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Ramadan-Santiago discusses the ways some Puerto Rican Muslims claim membership in the global Hip Hop and Islamic communities where they have not historically been centrally positioned. They understand and validate their place in these communities by marshalling historico-cultural evidence that authenticates and legitimates their membership claims. The author pays particular attention to the synthesis by which Puerto Rican Muslims re-imagine and re-create their identities simultaneously as Puerto Ricans, Muslims, and Hip Hop artists.

This chapter introduces the stakes of the book by narrating two stories that illustrate how the dynamics of gender difference affect belonging for women who write graffiti on both an individual and a structural level. Briefly surveying the current state of Graffiti Studies, the introduction argues that without accounting for the dynamics of gender difference within graffiti subculture, graffiti grrlz (and the ways they develop strategies of resistance in order to thrive) remain invisible. The introduction then breaks into four sections: Writing Grrlz describes the interdisciplinary ethnographic method and major interventions to the fields of Graffiti Studies and Hip Hop Studies; Digital Ups introduces the importance of digital media as a mode for grrlz to connect across geographical borders, language barriers, and time zones; Hip Hop Graffiti Diaspora frames the book’s utilization of diaspora and performance to account for the multiracial, multiethnic reality of transnational graffiti subculture; and Performing Feminism “Like a Grrl” explains how and why these strategies are framed as feminist performance.

This chapter explores the significant connections and interplay between Islam, Black cultural expression and oral traditions, rap, and Hip Hop. Drawing on the literature, the work and words of historical figures and rap and Hip Hop artists and activists, and his own personal and professional narratives, Amer Ahmed highlights the infusion of Islamic ideology and knowledge into Hip Hop. Through the frames of public and hidden discourse, Ahmed illuminates how rap and Hip Hop inform and draw meaning from Black Americans’ resistance to oppression, as well as other global freedom movements. The chapter applies an intersectional lens to multiple levels of inquiry, and to the subjects of identity, intergroup dynamics, and systemic inequality. Ahmed concludes with recommendations for how Hip Hop can be used in critical, liberatory pedagogy and practice.

This chapter demonstrates how multilingual youth in South Africa´s multilingual Hip Hop ciphas forge a local variety of Hip Hop Nation Language that relies on the strategic and creative use of linguistic resources associated with English, Cape Afrikaans (a local variety of Afrikaans), the local street variety Sabela (an admixture of isiXhosa, Kaaps, Zulu, nonverbal gang signs), and African American Language. With these linguistic resources, young multilingual speakers of Cape Afrikaans jointly produce ethnicity and extreme locality by forming linguistic registers that further create an agentive multilingual citizenship. Such creation of extreme locality is necessary in a linguistic context where Cape Afrikaans is stigmatized across nearly all social domains related to power and upward mobility, and where youth registers challenge the supposed inferiority of this variety because its very use resists long-held stereotypes about Cape Afrikaans speakers as unintelligent, lazy, and criminal.

Chapter 3 commences the recovery of an expansive plurality of globalized supra-Latinidades by exploring Latina/o-Asian wartime encounters in life-writing genres, wartime cinema, and performative popular culture such as spoken word and Hip Hop from WWII to the War on Terror. In addition to reassessing established and canonized texts about Latina/o wartime encounters with specific Asian nations, peoples, and cultures from WWII, the Korean War, and the US war in Vietnam, the chapter also recovers the neglected legacy of Latina/o exoticist and neo-Orientalist Latina/o travelogues in Cold War China and, more recently, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Turkey. The wide range of these Latina/o encounters with the broader transcontinental space of Eurasia, the colonialist chronotope of the “Orient,” and equally complicated notion of the Ummah, or global community of Muslims, involves a multiplicity of transversal LatinAsian violentologies. These pressure for radical expansions of Latina/o mestizajes beyond conventional frameworks predicated upon Judeo-Christian and Mesoamerican legacies, and also extend through and beyond Latina/o mulattaje paradigms that weave Africa and the continent’s wide gamut of ethnicities, cultures, and religions into the mix. The wide violentological variations in these case studies span transcontinental Eurasia, the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean part of western Asia), Northern Africa, and the Americas. They thus further challenge the lingering resistance paradigm and other teleologies, and ultimately militate for a radical globalization of Latina/o Studies.

This chapter explores the historical contexts that led to the deaths of George Floyd and other Black people by police brutality and the deaths of despair of economically disadvantaged whites. Tracing legacies of educational and residential segregation, racial violence, discrimination in programs such as the New Deal and the GI Bill, and deindustrialization, William Cross outlines the foundations of current conditions facing Black people. The chapter also highlights how these oppressive conditions gave rise to Black artistic expression in the form of the blues and Hip Hop. Noting how a second wave of deindustrialization created blighted communities of white people with lower levels of education, the chapter reveals how racial violence and power based in social class pathologies illuminate the impact of deindustrialization, inadequate social safety nets, and racism on Blacks and whites with a high school level education or less. Attending to the mutual needs of Blacks and economically disadvantaged whites, Cross concludes with recommendations for a call to action based on jobs, education, health care, and an increase in the minimum wage.

