“These.Are.The Breaks”: Rethinking Disagreement Through Hip Hop

Abstract

I read Rancière’s theory of disagreement alongside Kodwo Eshun’s theory of hip hop in order to (1) argue that the process of disagreement is meaningfully similar to the practice of remixing, (2) show how hip hop effects redistributions of sensibility, and thus functions as “art” in Rancière’s narrow sense of the term, and (3) examine how redistributions of sensibility function at the level of individual corporeal schemas.  To accomplish the latter two tasks, I analyze the use of a sample from the Watts Band’s “Express Yourself” in both an N.W.A. track and in a TV commercial for Botox.  The appearance of the same musical sample in such different contexts disrupts both the established order of race, class, and gender identities, and the ways that individual corporeal schemas are structured by these orders of identities.  I argue that individual corporeal schemas are important sites for the staging of political disagreement.