Affect, Black Rage, and False Alternatives in the Hip-Hop Nation

Abstract

This essay looks to the work of iconic rap artist Tupac Shakur to illuminate the role of Black rage as a common denominator between rap’s most conscious and gangsta iterations. Specifically, by theorizing Black rage as the founding affective impulse of the hip-hop nation, critics can identify common affective threads across the genre and spy emancipatory potential in hip-hop’s most jarring excesses, as surely as its more lucidly political iterations. I argue that theorizing Black rage through the lens of affect avoids many of the essentialist entanglements associated with earlier scholarship on the concept. The essay also challenges communication scholars to emphasize the emancipatory potential that underlies affective investments through the sociohistorical contextualization thereof.