Overview

Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok explores how hip hop culture -- principally music and dance -- is used to construct and perform identity and maintain a growing urban youth subculture. This community finds its home on Dubsmash, a social media app that lets users record short dance challenge videos before cross-sharing them on different social media apps such as Instagram and Snapchat. Author Trevor Boffone interrogates the roles that Dubsmash, social media, and hip hop music and dance play in youth identity formation in the United States. These so-called Dubsmashers privilege their cultural and individual identities through the use of performance strategies that reinforce notions of community and social media interconnectedness in the digital age. These young people create a sense of identity and community that informs and is informed by hip hop culture. As such, the book argues that Dubsmash serves as a fundamental space to fashion contemporary youth identity. To do this, the book re-appropriates the term Renegade to explain the nuanced ways that Dubsmashers take up visual and sonic space on social media apps to self-fashion identity, form supportive digital communities, and exert agency to take up space that is often denied to them in other facets of their lives.

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9780197577684

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Plenty of books focus on young people's fix on phones, cultural appropriation of Blackness, or hip-hop as music and pedagogy. Renegades tackles all that with a Woah! tagged on. Boffone confronts whiteness, anti-Black sexism, and even COVID19 with his insights about digital dance trends. He bops to beats chosen by Black girls in his Spanish classroom. He calls out the empathy gap limiting their safe, nurturing development as students. He 'mops' with them going viral on DubSmash and TikTok. This collaborative, therapeutic hip-hop intervention will lead White teachers and other readers to exclaim: Keke taught me the Black girl joy that influences the Internet's top hip-hop songs and dance. * Kyra Gaunt, author of The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop * Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok is a thorough and nuanced analysis of the many ways that Black youth have used hip-hop dance to transform digital space. By addressing the implications of this transformation for areas as diverse as educational philosophy, identity, language, intellectual property law, and political organizing, Trevor Boffone has produced a timely and inspiring contribution to hip-hop dance scholarship. * Joe Schloss, author of Foundation; B-boys, B-girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York *

Author Information

Trevor Boffone is a Lecturer in the Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston and a Spanish teacher at Bellaire High School. His work using Dubsmash and TikTok with his students has been featured on Good Morning America, ABC News, Inside Edition, and Access Hollywood, among numerous national and local media platforms. He is the co-editor of Encuentro: Latinx Performance for the New American Theater; Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature; Shakespeare and Latinidad; and Seeking Common Ground: Latinx and Latin American Theatre and Performance.

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