicizing, the thesis is able to account for hip hop’s process into capitalization so as to conduct a more complex discussion behind the problems of hip hop’s gangsta masculinity in the second and third chapters. The second chapter applies Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s theory of the Signifying Monkey to bell hooks’ observation of the negative black capitalism as well as to the novel, arguing that Ptah’s ideal of a constructive hip hop capitalism can only occur when the hip hop generation practices the art of signifying in the production of hip hop. By combining Houston A. Baker., Jr.’s theory of generational shifts with hooks’ observation of black male coolness, the third chapter identifies the paradigms of African American masculinity since slavery and their representations in A Hip Hop Story, then argues that the problems concerning gangsta masculinity is an extension of a history of suffering, exploitation, and resistance, and are not problems specific to this generation.
Subjects
hip hop
black capitalism
the Signifying Monkey
generation shifts
paradigms of African American masculinity
Type
thesis
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