Author

Miles Iton

Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Edidin, Aron

Area of Concentration

Philosophy

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is twofold. The first is to synthesize my four years of academic instruction in philosophy with contemporary social theories (from both academic and non-academic but culturally relevant sources) in order to create the term “cultural gentrification.” In the context of cultural gentrification, I examine hip-hop as a music genre and subculture pertinent to contemporary representations of blackness in American society and subcultures. The second is to examine the intersections between hip-hop performance and contemporary avenues of identity expression in order to draw conclusions toward hip-hop’s relationship to both blackness and cultural gentrification. I do so to illustrate how cultural gentrification can occur, how the preservation of black socio-political ideology has persisted throughout the history of hip-hop’s development and why it is essential for academic philosophy to account for the effects of racialized epistemologies on one’s ontological perspectives.

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