Few urban critters are more reviled than the hipster. They are notoriously difficult to define, and yet we know one when we see one. No wonder: they were among the global cultural phenomena that ushered in the 21st century. They have become a bulwark of mainstream culture, cultural commodity, status, butt of all jokes and ready-made meme.But frightening as it is to imagine, for more than a century hipsters have been lurking among us. Defined by their appearances and the cloud of meaning attached to themthe cool vanguard of gentrification, the personification of capitalism with a consciencehipsters are all looks, and these looks are a visual timeline to Americas past and present.Underlining this timeline is the pattern of American popular cultures love/hate/theft relationship with Black culture. Yet the pattern of recycling has reached a chilling point: the 21st century hipster made all possible past fads into new trends, including and especially the old uncool. In Decolonize Hipsters, Grgory Pierrot gives us a field guide to the phenomenon, a symptom and vanguard of the wave of aggressive white supremacist sentiment now oozing from around the globe.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. Grgory 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 OutcastDecolonize 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, its full of fun and thoughtful facts, interesting anecdotes and parallels that all lead in the same directionhow 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 Photo courtesy of the author Grgory 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. Photo courtesy of the author 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. 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 in hand, weaving in and out of traffic on his fixie, what have you, hes 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. Its 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 tooyoull 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 fashionvintage 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 clich, you say?Of course. And like all clichs, the hipster has become part of the dcor, a nuisance from the past woven so seamlessly into the fabric of our days that we no longer notice. Theres no telling a hipster from a douchebag these daysboth are everywhere, seeking uniqueness in universally recognizable ways. It wasnt always like this, not really. Once upon a time, in the 1990s of yore, the hipsters natural habitat consisted of specific, delimited urban ecosystems: Manhattans Lower East Side; Brooklyns Williamsburg; Berlins Kreuzberg; Londons Shoreditch (or the fictional Hosegate of BBCs cult classic Nathan Barley); Pariss Marais (aptly, French for swamp). Since then, hipsters have multiplied exponentially and expanded their domain. The whole world is their oyster bar now, and we all eat in it.Yet before he was cut into pieces and scattered Osiris-like into the zeitgeist, the hipster had to be born. Though none would claim him, he had many parents, some of whom we will observe in following chapters. For now, let us just say that he materialized in the late 1990s from the same heady brew that gave us the major subcultures of the twentieth century: avant-garde art meets popular culture at some uncharted crossroads and, around innovators in art, fashion, journalism, organizing, forms a scene of connoisseurs, fans, and followers that grows as the niche goes from well-kept to open secret. But for all that a trend may owe to popular art, popularity necessarily kills its claim to artistry. A trend too popular becomes a standard, a commonplace: it finds its spot on the wall next to taxidermized narwhals and LCD Soundsystem record sleeves. It may manage to retain a measure of surprise, but once its conventions are known, it becomes part of the cultural fabric. So, arguably, went the twenty-first century hipster: he waxed (vinyls the best), he waned, or maybe he diffused, all the more loathed because his idiosyncrasies melted in the mainstream.