Filipinos Represent: DJs, Racial Authenticity, and the Hip-hop Nation
By (Author) Antonio T. Tiongson Jr.
University of Minnesota Press
University of Minnesota Press
1st July 2013
United States
General
Non Fiction
Popular music
Social and cultural history
Ethnic studies
305.89921073
Paperback
152
Width 140mm, Height 216mm, Spine 25mm
The "Hip-hop Nation" has been scouted, staked out, and settled by journalists and scholars alike. Antonio T. Tiongson Jr. steps into this well-mapped territory with questions aimed at interrogating how nation is conceptualized within the context of hip-hop. What happens, Tiongson asks, to notions of authenticity based on hip-hop's apparentblackness when Filipino youth make hip-hop their own
This book offers a compelling account of Filipino American DJ culture as a site for negotiating cultural authenticity, racial identity, and gender politics. Antonio T. Tiongson Jr. gives us a highly engaging and nuanced critique of what is at stake when young Filipino Americans enter the Hip-hop nation and rethink Filipinoness in the post-Civil Rights era. It will be of interest to anyone grappling with questions of interracial solidarity, colorblindness, diasporic culture, and globalization that loom large today.Sunaina Maira, University of California, Davis
Filipinos Represent boldly asks what is at stake in defining the public meanings of hip-hop, identifying the stakes of hip-hop as an ethnic and racial practice that elucidates how Filipino American DJs experience race. Particularly compelling about Tiongson Jr.s research are the interviews he provides with practitioners of the craft. Their narratives and his contextualization of what meanings accrue around these symbols and performative modes are rich and nuanced.Anita Mannur, Miami University of Ohio
Antonio T. Tiongson Jr. is assistant professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. He is coeditor of Positively No Filipinos Allowed: Building Communities and Discourse.