Decolonize Hipsters

Few urban critters are more reviled than the hipster.They are notoriously difficult to define, and yet we know one when we see one.No wonder: they were among the global cultural phenomena that ushered in the 21st century.They have become a bulwark of mainstream culture, cultural commodity, status, butt of all jokes and ready-made meme. But frightening as it is to imagine, for more than a century hipsters have been lurking among us.Defined by their appearances and the cloud of meaning attached to them—the cool vanguard of gentrification, the personification of capitalism with a conscience—hipsters are all looks, and these looks are a visual timeline to America’s past and present. Underlining this timeline is the pattern of American popular culture’s love/hate/theft relationship with Black culture.Yet the pattern of recycling has reached a chilling point: the 21st century hipster made all possible past fads into new trends, including and especially the old uncool.In Decolonize Hipsters, Grégory Pierrot gives us a field guide to the phenomenon, a symptom and vanguard of the wave of aggressive white supremacist sentiment now oozing from around the globe.