Decolonize Hipsters

Look at that fucking hipster. Pants are tight, sneakers vintage and pristine; the Poison t-shirt is ironic (or IS IT?), visible tattoos are edgy, a fine trucker hat covers his tousled undercut, all manners of hair bedeck a pallid face framed by thick horn-rimmed glasses. John Brown might have approved of his facial hair, had he lived on instead of getting himself hanged fighting against slavery a hundred and fifty years ago. Loser, amirite? Ambling down the sidewalk, skinnycino(TM) in hand, weaving in and out of traffic on his fixie, what have you, he's on his way to his local, a former dive bar bought out by Wall Street investors and renamed Dive Bar, cans of PBR served in a bucket, microbrews on tap, avocado toast on the menu, you know the deal. It's right around every corner of every city now, and that is where that fucking hipster is always going. There he may meet his mates and there may well be women too-you'll know them by the fashion, the twenty different kinds of bangs, flower tattoos creeping down bare arms and mix-and-match stratas of once and future cool fashion-vintage anything, because all that is past, whether it was cool then or lame then, is cool now; all carefully crafted carelessness. You know their night will be brighter than your day, Instagrammed and hashtagged for good measure. You may only live once: hipsters live again, and again, and again.

A cliché, you say?

Of course. And like all clichés, the hipster has become part of the décor, a nuisance from the past woven so seamlessly into the fabric of our days that we no longer notice. There's no telling a hipster from a douchebag these days-both are everywhere, seeking uniqueness in universally recognizable ways. It wasn't always like this, not really. Once upon a time, in the 1990s of yore, the hipster's natural habitat consisted of specific, delimited urban ecosystems: Manhattan's Lower East Side; Brooklyn's Williamsburg; Berlin's Kreuzberg; London's Shoreditch (or the

Grégory Pierrot is a professor at the University of Connecticut at Stamford. He is the author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture, co-editor of the forthcoming An Anthology of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions, and co-host of the Decolonize That! webcast series.

Bhakti Shringarpure is editor-in-chief of Warscapes magazine. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital and co-editor of the forthcoming Insurgent Feminisms: Women Write War. She has written for The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Africa is a Country, among other places.

"Ever since Norman Mailer styled himself as a 'White Negro' and Anatole Broyard passed as a white jazz fan, the hipster has been a subject of fascination in cultural criticism, a symbol of the love and theft at the heart of American popular culture. Grégory Pierrot's fiercely illuminating short book dissects the political complacency and racial delusions of hipsterism, but it does so with a verve, swagger and irreverence. Pierrot provides us not only an anatomy of hipsterism's past, but a vision of its possible future. " -Adam Shatz, editor of Prophets Outcast

"Decolonize Hipsters, the opening salvo in a new series of handbooks, places hipsters at the vanguard of a movement that starts with gentrification but ends with gifting Trump the White House and giving rise and misguided succour to white supremacists... Quoting Karl Marx through to Lemmy from Motorhead, Pierrot fleshes out the essence of modern hipsterdom and its pernicious contemporary manifestations.... In your face for all the right reasons, it's full of fun and thoughtful facts, interesting anecdotes and parallels that all lead in the same direction-how hipsters steal, suck up and squander what they should hold dear... A quick and thought-provoking read that eloquently sets an agenda, justifies it, and demands that action is taken." -Morning Star