Flip the Script

European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality

J. Griffith Rollefson

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780226496214, 9780226496184
• eBook ISBN: 9780226496351
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Hip hop has long been a vehicle for protest in the United States, used by its primarily African American creators to address issues of prejudice, repression, and exclusion. But the music is now a worldwide phenomenon, and outside the United States it has been taken up by those facing similar struggles. Flip the Script offers a close look at the role of hip hop in Europe, where it has become a politically powerful and commercially successful form of expression for the children and grandchildren of immigrants from former colonies.
 
Through analysis of recorded music and other media, as well as interviews and fieldwork with hip hop communities, J. Griffith Rollefson shows how this music created by black Americans is deployed by Senegalese Parisians, Turkish Berliners, and South Asian Londoners to both differentiate themselves from and relate themselves to the dominant culture. By listening closely to the ways these postcolonial citizens in Europe express their solidarity with African Americans through music, Rollefson shows, we can literally hear the hybrid realities of a global double consciousness.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Hip Hop as Postcolonial Art and Practice
• 1  •  “J’accuse”: Hip Hop’s Postcolonial Politics in Paris
• 2  •  Nostalgia “En noir et blanc”: Black Music and Postcoloniality from Sefyu’s Paris to Buddy Bolden’s New Orleans
• 3  •  Musical (African) Americanization: Strategic Essentialism, Hybridity, and Commerce in Aggro Berlin
• 4  •  Heiße Waren: Hot Commodities, “Der Neger Bonus,” and the Commercial Authentic
• 5  •  M.I.A.’s “Terrorist Chic”: Black Atlantic Music and South Asian Postcolonial Politics in London
• 6  •  Marché Noir: The Hip Hop Hustle in the City of Light
• 7  •  “Wherever We Go”: UK Hip Hop and the Deformation of Mastery
• 8  •  “Straight Outta B.C.”: Différance, Defness, and Juice Aleem’s Precolonial Afrofuturist Critique
• Conclusion: Hip Hop Studies and/as Postcolonial Studies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Discography and Videography
• Index