“[A] magnificent study . . . adds to the burgeoning scholarship on global hip hop and furthers our knowledge of the African diaspora in Eastern Europe.” —Anthropology of East Europe Reviews Featured in NPR’s “Read These 6 Books About Ukraine” In Hip Hop Ukraine, we enter a world of urban music and dance competitions, hip hop parties, and recording studio culture to explore unique sites of interracial encounters among African students, African immigrants, and local populations in eastern Ukraine. Adriana N. Helbig combines ethnographic research with music, media, and policy analysis to examine how localized forms of hip hop create social and political spaces where an interracial youth culture can speak to issues of human rights and racial equality. She maps the complex trajectories of musical influence—African, Soviet, American—to show how hip hop has become a site of social protest in post-socialist society and a vehicle for social change. “This is a unique and admirable book that traces a complex trail from hip hop created by African migrants in Ukraine through remote African-American influences to their origins in Uganda and back again.” —Slavic Review “Portrays the music as a forceful influence on worldwide social and cultural expression.” —Slavonic and East European Review “A well-conceived study of the role and significance of hip hop in Ukraine. It joins the ranks of other very timely chronicles on the impact of hip hop in various societies around the world.” —Allison Blakely, Boston University

Responding to the development of a lively hip hop culture in Central and Eastern European countries, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates how a universal model of hip hop serves as a contextually situated platform of cultural exchange and becomes locally inflected. After the Soviet Union fell, hip hop became popular in urban environments in the region, but it has often been stigmatized as inauthentic, due to an apparent lack of connection to African American historical roots and black identity. Originally strongly influenced by aesthetics from the US, hip hop in Central and Eastern Europe has gradually developed unique, local trajectories, a number of which are showcased in this volume. On the one hand, hip hop functions as a marker of Western cosmopolitanism and democratic ideology, but as the contributors show, it is also a malleable genre that has been infused with so much local identity that it has lost most of its previous associations with "the West" in the experiences of local musicians, audiences, and producers. Contextualizing hip hop through the prism of local experiences and regional musical expressions, these valuable case studies reveal the broad spectrum of its impact on popular culture and youth identity in the post-Soviet world.

Essays examining the impact of hip hop music on pop culture and youth identity in post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe. Responding to the development of a lively hip hop culture in Central and Eastern European countries, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates how a universal model of hip hop serves as a contextually situated platform of cultural exchange and becomes locally inflected. After the Soviet Union fell, hip hop became popular in urban environments in the region, but it has often been stigmatized as inauthentic, due to an apparent lack of connection to African American historical roots and black identity. Originally strongly influenced by aesthetics from the United States, hip hop in Central and Eastern Europe has gradually developed unique, local trajectories, a number of which are showcased in this volume. On the one hand, hip hop functions as a marker of Western cosmopolitanism and democratic ideology, but as the contributors show, it is also a malleable genre that has been infused with so much local identity that it has lost most of its previous associations with “the West” in the experiences of local musicians, audiences, and producers. Contextualizing hip hop through the prism of local experiences and regional musical expressions, these valuable case studies reveal the broad spectrum of its impact on popular culture and youth identity in the post-Soviet world. “The volume represents a valuable and timely contribution to the study of popular culture in central and eastern Europe. Hip Hop at Europe’s Edge will not only appeal to readers interested in contemporary popular culture in central and eastern Europe, but also inspire future research on post-socialism’s unique local adaptations of global cultural trends.” —The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review “The authors of this edited volume do not romanticize and heroize the genre by automatically equating it with political opposition, a fate often suffered by rock before. Instead, the book has to be given much credit for presenting a very nuanced picture of hip hop’s entanglement—or non-entanglement, for that matter—with politics in this wide stretch of the world, past and present.” —The Russian Review

