Jon Ivan Gill – författare

Underground rap is largely a subversive, grassroots, and revolutionary movement in underground hip-hop, tending to privilege creative freedom as well as progressive and liberating thoughts and actions. This book contends that many practitioners of underground rap have absorbed religious traditions and ideas, and implement, critique, or abandon them in their writings. This in turn creates processural mutations of God that coincide with and speak to the particular context from which they originate.Utilising the work of scholars like Monica Miller and Alfred North Whitehead, Gill uses a secular religious methodology to put forward an aesthetic philosophy of religion for the rap portion of underground hip-hop. Drawing from Whiteheadian process thought, a theopoetic argument is made. Namely, that it is not simply the case that is God the "poet of the world", but rather rap can, in fact, be the poet (creator) of its own form of quasi-religion.This is a unique look at the religious workings and implications of underground rap and hip hop. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Hip-Hop Studies and Process Philosophy and Theology.

Underground rap is largely a subversive, grassroots, and revolutionary movement in underground hip-hop, tending to privilege creative freedom as well as progressive and liberating thoughts and actions. This book contends that many practitioners of underground rap have absorbed religious traditions and ideas, and implement, critique, or abandon them in their writings. This in turn creates processural mutations of God that coincide with and speak to the particular context from which they originate.Utilising the work of scholars like Monica Miller and Alfred North Whitehead, Gill uses a secular religious methodology to put forward an aesthetic philosophy of religion for the rap portion of underground hip-hop. Drawing from Whiteheadian process thought, a theopoetic argument is made. Namely, that it is not simply the case that is God the "poet of the world", but rather rap can, in fact, be the poet (creator) of its own form of quasi-religion.This is a unique look at the religious workings and implications of underground rap and hip hop. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Hip-Hop Studies and Process Philosophy and Theology.

It is not new, or radical, to suggest that ‘race’ is a social construct. The idea has been prominent in social, political and philosophical discourse for decades. The bold challenge put forward by Jon Ivan Gill is that this idea is just a halfway house – questioning the fixity of race while doing nothing to lessen the trauma caused by its continued presence as a category of human identity. Can we truly end racism before we dissolve the notion of race itself, and if we do then what are we left with?Showing the role that philosophy of religion has played in reifying ideas of race and racial categories, Gill looks beyond that legacy to a world after and beyond those ideas. With seemingly immutable notions of race still baked into our societies at the level of law and legislation, process philosophy can remind us that being, and how we define it, is dynamic and will change over time. If race as a category is impermanent, then it can be undone. Dispelling this 'powerful apparition' has deep-laced significance for contemporary society, from cancel culture and reparations to mixed race identity and the suppression of ethnicity and nationality. This is at once a keen dissection of colonial apparatus and a practical, creative vision for a new way of organizing ourselves.

It is not new, or radical, to suggest that ‘race’ is a social construct. The idea has been prominent in social, political and philosophical discourse for decades. The bold challenge put forward by Jon Ivan Gill is that this idea is just a halfway house – questioning the fixity of race while doing nothing to lessen the trauma caused by its continued presence as a category of human identity. Can we truly end racism before we dissolve the notion of race itself, and if we do then what are we left with?Showing the role that philosophy of religion has played in reifying ideas of race and racial categories, Gill looks beyond that legacy to a world after and beyond those ideas. With seemingly immutable notions of race still baked into our societies at the level of law and legislation, process philosophy can remind us that being, and how we define it, is dynamic and will change over time. If race as a category is impermanent, then it can be undone. Dispelling this 'powerful apparition' has deep-laced significance for contemporary society, from cancel culture and reparations to mixed race identity and the suppression of ethnicity and nationality. This is at once a keen dissection of colonial apparatus and a practical, creative vision for a new way of organizing ourselves.