A.D. Carson, "Owning My Masters (Mastered): The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions" (U Michigan Press, 2026)

New Books in African American Studies · Jul 2, 2026 · 55m

Owning My Masters (Mastered) is a digital archive of original rap music and spoken word poetry containing two volumes of music, an annotated timeline, videos, and a digital book. In this project, A.D. Carson exposes the artificial boundaries imposed on understood ideas about knowledge production in academia by employing hip-hop creative and compositional practices to interrogate ideas of citizenship, history, historical imagination, race, home, and humanness. Using sampled and live instrumentation and repurposed music, film, and news clips, an introductory video, and original rap lyrics…