Parodies of Ownership: Hip-hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law

This is an intriguing interdisciplinary examination of hip hop aesthetics.What is the relationship between hip hop and African American culture in the post-Civil Rights era? Does hip hop level a criticism of American culture or stand as an isolated and unique phenomena? How have African American texts responded to the increasing role intellectual property law plays in regulating images, sounds, words, and logos? Parodies of Ownership
examines how contemporary African American writers, artists, and musicians have developed a singular artistic form, what Schur terms ‘hip hop aesthetics’. This book offers an in-depth examination of a wide range of contemporary African American painters and writers, including Anna Deavere Smith, Toni Morrison, Adrian Piper, Colson Whitehead, Michael Ray Charles, Alice Randall, and Fred Wilson. By considering their work as a cross-disciplinary and specifically African American cultural movement, Schur shows how a new paradigm for artistic creation has developed. Weaving together law, literature, art, and music,
Parodies of Ownership
clarifies the conceptual issues that unify contemporary African American culture, empowering this generation of artists, writers, and musicians to address ways that racism continues to affect our country.