Hip-Hop Activism and Representational Politics

Proposed Special Issue for Journal of World Popular Music
Guest Editors: Adam Haupt, H. Samy Alim & Quentin Williams

Hip-hop has mixed and sampled languages, dialects, styles, sounds, and media from diverse sources and localities. Beyond its ability to articulate resistance to hegemonic discourses and practices, it has also been able to support activism for positive social change – from activism for the upliftment of youth in post-apartheid South Africa to hip- hop activism in Palestine

This special issue will consider the ways in which hip-hop has been used as a vehicle for exploring identity politics and activism in the African Diaspora. We are particularly interested in the ways in which language is used to represent the self in relation to the politics of place, race, gender, class and sexual orientation.

A key question to consider is whether we should read diverse communities’ production of hip-hop beyond the US as evidence of agency, or as evidence of corporate media monopolies’ global reach. What can an examination of work by hip-hop artists in particularly the Global South tell us about the extent to which relatively marginal artists are able to leverage off the advantages offered by cultural exchanges and digital media, for instance, to present their narratives and experiences on their own terms?

Papers speaking to the following themes will be considered:

• Multilingualism and identity politics in hip-hop
• The case for / against US cultural imperialism in hip-hop
• Hip-hop activism and agency
• Positioning identities through hip-hop aesthetics and / or politics
• Sampling and mixing in hip-hop
• Race and place in hip-hop activism and / or performance
• Debating translocal practices in hip-hop
• Cultural exchange and diffusion in the age of social media
• Race and cultural appropriation in global hip-hop
• Hip-hop, technology and the digital divide
• Gender, race and class in global hip-hop

Contact Adam Haupt at [email protected] for further details.