Sampling blackness: performing African Americanness in hip-hop theater and performance

Unrestricted Sampling Blackness: Performing African Americanness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance uses a comparative approach to ethnic studies to examine the impact of African American articulations of blackness on the performance practices of non-African American artists. Sampling Blackness envisions sampling as an improvisational process of knowledge production and identity negotiation that has the capacity to challenge dominant narratives about racial difference. Hip-hop DJs improvise connections between disparate tracks of music to create a new piece of music. The artists in this study use their voices and bodies to sample performative codes of African American identity to create and authenticate their Hip-hop performances. Offering a broad examination of Hip-hop theater and performance practices, this is the first study to engage the impact of Hip-hop on the artistic practices of non-African American performers in theater, conceptual art and dance.; Sampling Blackness contains five chapters that address Hip-hop's often contradictory relationship to blackness, African American culture and multiculturalism. Using the performances of Jewish American theater artist Danny Hoch, Korean conceptual artist Nikki S. Lee, and Afro-British choreographer/dancer Jonzi D, I analyze the ways these artists deploy performative codes associated with African American identity in Hip-hop. These codes are identified as: language (vernacular, stereotypes, oral narratives); styles of self-adornment (dress, hairstyles, make-up); and embodied gesture (dance moves, walks, attitudes, etc.). These codes, identified as African Americanness, are read as “tracks” of identity that are sampled and remixed to create new identifications that incorporate and disavow blackness. I compare the work of each artist with African American artist whose works either inspires the artistic practices of these artists or who creates similar types of performance. These comparisons enable opportunities to explore the conflation of Hip-hop music with African American identity that create a false binary between “authentic” and “inauthentic” Hip-hop performance. My findings reveal while many of these artists reinscribe existing racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes of African Americans in their performances, the artists also have the potential to enable cross-racial and ethnic coalitions.