Dr. des. Andrej Murasov

Andrej Murašov was a PhD Candidate at the Research Training Group from 2012 to 2015. He finished and defended his dissertation in 2015.

Abstract of the Dissertation Project

Electronic chants. Groove – from land to land. HipHop-Culture from the Bronx, Germany and Bosnia-Herzegowina

The project discusses the origin of hip hop culture in Bronx and its glocal reproduction in Germany and Bosnia in relation to its ethics and poetics. The ethos of hip hop culture must be understood in an Aristotelian sense, as being produced in the context of direct oral communication between the collective and the speaker. The self-conception of this culture is therefore mainly expressed by specific techniques that in the processes of secondary medialisation through writing, the radio, TV, or the internet guarantee its re-linking to a context of direct experience.

It is this act of subversion that causes the dissemination of the cultural practice of hip hop. In the global context, a local counterculture transforms, by self-staging, into a culture of self-staging that is in opposition not to a cultural "Other," but rather to "another" culture of media. This project explains the media dynamics at the onset of hip hop culture on the basis of the latter’s self-referential narrative strategies in rap music, DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti writing.