Center for InterAmerican Studies

We cordially invite you to the next talk of our IAS-colloquium series. On Tuesday, 2nd of December (6 pm c.t., Room X E0-226),

Martin Lüthe (Freie Universität Berlin) will lead a lecture on the topic:

Of NYC and DJT: Hip Hop Music and the (Un-)Making of Donald J. Trump.

This presentation examines how 1990s hip hop culture contributed to the public construction of Donald Trump’s persona—long before his political ascent. Hip hop culture in the 1990s (arguably) brought to the cultural fore a more general obsession with Donald Trump (no “J” back then). Trump embodied a certain dog-eat-dog capitalist ethos that much of so-called gangsta rap came to be known (and blamed) for during the 1990s — and, of course, Trump embodied New York City, hip hop music’s birthplace. In this talk, Lüthe aspires to answer questions pertaining to Trump’s “street cred”: What does this “making” of Trump signify, how is it entangled with his contemporary political moment, and how has it changed in the context of Trump’s political (un-)making?

Martin Lüthe is currently an associate professor/lecturer at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universitaet Berlin and Einstein Junior Fellow. Lüthe published the monographs “We Missed a Lot of Church, So the Music Is Our Confessional”: Rap and Religion (Lit Verlag, 2008) and "Color-Line and Crossing-Over: Motown and Performances of Blackness in 1960s American Culture" (WVT, 2011). Lüthe finished his second dissertation, the German Habilitation, with a manuscript on "Wire Writing: Media Change in the Culture of the Progressive Era" in February 2025. Lüthe is a member of the editorial board of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture and is working on a book manuscript entitled "The Beautiful Digital Game: A Cultural History of Soccer Video Games".