This set covers all aspects of international hip hop as expressed through music, art, fashion, dance, and political activity. Hip hop music has gone from being a marginalized genre in the late 1980s to the predominant style of music in America, the UK, Nigeria, South Africa, and other countries around the world. Hip Hop around the World includes more than 450 entries on global hip hop culture as it includes music, art, fashion, dance, social and cultural movements, organizations, and styles of hip hop. Virtually every country is represented in the text. Most of the entries focus on music styles and notable musicians and are unique in that they discuss the sound of various hip hop styles and musical artists' lyrical content, vocal delivery, vocal ranges, and more. Many additional entries deal with dance styles, such as breakdancing or b-boying/b-girling, popping/locking, clowning, and krumping, and cultural movements, such as black nationalism, Nation of Islam, Five Percent Nation, and Universal Zulu Nation. Country entries take into account politics, history, language, authenticity, and personal and community identification. Special care is taken to draw relationships between people and entities such as mentor-apprentice, producer-musician, and more.

Hip-Hop en Français charts the emergence and development of hip-hop culture in France, French Caribbean, Québec, and Senegal from its origins until today. With essays by renowned hip-hop scholars and a foreword by Marcyliena Morgan, executive director of the Harvard University Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, this edited volume addresses topics such as the history of rap music; hip-hop dance; the art of graffiti; hip-hop artists and their interactions with media arts, social media, literature, race, political and ideological landscapes; and hip-hop based education (HHBE). The contributors approach topics from a variety of different disciplines including African and African-American studies, anthropology, Caribbean studies, cultural studies, dance studies, education, ethnology, French and Francophone studies, history, linguistics, media studies, music and ethnomusicology, and sociology. As one of the most comprehensive books dedicated to hip-hop culture in France and the Francophone World written in the English language, this book is an essential resource for scholars and students of African, Caribbean, French, and French-Canadian popular culture as well as anthropology and ethnomusicology.

Ukraine's tumultuous history has left it standing on unstable ground, wrought with the devastation of the 20th century's wars, famines, and other struggles. Today, life in Ukraine is moving forward, stepping out of the shadows of Communism and into a modern, urban, and multicultural light, finally gaining for itself a sense of national identity. Now a cultural hotspot that serves as a crossroads between Europe and Asia, Ukraine's traditions of yesterday are evolving into today's daily life and customs. High school and undergraduate students will have the opportunity to delve into Ukraine's modern society by looking at its religious practices, language conflicts, gender issues, education policies, and media censorship struggles, as well as its cuisine, holidays, literature, music, and performing arts. A thorough and unique investigation of this young country, Culture and Customs of Ukraine is an absolute must-have for high school, public, and undergraduate library bookshelves. Coverage includes historical background, religions, language, gender, education, customs, holidays, and cuisine, media, literature, music, and Ukranian theatre and cinema in the 20th century. A chronology, photos, and bibliography including print and nonprint sources supplement this work.

In the twenty-first century, Senegalese hip hop--"Rap Galsen"--has reverberated throughout the world as an exemplar of hip hop resistance in its mobilization against government corruption during a series of tumultuous presidential elections. Yet Senegalese hip hop's story goes beyond resistance; it is a story of globalization, of diasporic movement and memory, of imagined African pasts and contemporary African realities, and of urbanization and the banality of socio-economic struggle. At particular moments in Rap Galsen's history, origin narratives linked hip hop to a mythologized Africa through the sounds of indigenous oralities. At other times, contrasting narratives highlighted hip hop's equally mythologized roots in the postindustrial U.S. inner city and African American experience. As Senegalese youth engage these globally circulating narratives, hip hop performance and its stories negotiate their place in a rapidly changing world. In Hip Hop Time explores this relationship between popular music and social change, framing Senegalese hip hop as a musical movement deeply tied to both indigenous performance practices and changing social norms in urban Africa. Author Catherine Appert takes us from Senegalese hip hop's beginnings among cosmopolitan youth in Dakar's affluent neighborhoods in the 1980s, to its spread throughout the city's ghettoized working class neighborhoods in the mid- to late-'90s, and into the present day, where political activism and hip hop musicality vie for position in local and global arenas. An ethnography of the inextricability of musical and social meaning in hip hop practice, In Hip Hop Time charts new intellectual territory in the scholarship of African and global hip hop.