Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a Globalizing World ed. by Eric Charry (review)

The local development and global florescence of hip hop is one of the most compelling stories in the study of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century urban popular culture. In cities throughout the world, hip hop has become a significant mode of identification among young urbanites, manifest in a diversity of forms that constitute the genre as an expressive cultural practice, including spoken poetry (rap), performative sampling and mixing (DJing), street dance (breaking), and street art (tagging). In contemporary urban Africa—from Cape Town to Cairo, Dakar to Dar es Salaam—hip hop can be seen and heard in the language, gestures, clothing, and hangouts of growing communities of artists and aficionados. Rap music is featured on the radio and television, there are schools that specialize in the art of the turntable and beat making, and breaking clubs have sprung up in neighborhoods across the continent. In addition, barbershops portray the latest hairstyles from the likes of Jay Z and 50 Cent and street corners signify with the tags of local crews.

Eric Charry's edited volume, Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a Globalizing World, is, first and foremost, an acknowledgement of hip hop's import as an expression of urban popular culture in Africa today. The text provides an impressive collection of case studies from prominent ethnomusicologists and anthropologists who have conducted extensive fieldwork in cities throughout the continent (though research from urban centers in North Africa is noticeably absent). While the title speaks of "New African Music," the book's content bears witness to a more broadly conceived "new African urbanism" manifest in the varied expressive forms of global hip hop. In this space of urban African modernity, the voices, beats, gestures, and styles of hip hop form a method of engaging and experimenting with traditional culture, criticizing and making claims on postcolonial politics, connecting with and contributing to the currents of globalization, and extending and deepening relationships with the black diaspora. The book makes these connections between art and society in the varied urban terrains of "Hip Hip Africa" through its own multi-modal mix of close readings, survey reports, and ethnographic inquiry. Eric Charry's introductory and concluding essays bookend the volume with useful and insightful overviews of the history and thematic concerns of what he calls "music for an African twenty-first century."

Readers of this journal will be particularly interested in the volume's discussion of the poetics and verbal art of hip hop in Africa today, as well as its critical and constructive engagement with questions of authenticity and the perceived "African-ness" of hip hop as a diasporic aesthetic practice. The book is replete with analyses that treat topics of language choice, code switching, slang use, lyrical content, intertextuality, oratory, and vocal style, presenting the texts and contexts of hip hop as crucial sites of socio-linguistic play and innovation in contemporary Africa. The authors acknowledge the deep cultural roots that inform such creativity—roots that suggest to some the African provenance of diasporic arts such as hip hop—but they remind their readers that such traditions are continually being reinvented and reimagined in the present by dynamic and diverse cadres of rappers, DJs, and breakers in cities across the continent. This is, in other words, a text that addresses the new frontiers and expressive cultural routes of hip hop, emphasizing the linguistic and cultural diversity that African urbanites have brought to bear on this global art form.

Hip Hop Africa is recommended for scholars and students with an interest in contemporary African popular culture and urbanism. Given the breadth of its content, it will be a particularly useful resource for graduate and undergraduate courses on global hip hop, African popular music, and urban African culture.