This thesis focuses on African American hip-hop music. How does this music form produce a connection between black people and how does it create a community? Hip-hop music has a performative...Show moreThis thesis focuses on African American hip-hop music. How does this music form produce a connection between black people and how does it create a community? Hip-hop music has a performative function in producing a collective identity based on race, and now that new generations of African Americans are growing up in a world steeped in hip-hop culture, it is important to try and understand this performativity. How does hip-hop music produce a construct of blackness? And how is this performative function complicated by the many contradictions in hip-hop: commercial hip-hop balances on a fine line between emancipating African Americans and reproducing negative stereotypes of African Americans.Show less
This thesis looks at the concept of double consciousness through a comparison of hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar's albums 'To Pimp a Butterfly' (2015) and 'DAMN.' (2017). To capture the...Show moreThis thesis looks at the concept of double consciousness through a comparison of hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar's albums 'To Pimp a Butterfly' (2015) and 'DAMN.' (2017). To capture the particularities of the development of double consciousness in 'DAMN.', the author proposes to add the new concept of post-critical double consciousness to the theoretical field.Show less
