Class, Race, and Marginality: Informal Street Performances in the City

Abstract

This chapter considers how class and race are navigated through informal performances by marginalized subjects in New York City and London. Taking litefeet dance and grime music as objects of analysis (both performance forms developed and pioneered by working-class men of color), it argues that we can think of informal and ostensibly frivolous practices as importantly political, structuring our understanding of cities and contributing to social and cultural change compelled by injustices in the political system of late capitalism. The chapter posits space as a means of understanding the politics of global cities and the connections between different geographical locations. Drawing on ethnographic and observation work undertaken by the author between 2014 and 2020, it uses hip-hop practices taking place in different contexts as a way of exploring how those who are relegated to the city’s edges find ways to survive and to push back against the dominant order. The argument here acknowledges the impossibility for marginalized performance forms to bring about total structural change but delineates ways that informal practices might nonetheless participate in a politics (understood as a struggle over power) and contribute to processes of change, which may not be inherently radical but are nonetheless resistant.