Shamanism, Racism, and Hip Hop Culture: Essays on White Supremacy and Black Subversion [Hardcover]

Shamanism, Racism and Hip Hop Culture is a groundbreaking collection of essays exploring the five hundred year history of white Christian hegemony that has so profoundly shaped American society. James W. Perkinson explores the idea that American identity and history are profoundly informed by an on-going interweaving of white entitlement and black disenfranchisement that constrains other forms of cultural struggle.Introduction PART I: SORCERY, CHRISTIANITY AND WHITE SUPREMACY Beyond Occasional Whiteness European Race Discourse as Modernity's Witchcraft Practice PART II: COUNTER-SORCERY, RESISTANCE AND BLACK POLYPHONY Constructing the Break The Gift/Curse of Second Sight PART III: RAP, RELIGION, AND SHAMANISTIC TRICKERY Rap as Wrap and Rapture From Mega-Lith to Mack Daddy Pedagogy, Supremacy, and Shamanistic Prophecy A Syncopated Pedagogy for a Postcolonial Theology Breaking Liturgy Out of the Market

Perkinson's latest book pierces the veil between detached theoretical assessment and lived experience. The work is visceral and evocative labor at the level of the spleen. His rhythmic analysis of shamanic aspects of white supremacy and cultural resistance draw the reader from tattered and worn race talk toward resonance with a vibrating and justice oriented universe. In every chapter, his analysis of race has a poetic beat that infuses issues of race and cultural dissonance with power, clarity, and the potential for embodied restoration. - Barbara A. Holmes, Associate Professor of Ethics and African American Religious Studies, Memphis Theological Seminary

Perkinson's book is a performance. This is a book by a poet-theologian. It is an example of how to do things not only with words but also with ideas and concepts; an example, in other words, of how to imaginatively perform theology and religious studies. What the book performs is a critical engagement with the world of race, racism and modernity. As such, it offers an example not of invl"