Intermedial and Transnational Hip Hop Life Writing

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of this forum contribution: The growing popularity of celebrity life writing and of memoirs which focus on the respective memoirist's specific social, professional, ethnic, or other context also spawned a large number of autobiographical publications by persons in the music industry. The field of musical autobiography is a recent development for which a niche in life-writing scholarship has only been carved out in the past decade. The growing number of autobiographical book publications as well as autobiographical self-representations in non-analog, non-printed, not primarily verbal formats raises the questions as to whether specific genres of hip-hop life writing have been evolving and as to the perspectives from which scholars should discuss them.

Keywords

• hip hop
• life writing
• intermediality
• transnationality
• transnational American studies