The popularity of rap in France is well known, from its receptiveness to American artists since the 1980s to the international success of IAM and MC Solaar and the bustling scenes in Paris and Marseille. Yet social scientist Hugues Bazin has argued that ‘among the hip-hop disciplines, dance is undoubtedly the expression that best allows the understanding of the development of hip-hop in France’ (Bazin Reference Bazin and Durand2003, p. 99). The Mitterand administration's endorsement of hip hop in the 1980s (simultaneous to its condemnation by conservative social groups in the United States) has given it a privileged, if contentious, place within contemporary French culture: as an institutionalised part of dance pedagogy; as a government-funded programme of dance studios and festivals; and, more broadly, as a medium for France to negotiate its claims to cultural exceptionalism in light of postcolonial immigration.

Through an examination of live dance productions, Felicia McCarren's book presents the first sustained examination of hip hop in French culture. The emphasis on France and the French ‘le hip-hop’ in her title signals a different approach to her subject from that found in most studies of global hip hop, which treat the genre as a local inflection of an essentially American phenomenon:

McCarren takes great care to situate French hip hop primarily within the nation's institutional, racial and cultural contexts: the black/blanc/beur Footnote ¹ dynamic of French multiculturalism; the universalist aspirations of the nation's cultural exceptionalism; pedagogical practices and public intellectual currents; and the connection between state funding and political resistance.

McCarren's book offers a deeply nuanced analysis of the cultural politics of hip hop dance in France. Her insights critically combine ethnographic perspectives with a rich theoretical apparatus based in French studies (especially Balibar), dance scholarship and performance studies. Rather than situating the genre as a medium of political resistance or an inroad to global culture, McCarren uses her participation in hip hop dance classes and close interactions with dance choreographers to argue that hip hop's primary purpose for its practitioners is to explore what it means to be French: ‘“Frenchness” is not simply a label I impose on this hip hop generation, but a claim they are making in their movement’ (p. xxxiii). At the same time, she views the public embrace of hip hop by official channels, or what she calls France's ‘republic of culture’, in ‘the most positive sense: funding hip hop to produce art, bringing the banlieue into the broader public sphere, a figural dance language, a body-based poetics that nuances the politics of bodily identity by moving beyond appearance, and an intellectual climate that understands dance as a practice of bodily knowledge’ (p. xxxiv). She uses the concept of the ‘mouv’, which intermixes both dance movement and social movement, to stress French hip hop's potential for cultivating a more unprejudiced French culture by working out the problems of postcolonial French identity.

The first three chapters of French Moves theorise the French identity danced in hip hop, focusing on how the dance form engages citizenship, the Francophone diaspora and integration. The final three turn to the technological, intellectual and pedagogical tools whereby this identity is expressed. While the chapters primarily focus on unravelling the complicated nuances of McCarren's theoretical issues, each concludes with an analysis of a dance, showing how their choreographies and gestures ‘enact’ (Salter Reference Salter2010) the complicated identity politics of French hip hop. If the book's concern with careful theorisation sometimes leads to circular, repetitive writing (especially in the first half), Chapter 5 offers the most striking distillation of her ideas. The chapter analyses two performances by French women concerning the 1970s Cambodian genocide: Yiphun Chiem's one-woman dance Apsara (2001), and Hélène Cixous' play L'histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk (1985). McCarren argues that Cixous' work, which referred to the Cambodian Royal Ballet (a troupe almost completely eliminated by the Khmer Rouge), demonstrates how dance can transmit and perform identity in the wake of genocide and postcolonial migration. Chiem's dance offers a personal take on this identity by combining Cambodian traditional dance forms, hip hop styles, and a haunting section where she gestures toward the genocide. McCarren's discussion of Cixous and Chiem's works gracefully demonstrates the book's emphasis on identity, gesture and representation. Her inclusion of Cambodian-French identity also importantly moves outside of black/blanc/beur racial dynamics, suggesting a more complex inflection of postcolonial Frenchness.

Given her focus on institutionalised dance, though, McCarren's study omits detailed discussion of the musical aspects of ‘le hip hop’. In fact, popular music scholars will find her coverage of hip hop music rather superficial. For example, she simplifies United States rap as a ‘commercial culture’ (p. 51) rather than engaging the performative and, indeed, pedagogical dimensions of the genre. While this is obviously not her book's topic, one wishes that she had used American rap more carefully, perhaps commenting on the resonances between the growing institutionalisation of hip hop within both K-12 and higher education in the Anglophone world. It is to her credit, though, that she differentiates the recent French embrace of hip hop from the 1920s embrace of le hot jazz (p. 51), a distinction which cautions against an ahistorical resonance between French and African-American cultures.

If lacking in musical details, French Moves: The Cultural Politics of Le Hip Hop is to be commended on a number of fronts: in calling attention to dance as a central facet of French hip hop culture; in richly examining the genre's cultural and institutional politics; and in insisting on the power of national cultural contexts in the politics of postcolonial popular music forms. This last point should especially give pause to scholars interested in the interactions between global circulation and local institutionalisation in the cultural dynamics of contemporary popular music practices.