Shanté Paradigm Smalls
· Chair; Associate ProfessorNew York University · Art & Public Policy
Active 2010–2026
About
Shanté Paradigm Smalls is an Associate Professor and the Chair of the Department of Art & Public Policy at New York University. Their teaching, writing, and research focus on Black popular culture across various aesthetic forms including music, film, visual art, and genre fiction. Their scholarly work explores themes such as Black transnationalism, Black speculation—including Afrofuturism, African Futurism, Caribbean Futurism, and Graphic Novels—Performance Studies, Hip Hop Studies, Music & Sound Studies, Critical Theory, Visual Culture, Black Literature & Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Queer & Trans Studies, Ethnography, and Tantric Buddhism. Smalls' first book, Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City, published by NYU Press in June 2022, has received multiple awards including the 2016 CLAGS Fellowship Award for best manuscript in LGBTQ Studies, the 2022-2023 New York City Book Award, and recognition from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Their writing has appeared in numerous academic and cultural publications, and they are currently researching manuscripts on Harriet Tubman and Black Futurity in the speculative genre. Prior to their current role, Smalls held positions at St. John’s University, the University of New Mexico, and Davidson College, and has been awarded fellowships from several prestigious institutions. They hold a PhD in Performance Studies from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, an MA in Performance Studies from NYU, and a BA in English and Theatre from Smith College.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Aesthetics
- Art
- Gender studies
- Computer Science
- Political Science
- Visual arts
Selected publications
Foreword: Hip Hop’s Black Queer Temporality
2026-02-17
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingNYU Press eBooks · 2022-06-28
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter demonstrates how Brooklyn-based emcee/producer/singer Jean Grae sonically disrupts Black heteronormative expectations in hip hop performance. The chapter thinks through the artistic uses of the uncanny, particularly how Grae works with uncanniness to decenter heteronormative Black masculinity, as well as to navigate abjection and social death.
NYU Press eBooks · 2022-06-28 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding<italic>Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City</italic> brings together Black, queer, and hip hop aesthetics through a study of New York City artists and artistic scenes in multiple media from 1975 to the present. I argue that they <italic>queerly</italic>articulate gender, racial, and sexual identitarian performances through specifically New York–based aesthetic and artistic practices and cues. These performances could emerge and concentrate only in New York because of the city’s bodily co-mingling (queer, Black, trans, immigrant, and other people of color) and genre experimentation (hip hop, house music, punk, funk, disco). Although these bodies and genres existed in other locales—Chicago: the birthplace of house music: Philadelphia: the hub of contemporary graffiti; and Los Angeles: a city central to the development of hip hop dance—New York City’s nexus of vibrant queer, Black, and hip hop worlds colliding and bonding in dance clubs, housing complexes, schools, roller rinks, art spaces, handball and basketball courts, movie house, specific neighborhoods, the subway system, and other quotidian, subcultural, and ephemeral sites uniquely position New York as a place of experimental and original aesthetic collaboration.
NYU Press eBooks · 2022
1st authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Computer Science
New York University Press eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Gender studies
- Political Science
Unearths the queer aesthetic origins of NYC hip hopHip Hop Heresies centers New York City as a space where vibrant queer, Black, and hip hop worlds collide and bond in dance clubs, schools, roller rinks, basketball courts, subways, and movie houses. Using this cultural nexus as the stage, Shanté Paradigm Smalls attends to the ways that hip hop cultural production in New York City from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century produced film, visual art, and music that offer queer articulations of race, gender, and sexuality.To illustrate New York City as a place of experimental aesthetic collaboration, Smalls brings four cultural moments to the forefront: the life and work of the gay Chinese American visual and graffiti artist Martin Wong, who brokered the relationship between New York City graffiti artists and gallery and museum spaces; the Brooklyn-based rapper-singer-writer-producer Jean Grae, one of the most prolific and underrated emcees of the last two decades; the iconic 1980s film The Last Dragon, which exemplifies the experimental and queer Black masculinity possible in early formal hip hop culture; and finally queer- and trans-identified hip hop artists and groups like BQE, Deepdickollective, and Hanifah Walidah, and the documentary Pick Up the Mic.Hip Hop Heresies transforms the landscape of hip hop scholarship, Black studies, and queer studies by bringing together these fields through the hermeneutic of aesthetics. Providing a guidepost for future scholarship on queer, trans, and feminist hip hop studies, Hip Hop Heresies takes seriously the work that New York City hip hop cultural production has done and will do, and advocates a form of hip hop that eschews authenticity in favor of performativity, bricolage, and pastiche
Introduction: Heretical Desire: New York City’s Queer Hip Hop Aesthetics
New York University Press eBooks · 2022-12-31
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingNYU Press eBooks · 2022
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Aesthetics
- Art
New York City hip hop artists actively engage in the transformative and disruptive power of three aesthetic forms often conceived as disparate, distinct, and antagonistic: Black aesthetics, queer aesthetics, and hip hop aesthetics.
4 Queer Hip Hop, Queer Dissonance
New York University Press eBooks · 2022-12-31
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2 Nigga Fu: The Last Dragon, Black Masculinity, and Chinese Martial Arts
New York University Press eBooks · 2022-12-31
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingNYU Press eBooks · 2022-06-28
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter speculates on the future of hip hop by looking at its present to think through the (re)connections to the popular, the insurgent, and the unexpected queer aesthetics that occur in hip hop art forms. Drawing together the themes of the book, and focusing on the figure of Lil Nas X, I advocate a form of hip hop that eschews authenticity in favor of performativity, bricolage, and pastiche.
Frequent coauthors
- 1 shared
Ramzi Fawaz
- 1 shared
Jessica N. Pabón
- 1 shared
Elliott H. Powell
Awards & honors
- CLAGS Fellowship Award for best manuscript in LGBTQ Studies…
- New York City Book Award from the New York Society Library (…
- International Book Prize from IASPM (International Associati…
- Rock 'N' Roll Hall of Fame's Book Prize (shortlisted)
- Resume-aware match score
- Save to shortlist
- AI-drafted outreach
See your match with Shanté Paradigm Smalls
PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.
- Free to start
- No credit card
- 30-second signup