Human Rights Education Associates

Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality

Author

Professor J. Griffith Rollefson

Publisher

The University of Chicago Press

Place of Publication

Online

Year of Publication

2017

Language

English

This book and corresponding lessons examine how the children and grandchildren of immigrants from the former colonies and peripheries of Europe are employing the African American musical protest strategies of hip hop both to differentiate themselves from and relate themselves to their respective majority societies. Drawing on music, media, observations, and interviews from fieldwork in Paris, Berlin, and London (as well as a conclusion centered in Cork, Ireland), this book situates musical analyses in the postcolonial and globalizing contexts of the three cities, demonstrating how this black American music structures local concerns and enables syncretic expressions that are at once wholly local and definitively global. It concludes that hip hop is both a product of the postcolonial contradictions that hyphenate citizens within their own nations and a form of cultural politics well suited to flip the script on the inequalities those hyphens imply.
MMA: Music
Freedom from discrimination, Anti-racism

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