Hip-Hop as Philosophical Text and Testimony

Lissa Skitolsky is the 2020-2021 Simon and Riva Spatz Visiting Chair in Jewish Studies at Dalhousie University.

Skitolsky explores how underground hip-hop generates philosophical value as critical theory and anti-racist practice, based on its subversive production of subjugated knowledge. Examples drawn from work by N.W.A., Tupac Shakur, KRS-One, and Public Enemy demonstrate the power of hip-hop as a culture “bearing witness to and resisting the infliction of anti-Black violence in every social and political institution in the United States" (p. 1). Skitolsky's blistering analyses explore the “normalization of systemic racism” and how hip-hop is “politically significant as a form of testimony" (p. 12). She convincingly argues for the genre's therapeutic value by asserting that “hip-hop is the only form of popular culture that testifies to the traumas suffered from being-black in America" (p.14). The author draws on cultural theorists Paul Taylor, Charles Mills, George Yancy, and Audre Lorde (as well as Du Bois, Foucault, and Lacan) to portray and indict a “white sensibility” that is sustained by the “refusal to ask specific kinds of questions or analyze taken-for-granted assumptions” (p. 7) in relation to political inequalities. Skitolsky provides careful consideration of PTSD as a ground of Black life and a detailed critique of scholarly refusals to encompass Black social death within genocide studies. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

• Introduction: It’s Bigger Than Hip-HopChapter One: Know What I’m Sayin?Chapter Two: Can I Get a Witness?Chapter Three: Claimin I’m a CriminalChapter Four: But You Don’t Hear Me ThoChapter Five: You Feel Me?Chapter Six: Fuck Tha PoliceConclusion: The Aesthetic Politics of Underground Hip-HopPlaylist by ChapterDiscography