ABSTRACT
In her contribution to the volume, Ramona Mosse engages with the genre of hip-hop theater, arguing that it raises key questions related to theatrical speech acts, such as who speaks for whom or what kinds of appeals can be made, because speech acts here oscillate interestingly between self-representation, protest, oral storytelling and adaptation of the theatrical canon. After first examining hip-hop theater’s development as an event-based and participatory counterculture, defined not least by its political commitment to giving voice to the disenfranchised and the marginalized, Mosse analyzes manifestos and performances by hip-hop artists such as Danny Hoch and Marc Bamuthi Joseph, arguing that these works thrive on a peculiar tension between the performative and theatrical powers they enlist.
