East Gallery, Buell Hall
Event co-sponsored by the Columbia Maison Française, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and Barnard College Department of Dance
Felicia McCarren in conversation with Barbara Browning and Madeleine Dobie
For several decades, le hip hop has shown another face of French culture. Danced by minorities associated with immigration and the suburbs, it has channeled rage against racism and unequal opportunity and offered a movement vocabulary for the expression of multicultural difference that challenges the universalist discourse of the Republic. But French hip-hop has also been supported by Socialist cultural policy, subsumed into the national heritage, and instituted as a pedagogy. Felicia McCarren discusses the poetics and politics of le hip hop with Barbara Browning (Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU) and Madeleine Dobie (French & Comparative Literature, Columbia).
Felicia McCarren is a professor of French at Tulane University and the author of Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine (1998) and Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2003) both from Stanford University Press. Her new book, French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop (Oxford, 2013) explores the urban dance of minorities in France. It was awarded the 2014 De la Torre Bueno Prize, and the Outstanding Publication of the Year 2014 from the Congress on Research in Dance.