Chapter 4 examines the history of hip hop as a genre that was literally created in the streets (at block parties). Additionally, this chapter explores the role of hip hop as a Black art form that provides a complex picture of Black space. As a part of this discussion, this chapter analyzes The Fugees’s The Score, Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool, and Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City as examples of how hip hop operates as an art form that humanizes Black youth in counter cultural ways.

The chapter focuses on the televisual and lived experiences of the dancers and choreographers to connect the production of spectacle on the screen to their everyday lives. It captures these individual life stories of aspirations and failures within the larger context of the emergence of dance reality shows such as Just Dance and Naach Dhum Machale on national and local television networks.

Chapter 6 turns to sampling as it is usually understood: integral to Hip-Hop culture. The track in point is “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” by Gil Scott-Heron, a track that others have sampled, or alluded to, countless times since its release in 1970. The chapter analyses this well-known track for its other, equally formative sonic dimensions. Lyrics do matter here for they are part of African and African American practices of “signifyin’.” Through her “sampling back,” namely, a form of answer rap, Sarah Jones inverts this iconic track thirty years later to launch a blistering critique of sexism in not only the Rap/Hip-Hop business but also the music business in general. The chapter considers the ways in which Jones’s signifyin’ on “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” literally and sonically, illustrates how musico-cultural borrowing and or as sampling are part of a broader repertoire of African American signifyin’ practices, as these are, in turn, understood as Black culture and, thereby, Black American politics.

This chapter foregrounds the idea that bodies are racially malleable—that is, that people engage in daily practices (such as clothing, bodily aesthetics, and language) in order to change the ways that their bodies are racially perceived. Drawing on data collected with poor male favela (shantytown) youth and famous Brazilian rappers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, I investigate how speakers embrace language, in particular, to influence how “white” or “nonwhite” their body appears to others. While they may speak more “proper” to police officers to sound like upstanding citizens who deserve better treatment, Brazilian youth also draw on North American Hip Hop influences to embrace the sounds of what they perceive to be a “tough” urban blackness.

This chapter argues that hip-hop satire offers a critique of commercial hip-hop’s fetishization of racial authenticity. Mighty Casey, Childish Gambino, and Little Brother all challenge the definitions of blackness provided by mainstream and commercially-successful hip-hop. These artists rely on independent labels and internet outlets, and as such operate on the “lower frequencies” of African American cultural production.

Chapter 6 puts hip hop and its pedagogy into the context of this French theory of practice, considering how a climate created by French intellectuals focusing on practice and understanding bodies as sites of cultural production and knowledge allowed hip hop to be taken seriously by ministers of culture and a left-wing elite. Reading the work of Leroi-Gourhan, Bourdieu and De Certeau anticipating and accompanying a shift to an idea of culture as practice, using dance as a subject, an example or a metaphor, provides here a context for the appreciation of the counter-cultural form and an explanation of its “recuperation” by state agencies for social purposes, and in particular the institutionalization of its transmission or pedagogy. Chapter 6 also documents how hip hop dance technique is learned, complementing these theories of practice, and the concept of mimesis is discussed in the transmission of hip hop moves. The use of the mirror in the dance studio allows a double reflection on the aestheticization of the form in class training and the constitution of a community in performance.

Based on interviews and participant observation, this chapter foregrounds race as it examines the meanings attached to men’s bodies, to bodily movement, and to dance. It considers the interplay between imagination and everyday performance in order to explore how race shapes masculine embodification. When men practiced dance steps at home, or performed them in public, when they ridiculed or praised others about the ways they moved, they defined membership in communities, imagined authenticity, and stretched, hardened, or denied the existence of social boundaries. As men spoke about physical grace and its absence, men employed racial and class terms. Black and Asian men recognized that race was salient in how they were perceived. White men saw race in others but often said that being white was not an important aspect of their own experience. The chapter considers the meanings young men attach to dance styles performed to hip hop music. Young men claim such dances as a race neutral youth culture, yet some of their appeal of rests on their association with black culture.

This ethnographic case study discusses the experiences of nine competitive male hip hop dancers as they participated in an all-male jazz technique class, which was taught by the researcher, in a private Canadian dance studio. Questionnaires were distributed to the male students and their three dance teachers to identify both the students’ and teachers’ perceptions of gender in competitive dance education. This chapter critically examines pedagogical practices that masculinize dance movement and teaching strategies in a private dance school with the intention of encouraging male enrollment. It challenges dance educators to assess how their own gendered assumptions influence their pedagogies, and to consider the potential effects they may have on their students’ experiences.