Hip Hop Intellectual Resistance

About the Book

As an engaging philosophical work of social critique and cultural commentary, A. Shahid Stover ignites a series of explosive critical interrogations which explore a tense unity of Hip Hop aesthetics and radical social theory. Written with the compelling audacity of a young iconoclast, Stover challenges the reader with an elevated critical discourse which remains diligently grounded and ever relevant to “the streets of a world in structural transition, spiritual alienation, socio-political upheaval and intellectual revolt.” Hip Hop Intellectual Resistance is a book of genuine ‘existential liberationist’ commitment as lived and experienced by a new voice of independent radical thought, who revels in confronting the ‘academy’ with social relevance and inciting the ‘streets’ with intellectual rigor.

About the Author

A. Shahid Stover is an avant-garde African-American writer/philosopher/social critic and Editor-in-Chief of The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH(brotherwise.com), an independent journal focused on radical theory, social critiques, emancipatory aesthetics and human liberation. As the late Derrick Bell once generously acknowledged, Stover "makes what I'm writing seem so mid-20th century". A vigorous public speaker and dynamic lecturer who thrives as a rebel outsider to the academic establishment, Stover writes from a perspective of EXISTENTIAL LIBERATION THEORY, a method of insurgent philosophical critique that involves a radical reconstitution of Sartrean 'existential Marxism' and Fanonist 'decolonization phenomenology' as a unified dialectical project which provides a working discursive framework from which to interrogate two fundamental concerns of Black existence: human 'being' and human liberation. A former underground Hip Hop eMCee turned radical intellectual, A. Shahid Stover's first book of critical theory, HIP HOP INTELLECTUAL RESISTANCE, focuses on Hip Hop aesthetics as Black cultural resistance to western imperialist oppression and racist dehumanization. Stover places important emphasis on Black 'postmodern lumpenproletariat' subjectivity as an authentic source for cultivating Hip Hop aesthetics and developing potentialities for radical social change. Having studied History at Coastal Carolina University and Journalism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Stover began writing as a freelancer for The CAROLINA TIMES(one of the oldest independent Black newspapers in America) and has also written for The SOURCE MAGAZINE of Hip Hop, Music, Culture and Politics and LEFT TURN magazine. Stover is currently based in New York City.