"In The Disturbing Profane, Joseph R. Winters argues that hip hop's religiosity is found in qualities associated with the dark sacred. Winters brings the tools of religious studies, Black studies, Black feminist thought, and critical theory to bear on contemporary hip hop music to trouble distinctions between the sacred and the profane. He challenges the idea of a stable sacred, highlighting the sacred's power to trespass and destabilize white masculine hegemony. In undermining stable meanings, hip hop artists often celebrate being agents of violence and power, but this project examines moments when fantasies of being omnipotent betray loss and vulnerability. The Disturbing Profane shows how hip hop's ethical moment lies in its ability to interrupt striving for purity, revealing our investments in unpleasant realities and conditions. Winters argues that hip hop's disorder opens its audience onto a volatile notion of the sacred, inseparable from the unruly qualities of Blackness. Winters engages with an array of rap artists, songs, and videos, putting authors such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Imani Perry, Frank Wilderson, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille in a constellation with figures like Notorious BIG, Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar, Lupe Fiasco, and Nicki Manaj"-- Provided by publisher.
In The Disturbing Profane, Joseph R. Winters explores how hip hops religiosity is found in qualities associated with the dark sacred. Rather than purity and wholeness, this expression of the sacred signifies death and pleasure, opacity and contamination, and exorbitance and anguish. Winters draws on religious studies, Black studies, Black feminist thought, and critical theory to bear on contemporary hip hop in order to trouble distinctions between the sacred and the profane. He shows how artists like Notorious B.I.G., Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar, Lupe Fiasco, and Nicki Manaj undermine stable meanings of the sacred to reveal listeners investments in unpleasant realities. Hip hop opens its audience to a volatile notion of the sacred and the unruly qualities of Blackness. Moreover, Winters demonstrates that hip hops dark sacrality makes it inseparable from its expression of, participation in, and resistance to the anti-Black and Black gendered violence that organizes the social world.
Joseph R. Winters explores how hip hop troubles notions of the sacred and the profane, arguing that it opens up its audience to a volatile notion of the sacred and the unruly qualities of Blackness.
