Decolonize Hipsters

Few urban critters are more reviled than the hipster. They are notoriously difficult to define, and yet we know one when we see one. No wonder: they were among the global cultural phenomena that ushered in the 21st century. They have become a bulwark of mainstream culture, cultural commodity, status, butt of all jokes and ready-made meme. But frightening as it is to imagine, for more than a century hipsters have been lurking among us. Defined by their appearances and the cloud of meaning attached to them--the cool vanguard of gentrification, the personification of capitalism with a conscience--hipsters are all looks, and these looks are a visual timeline to America's past and present. Underlining this timeline is the pattern of American popular culture's love/hate/theft relationship with Black culture. Yet the pattern of recycling has reached a chilling point: the 21st century hipster made all possible past fads into new trends, including and especially the old uncool. In Decolonize Hipsters, Grégory Pierrot gives us a field guide to the phenomenon, a symptom and vanguard of the wave of aggressive white supremacist sentiment now oozing from around the globe.

Beginning in the late 1970s as an offshoot of disco and punk, dance-punk is difficult to define. Also sometimes referred to as disco-punk and funk-punk, it skirts, overlaps, and blurs into other genres including post-punk, post-disco, new wave, mutant disco, and synthpop. This book explores the historical and cultural conditions of the genre as it appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then again in the early 2000s, and illuminates what is at stake in delineating dance-punk as a genre. Looking at bands such as Gang of Four, ESG, Public Image Ltd., LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture, and Le Tigre, this book examines the tensions between and blurring of the rhetoric and emotion in dance music and the cynical and ironic intellectualizing associated with post-punk.

The Sacred and the Profane is a work that combines local and global analysis to examine our age's often-talked about, but mostly misunderstood, 'mainstream subculture': the hipster. This book seeks to answer questions like, 'Why don't hipsters want to be called hipsters?' and 'Why do they act like they are different when they are just like all the other hipsters?' If you can't stand hipsters, are a hipster, or don't know what a hipster is, this book is for you. ,

Twenty-first century popular culture has given birth to a peculiar cultural figure: the hipster. Stereotypically associated with nerd glasses, beards and buns, boho clothing, and ironic T-shirts, hipsters represent a (post-)postmodern (post-)subculture whose style, aesthetics, and practices have increasingly become mainstream. Hipster Culture is the first comprehensive collection of original studies that address the hipster and hipster culture from a range of cultural studies perspectives. Analyzing the cultural, economic, aesthetic, and political meanings and implications of a wide range of phenomena prominently associated with hipster culture, the contributors bring their expertise and own research perspectives to bear, thus shaping the volume's transnational and intersectional approach. Chapters address global and local manifestations of hipster culture, processes of urban gentrification and cultural appropriation, alternative foodways and eclectic fashion styles, the significance of nostalgia, retro technologies and social media, and the aesthetics and cultural politics of literature, film, art, and music marked by self-reflexivity, irony, and a simultaneous longing for an earnest authenticity. Hipster Culture explores the diversification of hipster culture, sheds light on popular constructions of the hipster as cultural Other, and critically investigates hipster culture's entanglements with and challenges to dominant cultural discourses of gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, age, religion, and nationality.

Behold the sleazy logic of museums: plunder dressed up as charity, conservation, and care.

Who was the turn-of-the-century hipster? Who is free enough of the hipster taint to write this history without contempt or nostalgia? Why are we tempted to declare the neo-hipster moment over, when the hipster's "global brand" has just reached its apotheosis? A panel of n+1 writers, including Mark Greif, Christian Lorentzen, and Jace Clayton (aka dj/rupture) invited the public to join an investigation into the rise and fall of the contemporary hipster. Their debate took place at the New School University in New York City, and was followed by articles, responses, and essays, all printed here for the first time. "The hipster is that person, overlapping with declassing or disaffiliating groupings—the starving artist, the starving graduate student, the neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skatepunk, the would-be blue-collar or post-racial individual—who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and opens up a poisonous conduit between the two." "Isn't hipsterism, like, the best thing that's happened at the end of the Bush years?" "The truth was that there was no culture worth speaking of, and the people called hipsters just happened to be young, and more often than not, funny looking."

Walter Mosley is one of America’s bestselling novelists, known for his critically acclaimed series of mysteries featuring private investigator Easy Rawlins. His writing is hard-hitting, often limned with a political subtext, and aimed at a broad audience. Years ago, when Mosley was working on a doctorate in political theory, he envisioned writing very different kinds of books from those for which he has become celebrated. But once you’ve been tagged as a novelist, and in Mosley’s case, a genre writer, even a bestselling one, it is hard to get an airing for ideas that cross those boundaries. Folding the Red into the Black has grown out of Mosley’s public talks, which have gotten both enthusiastic and agitated responses, making him feel the ideas in those talks should be explored in greater depth. Mosley’s is an elastic mind, and in this short polemic he frees himself to explore some novel ideas. He draws on personal experiences and insights as an African-American, a Jew, and one of our great writers to present an alternative manifesto of sorts: “We need to throw off the unbearable weight of bureaucratic capitalist and socialist demands; demands that exist to perpetuate these systems, not to praise and raise humanity to its full promise. And so I propose the word, the term Untopia.”