Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration

Acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The research presented here has been funded by grants from the 2007 Advanced Research Fellowship from the American Councils for International Education, the International Research and Exchange Board (IREX) 2007– 2008 Individual Advanced Research Opportunities Program, the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Fellowship Program, and the 2008–2009 IREX Short-Term Travel Grant. Sections of this book were researched as a Title VIII Supported Research Scholar during the summerof2009attheKennanInstitute (coveringRussiaandsurroundingstates) at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and as an Internal Research Fellow at the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh in the fall of 2009. I am very grateful to the many people and communities in different parts of the world that expressed an interest in this project and extended a helping hand to me every step of the way. Though it is not possible to name everyone who has contributed to the development of this research project and to the writing of this book, I feel it is best to thank people in the order that I met them, since this project has grown through so many layers since 2004 when I first came across the ethnographic data that led me down this path. My first meetings with African musicians in Ukraine came while I was working as a travel guide for my mother’s tour groups through Scope Travel Inc. At that time,Iwasworkingoffthe“debts”Ihadaccumulatedwithmyparentsfollowing eight years of graduate school in ethnomusicology spent researching the impact of international development aid on Roma (Gypsy) music traditions in Ukraine. My goal was not to launch into another research project without having completed the previous one, but political upheaval in Ukraine made it complicated for me to publish my dissertation at that time. Though my xiv Acknowledgments dissertation remains a book to be written, I took with me into this project the excellent training I had received from my ethnomusicology professors at Columbia University, especially Dieter Christensen, Aaron Fox, Ana Maria Ochoa, Christopher Washburne, and historian Mark von Hagen, and applied it to the study of hip hop. When I began this project, I had no intention to publish a book or to engage in as much research as I did. Thus, while the hip hop project essentially began in 2004, I did not begin working on it with a relative amount of seriousness until 2007, when I was a visiting professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It was in long conversations with my colleagues Donna Buchanan, Gabriel Solis, Thomas Turino, GayleandJeffryMagee,andBrunoNettlthatIconceptualizedthetheoretical frameworks that provided the foundations for my understandings of global hip hop, the relationships between Africa and the USSR, the role of music in the Cold War, and the politics of migration in the European Union and the former USSR. Richard Tempest, director of the Russian and East European Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, provided me with numerous insights intoRussian popularmusic and culture.My first fieldwork on hip hop in Ukraine preceded my year in Urbana, and I followed up with fieldwork in Ukraine in the summer of 2008. With the financial assistance of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Fellowship Program, I worked with Olya Kolomyyets, lecturer at the Faculty of Culture and Arts at the Lviv National University, and Yaryna Romaniuk, an ethnomusicologist affiliated with the Kharkiv Conservatory of Music, in conducting interviews with hip hop musicians, graffiti artists, producers, and policy workers addressing issues of migration. We synthesized comparative information from three different parts of Ukraine—Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Lviv—that reinforced many of the ideas I had garnered during my fieldwork the previous summer. In the fall of 2008, I began my job as an assistant professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh, where I taught undergraduate courses on global hip hop and took time to further explore theoretical thinking on race in the United States. A diversity seminar for faculty led by Jean Ferguson Carr and Valerie Carr Copeland at the end of my first teaching year further solidified my thinking on how we talk about race, gender, and class in the classroom. In the fall of 2009, I received a course release and was one of the inaugural fellows at the University of Pittsburgh’s Humanities Center , directed by Jonathan Arac and Todd Reeser. Invited lectures at various xv Acknowledgments universities and a series of...