Everything I love: sensuous homelands as a way of experiencing history through hip hop films
ABSTRACT Recent scholarship on rap music has begun to consider this genre as a way of doing urban research focused more on the senses and mobilities in experiencing the city than describing the city as a stable and objective space. To present the functioning of this type of research in hip hop films, I propose the term 'sensuous homelands' and analyse their role in two hip hop films: American semi biography of Eminem 8 Mile (Curtis Hanson, 2002) and a biopic of Polish hip hop group Paktofonika (PFK) Jestes Bogiem You Are God (Leszek Dawid, 2012) Following both the view on rap music as a way of researching the city and Jean Luc Godard's presentation of historical thinking as similar to love in his Eloge de l'amour/In Praise of Love (2001) I present both films as examples of sensuous, affectionate and empowering histories of everyday urban life.