Dance: Hip Hop

This set covers all aspects of international hip hop as expressed through music, art, fashion, dance, and political activity. Hip hop music has gone from being a marginalized genre in the late 1980s to the predominant style of music in America, the UK, Nigeria, South Africa, and other countries around the world. Hip Hop around the World includes more than 450 entries on global hip hop culture as it includes music, art, fashion, dance, social and cultural movements, organizations, and styles of hip hop.

Tracing the African American dance from the Diaspora to the dance floor, this book covers a social history germane not only to the African American experience, but also to the global experience of laborers who learn lessons from hip hop dance. Examining hip hop dance as text, as commentary, and as a function of identity construction within the confines of consumerism, the book draws on popular cultural images from films, commercials, and dance studios.

Mark R. Villegas considers sprawling coast-to-coast hip hop networks to reveal how Filipino Americans have used music, dance, and visual art to create their worlds. An important investigation of hip hop as a movement of racial consciousness, Manifest Technique shows how the genre has inspired Filipino Americans to envision and enact new ideas of their bodies, their history, and their dignity.

Rhymin' and Stealin' begins with a crucial premise: the fundamental element of hip-hop culture and aesthetics is the overt use of preexisting material to new ends. Whether it is taking an old dance move for a breakdancing battle, using spray paint to create street art, quoting from a famous speech, or sampling a rapper or 1970s funk song, hip-hop aesthetics involve borrowing from the past.

Includes over 500 pages organized into 210 articles that examine the history and contributions of hip hop to American and global culture.