Renegades

Book excerpt: Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok explores how hip hop culture -- principally music and dance -- is used to construct and perform identity and maintain a growing urban youth subculture. This community finds its home on Dubsmash, a social media app that lets users record short dance challenge videos before cross-sharing them on different social media apps such as Instagram and Snapchat. Author Trevor Boffone interrogates the roles that Dubsmash, social media, and hip hop music and dance play in youth identity formation in the United States. These so-called Dubsmashers privilege their cultural and individual identities through the use of performance strategies that reinforce notions of community and social media interconnectedness in the digital age. These young people create a sense of identity and community that informs and is informed by hip hop culture. As such, the book argues that Dubsmash serves as a fundamental space to fashion contemporary youth identity. To do this, the book re-appropriates the term "Renegade" to explain the nuanced ways that Dubsmashers take up visual and sonic space on social media apps to self-fashion identity, form supportive digital communities, and exert agency to take up space that is often denied to them in other facets of their lives.