Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Research Centres, Institutes and Projects
  3. CIPHER
  4. Resources

Resources

Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcolonality J.Griffith Rollefson

304 pages | 11 halftones, 11 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2017

Chicago Studies in 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.

For further information, please click here: The University of Chicago Press 

Websites and Blogs

A Hip Hop and Postcolonial Studies Bibliography

  • Aidi, Hisham. Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture. New York: Pantheon, 2014.
  • Alim, H. Samy. Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture. New York: Routledge, 2006.
  • Alim, H. Samy & Adam Haupt. “Reviving Soul(s): Hip Hop as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in the U.S. & South Africa”. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Educational Justice (Django Paris and H. Samy Alim, eds.). Teachers College Press, Columbia University: New York, 2017.
  • Ameli, Saied Reza. Globalization, Americanization and British Muslim Identity. London: Islamic College for Advanced Studies Press, 2002.
  • Appert, Catherine M. “Locating Hip Hop Origins: Popular Music and Tradition in Senegal.” Africa 86 (May 2016): 237–62.
  • Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
  • Ashcroft, William. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 2000.
  • Back, Les. The Art of Listening. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007.
  • Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
  • ———. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
  • Baraka, Amiri (Jones, LeRoi). Black Music. New York: William Morrow, 1968.
  • ———. Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed from It. New York: William Morrow, 1963.
  • Berger, Harris M. and Michael Thomas Carroll, Global Pop, Local Language. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2003.
  • Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge Classics, 1994.
  • Bramwell, Richard. UK Hip-Hop, Grime and the City: The Aesthetics and Ethics of London’s Rap Scenes. London: Routledge, 2015.
  • Brubaker, Rogers. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
  • Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997.
  • ———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
  • Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.
  • Chang, Jeff. Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005.
  • Chang, Jeff. “It’s a Hip-Hop World.” Foreign Policy, no. 163 (November–December 2007): 58–65.
  • Clark, Msia Kibona and Mickie Mwanzia Koster, eds. Hip Hop and Social Change in Africa: Ni Wikati. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014.
  • Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015.
  • Condry, Ian. Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
  • da Silva, Denise Ferreira. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
  • Dawson, Ashley. Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.
  • Dean, John, and Jean-Paul Gabilliet, eds. European Readings of American Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.
  • Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.
  • Drury, Meghan. “Counterorienting the War on Terror: Arab Hip Hop and Diasporic Resistance.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 29 (2017): 1–11.
  • Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Edited by David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams. New York: Bedford Books, 1997.
  • Durand, Alain-Philippe, ed. Black, Blanc, Beur: Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002.
  • Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
  • El-Khairy, Omar. “‘Freedom’s a Lifestyle Choice: US Cultural Diplomacy, Empire’s Soundtrack, and Middle Eastern ‘Youth’ in our Contemporary Global Infowar.” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 2 (2009): 115–35.
  • Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage, 1964.
  • Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks [Peau noire, masques blancs] (1952). Translated by C. L. Markham. London: Pluto Press, 1986.
  • ———. The Wretched of the Earth. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1963.
  • Fehrenbach, Heide, and Ute G. Poiger, eds. Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000.
  • Fernandes, Sujatha.  Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation (2011) Introduction, “The Making of a Hip Hop Globe”
  • Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
  • Forman, Murray. The ‘Hood Comes First; Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip Hop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
  • Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
  • Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. New York: Verso, 1993.
  • ———. Small Acts. New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1993.
  • ———. “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson, 1987.
  • Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays [Le Discours Antillais], trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.
  • Guillory, Monique, and Richard C. Green, eds. Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
  • Harrison, Anthony Kwame. “Post-colonial consciousness, knowledge production, and identity inscription within Filipino American hip hop music,” in Perfect Beat. 2012.
  • Haupt, Adam. Static: Race and Representation in Post-Apartheid Music, Media and Film. Johannesburg: HSRC Press, 2012.
  • ______. “Counterpublics, Noise and Ten Years of Democracy.” New Coin Poetry 40 (2004): 76–90.
  • ———. Stealing Empire: P2P, Intellectual Property and Hip-Hop Subversion. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008.
  • Helbig, Adriana N. Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.
  • Hine, Darlene Clark, Tricia C. Keaton, and Stephen Small. Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
  • hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2015.
