Break and Flow

Hip Hop Poetics in the Americas

Charlie D. Hankin

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780813949819
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813949833
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría de la crítica literaria

Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies

Hip hop is a global form of creative expression. In Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti, rappers refuse the boundaries of hip hop’s US genesis, claiming the art form as a means to empower themselves and their communities in the face of postcolonial racial and class violence. Despite the geographic and linguistic borders that separate these artists, Charlie Hankin finds in their music and lyrics a common understanding of hip hop’s capacity to intervene in the public sphere and a shared poetics of neighborhood, nation, and transatlantic yearnings. Situated at the critical intersection of sound studies and Afro-diasporic poetics, Break and Flow draws on years of ethnographic fieldwork and collaboration, as well as an archive of hundreds of songs by more than sixty hip hop artists. Hankin illuminates how new media is used to produce and distribute knowledge in the Global South, refining our understanding of poetry and popular music at the turn of the millennium.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Yearning: “Nan lòt dimansyon”
• 2. Raplove: “Es lo que hay”
• 3. Uprooting: “Qué importa si sonamos americano hermano”
• 4. Scale: “Rap é meu lugar”
• 5. Writing: “Enraizados da letra”
• 6. Violence: “Sou fèy blanch”
• Epilogue: En-/un-gendering Hip Hop
• About the Artists
• Selective Timeline of Brazilian, Cuban, and Haitian Hip Hop
• Permissions
• Notes
• Discography
• Bibliography
• Index