Synopses & Reviews
For more than two decades,
le hip hop has shown France's "other" face: 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 black U.S. culture to articulate their own difference but their mouv' developed differently, championed by a Socialist cultural policy as part of the patrimoine culturel, instituted as a pedagogy and supported as an art of the banlieue. In the multicultural mix of "Arabic" North African, African and Asian forms circulating with classical and contemporary dance performance in France, if hip hop is positioned as a civic discourse, and hip hop dancer as legitimate employment, it is because beyond this political recuperation, it is a figural language in which dancers express themselves differently, figure themselves as something or someone else.
French hip hop develops into concert dance 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" post-colonial identity poetics and grants its dancers the statut civil of artists, technicians who develop and transmit body-based knowledge.
This book-- the first in English to introduce readers to the French mouv' --analyzes the choreographic development of hip hop into la danse urbaine, touring on national and international stages, as hip hoppeurs move beyond the banlieue, figuring new forms within the mobility brought by new media and global migration.
Review
"Felicia McCarren has succeeded brilliantly in taking dance out of its disciplinary confines, showing how vital a consideration of hip-hop is to any attempt to understand the dynamics of race and identity in contemporary France; the progress of the globalization of culture; the transformational power of moving bodes; and the mutually constitutive relation between bodies and technologies. McCarren makes it impossible for semiotics or cultural theory to remain indifferent to dance." --Carrie Noland, author of Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture
Synopsis
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 and Italian at Tulane University and author of D
ance Pathologies; Performance, Poetics, Medicine (1998) and
Dancing Machines; Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2003)
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: "French?": Circulation, Immigration and Assimilation
Part I: Politics and poetics
Chapter 1: Hop Hop Citizens: politics, culture and performance
Chapter 2: Hip Hop Dance "speaks" French: droit de citer
Chapter 3: Hip Hop as post-colonial representation: Farid Berki's Invisible Armada and Exodust
Part II: Technology and techniques
Chapter 4: Dancing In and Out of the Box: Frank II Louise's Drop It!(2000) and Compagnie Choream's Epsilon (1999)
Chapter 5: Breaking history: Helène Cixous' L'histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, Roi du Cambodge and Yiphun Chiem's Apsara (2007)
Chapter 6: Techniques: French urban dance in intellectual context
Conclusion