Introduction: Intersections of culture and religion in African-American communities

Abstract

As a child of the blues, hip hop culture and rap music bring together the ‘best of both worlds’ of culture and religion respectively. The interrogation of cultural production by African-American scholars across fields is not a new phenomenon, however, a rigorous examination of the religious and theological contours of hip hop culture, such as rap music, are slowly beginning to take shape. In this Introduction, we contextualize one such attempt as expressed in this journal you hold, to think religion and hip hop together in new and exciting ways. Here, we give thought to the multifaceted ways in which the changing syncretic cultural cartography of hip hop in general and rap music specifically push and force a re-thinking of religious sensibilities and the quest for life meaning. More than that, we take the position that not only does the genius of hip hop culture and rap music call and yearn for a more complicated terrain of the religious, but likewise, offers a rich opportunity to rethink the rugged terrain of the cultural. Here, we not only interrogate rap music from the corners of religion, more than that, we open ourselves up to be confronted and gripped by the rugged terrain of African American cultural production.

Keywords:

• complex subjectivity
• African-American culture
• rap music
• hip hop culture
• quest for meaning

Notes

1. Beyond the essays represented here, other helpful definitions and approaches to the cultural can be found in the work of Clifford Geertz (see The interpretation of cultures 1975) who pushes us to consider a more semiotic perspective on culture, while Geertz draws attention to the interpretive study of culture with attention to ‘thick’ description, other helpful ideas of culture can be found in the work of thinkers such as Raymond Williams, who considers culture as lived reality, considering the ‘presence’ and ‘interplay’ of dominant, residual and emergent cultural forms, and Antonio Gramsci's work on the cultural superstructure including notions of resistance and practices of counter-hegemony.

2. See Pinn 2003, 159–70. This theory of religion as the quest for complex subjectivity is common, we believe, to all humans; but within the context of this special issue, we limit ourselves to the nature of this quest expressed in cultural production of hip hop culture in general and rap music in specific in the US North American context.