Welcome to the Terrordome: Race, Power and the Rise of American Rap Music, 1979-1995

Welcome to the Terrordome examines how late twentieth century rappers used culture as a critical and politically useful battleground to unmask the modes and mechanisms of a persistent and haunting coloniality in the afterlives of American slavery. This dissertation contributes to a historical analysis on race, power and culture in the United States by investigating how Black rappers used their oppositional gaze to bring a repressed colonial subscript into unobstructed view and destabilize the prevalent master narratives of colourblindness, modernity and post-coloniality. To look was to understand and challenge power relations, as well as to be acknowledged as human. In their readings of America, rappers ruptured the seemingly closed and dehumanizing discourses of blackness while also revealing abusive systems of power that the state continually denied in everyday practices.

In the era of mass incarceration, rappers used Rap to embolden their consciousness and narrate to the American public how blackness was continuously framed as terrifying and simultaneously subjected to terror. In a period marked by post-industrial changes and intra-class division, Rap was profoundly shaped by the symptoms of the post-industrial city and shifting black communal sensibilities all of which rendered visible the states of consciousness of a young, urban, racialized working and workless poor demographic. Raps claims on power marked a historical period of disjuncture in that it was a democratizing musical form that provided a wide spectrum of participants with the ability to produce readings of how the textures of American democracy had contained, managed and restricted Black life chances.

Welcome to the Terrordome argues that rappers transformed dispositions of power by taking up persistent readings of the black body as weaponized and inverting the meanings and purposes of these narratives to disrupt the status quo. These Rap readings and performances captured heightened states of consciousness for both the colonized and the colonizer which were rooted in the transformations brought about by enslavement and the afterlives of slavery. As rappers used their narratives to render the terrorized and terrified as discursive, unstable and unruly categories, they performed terror to vocalize their demands and undermine the myths of post-coloniality.