I am proud to announce that I’ve been asked to contribute a chapter to The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, edited by Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough. The collection includes essays by Lev Manovich, Mark Amerika, Kembrew McLeod, Aram Sinnreich, as well as the editors — a whopping 41 chapters in all! My essay, which has largely been hashed out via posts on this very website, is titled “The End of an Aura: Nostalgia, Memory, and the Haunting of Hip-Hop.” Using the tropes of hacking and haunting, as well as a chunk of thought from Walter Benjamin, it deals with the question of memory in a time of easy digital reproduction. Of the essay, Navas, Gallagher, and burrough write in the Introduction,
His inquiry is realized as an actual literary critical performance. Christopher’s text by and large comprises a series of quotes by divergent authors, ranging from cyberpunk to hip-hop, which take the shape of an intertextual collage that turns into a case study of authenticity in the time of constant digital reproduction (p. 6).
Many thanks to Eduardo Navas for inviting me to contribute and to Barry Brummett for pushing me to write about this idea in the first place.
The collection is out now!