Renegades
Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok
Trevor Boffone
Reviews and Awards
"From the dance challenges of the Renegade and Donut Shop, to the moves of the mop and the woah, Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok provides a fascinating window into the youth identity formation of Gen Z culture through their predominant life-line of social media." -- Adrienne Gibbons Oehlers, Dance Research Journal
"Renegades celebrates new digital platforms, through the lives and experiences of the Black dancers, artists, musicians, and activists who popularize their viral content. If you care about where the future of hip-hop culture, digital community-building, and education are going, you should buy this book!" -- Aria S. Halliday, Editor of The Black Girlhood Studies Collection
"Plenty of books focus on young people's fix on phones, cultural appropriation of Blackness, or hip-hop as music and pedagogy. Renegades tackles all that with a Woah! tagged on. Boffone confronts whiteness, anti-Black sexism, and even COVID19 with his insights about digital dance trends. He bops to beats chosen by Black girls in his Spanish classroom. He calls out the empathy gap limiting their safe, nurturing development as students. He 'mops' with them going viral on DubSmash and TikTok. This collaborative, therapeutic hip-hop intervention will lead White teachers and other readers to exclaim: Keke taught me the Black girl joy that influences the Internet's top hip-hop songs and dance." -- Kyra Gaunt, author of The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop
"Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok is a thorough and nuanced analysis of the many ways that Black youth have used hip-hop dance to transform digital space. By addressing the implications of this transformation for areas as diverse as educational philosophy, identity, language, intellectual property law, and political organizing, Trevor Boffone has produced a timely and inspiring contribution to hip-hop dance scholarship." -- Joe Schloss, author of Foundation; B-boys, B-girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York