Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture

Global Hip-Hop and the African Diaspora

HALIFU OSUMARE Global Hip-Hop and the African Diaspora Global hip-hop youth culture is the most recent manifestation in the story of the exportation of black American cultural production that started with nineteenth-century minstrelsy, thrived during the 1950s crossover rockand -roll era and continues today. What has changed is the speed at which black music and dance are marketed and the global reach that they now command. The result is that U.S. black American culture continues to be mired in social narratives of “blackness” that proliferate multidimensionally in the international arena, commingling with other countries’ issues of social marginality. However, these narratives take on different meanings in Africa and its diaspora than in other areas of the world like Asia. Hiphop aesthetics, steeped in polyrhythm, antiphony, an orality of social commentary , and a vital embodiment of all of the above, is repositioned by sub-Saharan black African, Afro-Caribbean, and Brazilian youths because of their connection to the transiting black aesthetic itself. African diasporic cultural connections, situated within particular issues of social marginality in each site by hip-hop youths, are the subject of this essay. By investigating the international diffusion of a culture, one is essentially inquiring into an interactive, dialogic process that links discrete local sites and real people. Popular music scholar Tony Mitchell, using Roland Robertson’s (1995) term glocal to capture the relationships between global and local, contends that “each is in many ways de‹ned by the other and . . . they frequently intersect, rather than being polarized opposites.”1 At one end of the global-local paradigm is international political economy, with the contrived mechanisms of multinational corporations (TimeWarner , Microsoft, Viacom, BMG, EMI, etc.) as purveyors of pop culture, creating virtualized desires that we de‹ne as global postmodern culture. At the other end exist discrete loci of exchanges of information, aesthetics, pleasure, and perspectives on age-old issues of human hierarchies in vari266 ous local manifestations. The global-local interchange is indeed complex and is continually metamorphosing. Hip-hop culture has become a binding youth subculture that has enabled young people in disparate local communities to share a sense of a common attachment. Yet the fact that the global hip-hop generation is being reared on MTV and music videos does not completely explain the intricacies of various international sites’ identi‹cation with hip-hop and its adaptation to local issues and aesthetics . I turn now to a brief investigation of other locally based historical implications of this global youth phenomenon. Connective Marginalities of the Hip-Hop Globe While most adults over forty get their impressions of hip-hop from the hypersexed, spoon-fed, commercialized music videos of MTV, BET, and VH1, there exists a multifaceted and empowered hip-hop “underground” movement that generally tends to promote a more socially conscious rap music. This branch of hip-hop culture has evolved from the “political” and “conscious” rap era in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Groups and artists from that era like Public Enemy, Brand Nubian, Poor Righteous Teachers, Queen Latifah, and A Tribe Called Quest popularized probings connected to Afrocentricity and the Nation of Islam and were laced with streetwise allusions that spread social critiques of America globally.2 For example, Queen Latifah’s “Ladies First” 1991 video combined her talents with black British rapper Monie Love to render a searing indictment of both sexism and black social marginalization in general and South African apartheid speci‹cally.3 Today’s emcees who do not receive regular rotation on the music video channels or commercial radio’s Top 40, like The Roots, Dead Prez, The Coup, Bahamadiya, Talib Kweli, Common, and Mos Def, continue today’s socially conscious and self-empowering thrust of hip-hop. Through expanding international tours, artists such as these motivate youths internationally to explore their own issues of marginalization through layered, nuanced metaphors and rhyming allusions, and sometimes through direct political projects. Exactly how do the youth of other nations, who often speak languages other than English, decode and reinvent African American and Latino hiphop culture emanating from the urban United States? The answer partly lies in what I call hip-hop’s connective marginalities. These are resonances acknowledged by youth internationally with black expressive culture ‹rst Global Hip-Hop and the African Diaspora 267 generated from the Bronx, Compton and South Central in Los Angeles, and East Oakland and Marin City in northern California. Corresponding...