Poetics with a Promise: Performances of Faith and Gender in Christian Hip-Hop.

Abstract

Poetics With a Promise explores how African American Christian hip-hop artists negotiate tensions between the sacred and the secular in African American Christianity and in popular culture. Having first arrived on the church and popular culture scenes in the early-1980s, Christian, or holy, hip-hop music is unabashedly evangelical. But, despite its evangelical content, Christian hip-hop is often excluded from many African American churches. Some church elders consider Christian hip-hop to be an incomplete transformation of secular street culture, remaining inappropriate for the sacred context of church services. On the other hand, Christian hip-hop is only marginally accepted within secular hip-hop circles, as some rap artists question its authenticity and relevance. Both male and female Christian hip-hop artists face a myriad of artistic and religious pressures and expectations as they negotiate complex religious, gender and musical politics in their work.

Poetics With a Promise, the first full-length study of Christian hip-hop to date, analyzes on- and off-stage performances of gender and faith. I demonstrate how performers' racialized masculinities and femininities are constructed, performed, and represented as caught in between the secular demands of the hip-hop musical and cultural form that they utilize and the sacred nature of the messages that they endeavor to convey. I approach the study of religion and faith as “lived religion,” examining faith as it is practiced and performed in day-to-day life. Through ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and music, lyrical and performance analyses, this project intervenes in African American and American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Popular Culture Studies in its examination of the intersections of the sacred and secular and how faith becomes the lens through which these artists perform their gendered identities.

The context of Christian hip-hop reveals that the historic and ongoing tensions between public and private, religious and secular, and spirit and the body hold similarities to controversies surrounding gospel blues in the 1930s and 1940s. But at the same time, technological advances, globalization, and youth’s increasingly deinstitutionalized spiritual practices challenge our understandings of tensions between the sacred and the secular in African American life and culture.