French Moves

For more than two decades le hip hop has shown another face of France: 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 the multicultural difference that challenges the universalist discourse of the Republic. French hip-hoppers subscribe to U.S. black culture to articulate their own difference but in France hip-hop was championed by a Socialist cultural policy subsumed into the cultural heritage and instituted as a pedagogy. France supported hip-hop dance as an art of the suburbs: a multicultural mix of North African African and Asian forms that circulate with classical and contemporary dance performance. French hip-hop develops into concert dance becoming a civic discourse and legitimate employment not through the familiar model of a culture industry but within a Republic of Culture. It nuances an Anglo-Saxon model of identity politics with a francophone identity poetics and grants its dancers a national profileas artists who develop dance techniques and transmit body-based knowledge.This book the first in English to introduce readers to the French hip-hop movement analyzes the choreographic development of hip-hop into la danse urbaine touring on national and international stages as hip-hoppers move beyond thesuburbs figuring new forms within the mobility brought by new media and global migration.