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.

About the Author
Felicia McCarren is Professor of French and Italian at Tulane University and author of Dance Pathologies; Performance, Poetics, Medicine (1998) and Dancing Machines; Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2003)

Reviews
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 *
The strengths of McCarren's research lay both in the cross-disciplinary structural analysis of national ideology and state funding of the arts (and research on the arts) insofar as they relate to particular communities and individuals in complex national, social, and cultural situations. Likewise, McCarren's introduction to works that might not be widely known to scholars bring new perspectives on French concert dance and the ways in which dance might be read as part of debates on national and global politics. * H-France Review *
...Offers an original perspective on contemporary hip-hop theatre. * Dance Review Journal *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199939978
Author Felicia McCarren
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 386g
Dimensions(mm) 155mm * 231mm * 23mm