Author-Meets-Respondents Session for Joseph R. Winters, The Disturbing Profane: Hip Hop, Blackness, and the Sacred (Duke Press, 2025)

This Author-Meets-Respondents session provides a forum for critical engagement with Joseph R. Winters’s book, The Disturbing Profane: Hip Hop, Blackness, and the Sacred (Duke University Press, 2025). Winters explores how hip hop’s religiosity is anchored in the "dark sacred"—a register that signifies death and pleasure, opacity and contamination, exorbitance and anguish, rather than conventional notions of purity and wholeness. Bringing religious studies, Black studies, Black feminist thought, and critical theory into conversation with hip hop, the book radically troubles traditional boundaries between the sacred and the profane. Through nuanced analyses of artists such as Notorious B.I.G., Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar, Lupe Fiasco, and Nicki Minaj, Winters shows how hip hop destabilizes fixed meanings of sacrality to confront listeners with their own investments in unpleasant social realities, exposing audiences to a volatile sacred and the unruly dynamics of Blackness. Furthermore, the text demonstrates that hip hop’s dark sacrality is deeply intertwined with its expression of, participation in, and resistance to the antiblack and Black gendered violence structuring the contemporary social order. Respondents from a variety of specializations and career stages will evaluate the book’s major contributions to Africana religious studies, hip hop studies, Black feminist critique, and cultural theory.