Join us for an evening with A.D. Carson, who will read from his new memoir, Being Dope: Hip Hop and Theory through Mixtape Memoir. An audience Q&A will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: Being Dope is a book that will challenge what you think you know about rap and rappers. It is not a typical memoir and is as much about genre as it is about anything else: history, hip hop scholarship, storytelling, and theorizing through rap. Each section features A.D. Carson’s mixtap/e/ssay lyrics alongside poetry, reflective prose, and critical analysis that provide social, historical, academic, and personal context. Being Dope is about permission and sanctioning. As Carson demonstrates, dope is distinct from drugs like illegal is distinct from legal and illicit is distinct from licit. Being Dope is about the rapper as genre, a contested category of human relegated to subhuman status in the public imagination. The book is, therefore, a refusal of this refusal: the rapper being, on his own terms.
Dope is rooted in the experiences of Black people in the US, including histories of people treated as property, chattel, technology, and the “War on Drugs”—a war on people—its casualties and aftermaths. Dope is also a measure of quality, of cool. Being Dope is about the presence of pasts and futures—methods of intoxication—more than it is about the absence of humility. Being Dope is the beautiful, ugly, abundant, and otherwise art made from the ruins of war and the carnage it leaves.
About the Author: Dr. A.D. Carson is an award-winning performance artist, educator, and associate professor of hip hop and the Global South at the University of Virginia. Originally from Decatur, Illinois, he blends music, scholarship, and storytelling to explore race, history, and culture through hip hop. His 2020 album, i used to love to dream, became the first rap album peer-reviewed by an academic press, and he previously submitted a full rap album as his PhD dissertation. His newest book, Being Dope: Hip Hop and Theory through Mixtape Memoir, expands his innovative approach to hip hop scholarship. Carson’s work has been featured by Rolling Stone, NPR, and The Washington Post.
