Posthuman Rap

Posthuman Rap listens for the ways contemporary rap maps an existence outside the traditional boundaries of what it means to be human. Contemporary humanity is shaped in neoliberal terms, where being human means being viable in a capitalist marketplace that favors whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and fixed gender identities. But musicians from Nicki Minaj to Future to Rae Sremmurd deploy queerness and sonic blackness as they imagine different ways of being human. Building on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Alexander Weheliye, Lester Spence, L.H. Stallings, and a broad swath of queer and critical race theory, Posthuman Rap turns an ear especially toward hip hop that is often read as apolitical in order to hear its posthuman possibilities, its construction of a humanity that is blacker, queerer, more feminine than the norm. While each chapter is written so that it can be sectioned off from the rest and read with a focus on the discrete argument contained in it, the chapters are not meant to be individual case studies. Rather, each builds on the previous one so that the book should best function if it is read in sequence, as a journey that lands us in a posthuman vestibule where we can party more freely and hear the music more clearly if we’ve traveled through the rest of the book to get there.