Read more
Few urban critters are more reviled than the hipster. They are notoriously difficult to define, and yet we know one when we see one. No wonder: they were among the global cultural phenomena that ushered in the 21st century. They have become a bulwark of mainstream culture, cultural commodity, status, butt of all jokes and ready-made meme.
But frightening as it is to imagine, for more than a century hipsters have been lurking among us. Defined by their appearances and the cloud of meaning attached to them-the cool vanguard of gentrification, the personification of capitalism with a conscience-hipsters are all looks, and these looks are a visual timeline to America's past and present.
Underlining this timeline is the pattern of American popular culture's love/hate/theft relationship with Black culture. Yet the pattern of recycling has reached a chilling point: the 21st century hipster made all possible past fads into new trends, including and especially the old uncool. In Decolonize Hipsters, Grégory Pierrot gives us a field guide to the phenomenon, a symptom and vanguard of the wave of aggressive white supremacist sentiment now oozing from around the globe.
About the author
Grégory Pierrot is a professor at the University of Connecticut at Stamford. He is the author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture, co-editor of the forthcoming An Anthology of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions, and co-host of the Decolonize That! webcast series.
Bhakti Shringarpure is editor-in-chief of Warscapes magazine. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital and co-editor of the forthcoming Insurgent Feminisms: Women Write War. She has written for The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Africa is a Country, among other places.
Report
"Ever since Norman Mailer styled himself as a 'White Negro' and Anatole Broyard passed as a white jazz fan, the hipster has been a subject of fascination in cultural criticism, a symbol of the love and theft at the heart of American popular culture. Grégory Pierrot's fiercely illuminating short book dissects the political complacency and racial delusions of hipsterism, but it does so with a verve, swagger and irreverence. Pierrot provides us not only an anatomy of hipsterism's past, but a vision of its possible future. " -Adam Shatz, editor of Prophets Outcast
"Decolonize Hipsters, the opening salvo in a new series of handbooks, places hipsters at the vanguard of a movement that starts with gentrification but ends with gifting Trump the White House and giving rise and misguided succour to white supremacists... Quoting Karl Marx through to Lemmy from Motorhead, Pierrot fleshes out the essence of modern hipsterdom and its pernicious contemporary manifestations.... In your face for all the right reasons, it's full of fun and thoughtful facts, interesting anecdotes and parallels that all lead in the same direction-how hipsters steal, suck up and squander what they should hold dear... A quick and thought-provoking read that eloquently sets an agenda, justifies it, and demands that action is taken." -Morning Star
