Le Hip-hop in France: An Interview with Felicia McCarren

Abstract

Hip hop is perhaps the most globally recognizable form of cultural production that has emerged from a North American context. Here, Felicia McCarren, Professor of French at Tulane University and author of French Moves: The Cultural Politics of Le Hip Hop (2013), discusses the French urban dance movement of le hip hop and the ways in which it departs from the popular U.S. American understanding of hip hop culture.

Keywords:

• Dance
• hip-hop
• performance

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ryan Augustyniak

Ryan Augustyniak is a PhD candidate in the French program of the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. His dissertation research explores the aesthetic relationship between American and Haitian-American confinement literatures alongside the legal and cultural contexts from which they emerge. He has recently presented research on the legacies of James Baldwin in France, Edwidge Danticat’s aesthetic engagement with the prison and the theme of confinement, and Jean Claude-Charles’ De si jolies petites plages.

Felicia McCarren is a performance historian and cultural theorist, and the author of Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine (1998) and Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2003) both from Stanford UP, and articles on performance, cinema, and new media. Her new book, French Moves: The Cultural Politics of Le Hip Hop (Oxford UP, 2013), explores the urban dance of minorities in France. She holds the BA in Literature magna cum laude from Harvard, and the MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University. She has taught at Stanford, UCLA, NYU-Tisch School for the Arts, and the University of New Mexico. In Europe, she has taught at the Danshogskolen in Stockholm, the Danish State School for the Performing Arts, and PARTS in Brussels, in Spain for the Tulane Summer Program in Cadiz, and in Paris as the President of EDUCO (Emory, Duke, Cornell, and Tulane in Paris) 2012–2013.