How Blackness Informs Global Filipino Corporeality: The Embodied and Racial Politics of Afro-Filipino Hip-Hop Dance

Abstract

In his first book titled Choreographing in Color, J. Lorenzo Perillo examines the complex embodied and racial politics of Afro-Filipino hip-hop dance. He uses hip-hop dance as a lens to investigate the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts surrounding Afro-Filipino culture. He does this by taking his readers on a journey through continents, hip-hop events, labor migrations, and viral digital media. Using critical race theory as an interpretative framework, the book showcases how the different nuances of hiphop dance can exemplify dynamics surrounding the transnational circulation of Filipino identities. Through a multi-sited, bilingual ethnography and choreographic analysis, Perillo aims to “uncover how and why Filipino dancers have made such a tremendous impact on the global popularization of hip-hop and street dance since the late twentieth century” (p. 2). Perillo explains throughout the book how Filipinoness is linked to Blackness in beautiful and violent ways. He goes back in time to show how the colonial past informs the Filipino hip-hop dance innovations of the present. Perillo argues that “Filipinos engage hip-hop and street dancing in ways that work with and against empire, neoliberalism, and state-sanctioned violence, thus creating a space where their participation in hip-hop through dance can be regarded as something beyond cooptation, mimicry, or, even still, appropriation” (p. 2). In other words, by offering nuanced analyses about the connections between Black and Filipino cultures and identities, Perillo helps us see other possible kinds of relatedness between Blackness and Filipinoness. Therefore, his work contributes to conversations about cultural appropriation in hip-hop and beyond. Perillo’s theoretical framework draws from scholarship on Black performance, performativity, and Southeast Asian American studies. His work is notably influenced by Black embodied