Viewing hiphop as the postmodern successor to African American cultures Jazz modernism this book examines hiphop musics role in the history of the AfricanAmerican experience.Spectacular Vernaculars examines hiphops cultural rebellion in terms of its specific implications for postmodern theory and practice using the politics of reception as its primary rhetorical ground. Hiphop culture in general and rap music in particular present model sites for such an inquiry since they enact both postmodern modes of productionthe appropriation of tropes technologies and material cultureand a potential means of resistance to the commodification of cultural forms under late capitalism. By paying specific attention to the historical and cultural context of hiphop as a black artform and locating its practice of resistance in terms of a postmodernist reading of consumer culture this book offers a complex reading of hiphop as a postmodern practice with implications both for theories of postmodernism and cultural studies as a whole.