Underground Rap as Religion

A Theopoetic Examination of a Process Aesthetic Religion

Jon Ivan Gill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138307797
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351391320
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Music

Underground rap is largely a subversive, grassroots, and revolutionary movement in underground hip-hop, tending to privilege creative freedom as well as progressive and liberating thoughts and actions. This book contends that many practitioners of underground rap have absorbed religious traditions and ideas, and implement, critique, or abandon
them in their writings. This in turn creates processural mutations of God that coincide with and speak to the particular context from which they originate.

Utilising the work of scholars like Monica Miller and Alfred North Whitehead, Gill uses a secular religious methodology to put forward an aesthetic philosophy of religion for the rap portion of underground hip-hop. Drawing from Whiteheadian process thought, a theopoetic
argument is made. Namely, that it is not simply the case that is God the "poet of the world", but rather rap can, in fact, be the poet (creator) of its own form of quasi-religion.

This is a unique look at the religious workings and implications of underground rap and hip hop. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Hip-Hop Studies and Process Philosophy and Theology.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• The storied introduction: underground rapper meets Whiteheadian thought
• 1 Reconstructions of religious identities and racial ideologies in process philosophy and hip-hop culture
• 2 Underground hip-hop as the flow of life
• 3 De/centering religion, hip-hop and the nature of the “underground” in Western scholarship: a historiography
• 4 Receptions of theopoetic aesthetics: definitional and historical groundings
• 5 The theopoetics of underground rap’s creative impulse
• 6 Multiverse theistic creations through underground religious rap
• 7 Underground hip-hop culture and aesthetic process of religion
• Epilogue: ending words on process thought, hip-hop scholarship, and theology
• Index