  • Huq, Rupa. Beyond Subculture: Pop, Youth and Identity in a Postcolonial World. London: Routledge, 2006.
  • Ibrahim, Awad. “Arab Spring, Favelas, Borders, and the Artistic Transnational Migration: Toward a Curriculum for a Global Hip-Hop Nation.” Curriculum Inquiry 47 (2017): 103–111.
  • Jacobsen, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
  • Kajikawa, Loren. Sounding Race in Rap Songs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.
  • Kazanjian, David. The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Colonial America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
  • Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: Free Press, 1994.
  • ———. Yo’ Mama’s Disfunctional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997.
  • Keyes, Cheryl L. Rap Music and Street Consciousness. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
  • Klopp, Brett. German Multiculturalism: Immigrant Integration and the Transformation of Citizenship. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
  • Krims, Adam. Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  • Kroes, Rob. If You’ve Seen One You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
  • Lipsitz, George. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place. New York: Verso, 1994.
  • Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
  • Malone, Christopher and George Martinez, Jr. “The Organic Organizer: The Political Development of Hip-Hop and the Prospects for Global Transformation.” New Political Science 32 (December 2010): 531–45.
  • Manabe, Noriko. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music after Fukushima. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
  • Mercer, Kobena. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1994.
  • Mitchell, Tony, ed. Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
  • Miyakawa, Felicia. Five Percenter Rap: God Hop’s Music, Message, and Black Muslim Mission. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
  • ______. “Hip-Hop Diplomacy.” Parts 1–4. The Avid Listener, 4–24 November 2014. http://www.theavidlistener.com/2014/11/.
  • Morgan, Marcyliena. The Real Hip Hop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
  • ______. “’The World is Yours’: The Globalization of Hip-Hop Language.” Social Identities 22 (2016): 133-49.
  • Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
  • Nitzsche, Sina, and Walter Grünzwieg. Hip-Hop in Europe: Cultural Identities and Transnational Flows. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2013.
  • Olaniyan, Tejumola. Arrest the Music: Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
  • Peabody, Sue, and Tyler Stovall, eds.  The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
  • Pennycook, Alastair. “Language, Localization, and the Real: Hip-Hop and the Global Spread of Authenticity.” Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 6 (2007): 101–115.
  • Perry, Imani. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
  • Perry, Marc. “GLOBAL BLACK SELF-FASHIONINGS: HIP HOP AS DIASPORIC SPACE,” Identities, 15:6 (2008), 635-664.
  • ______. Negro Soy Yo: Hip Hop and Raced Citizenship in Neoliberal Cuba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
  • Poiger, Ute G. Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
  • Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.
  • Radano, Ronald and Philip V. Bohlman, eds. Music and the Racial Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
  • ———. Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
  • Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982.
  • Rodriguez, Richard. Brown: The Last Discovery of America. New York: Viking Penguin, 2002.
  • Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1999.
  • Rollefson, J. Griffith. “‘He’s Calling His Flock Now’: Black Music and Postcoloniality from Buddy Bolden’s New Orleans to Sefyu’s Paris.” American Music 33, no. 3. Special issue: “Transatlantic Perspectives,” ed. Glenda Goodman (Fall 2015): 375–97.
  • ______. “Musical (African) Americanization in the New Europe: The Case of Aggro Berlin.” In Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000, ed. Felix Meyer, Carol J. Oja, Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne C. Shreffler, 464–77. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2014.
  • ______. “‘Gheddos du Monde’: Sounding the Ghetto, Occupying the Nation from Berlin to Paris.” In Hip-Hop in Europe: Cultural Identities and Transnational Flows, ed. Sina A. Nitzsche and Walter Grünzweig, 227–39. Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2013.
  • ______. “Le Cauchemar de la France: Blackara’s Postcolonial Hip Hop Critique in the City of Light.” In Native Tongues: An African Hip-Hop Reader, ed. Paul Khalil Saucier, 179–216. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011.
  • ______. “Musical (African) Americanization in the New Europe: Hip Hop, Race, and the Cultural Politics of Postcoloniality in Contemporary Paris, Berlin, and London.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2009.
  • ______. “The ‘Robot Voodoo Power’ Thesis: Afrofuturism and Anti-anti-essentialism from Sun Ra to Kool Keith.” Black Music Research Journal 28, no. 1 (Spring 2008), 83-109.
  • ______. “‘Is This Really Liberty, Equality, Fraternity?’ The NTM Affair, French Cultural Politics, and Americanization as Cultural Miscegenation.” Music Research Forum 19 (Summer 2004), 26-41.
  • Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.
  • Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993.
    •  Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
  • Salois, Kendra. “The Networked Self: Hip Hop Musicking and Muslim Identities in Neoliberal Morocco,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2013.
    • “Connection and Complicity in the Global South: Hip Hop Musicians and US Cultural Diplomacy.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 27 (2015): 408–23.
  • Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
  • Saucier, P. Khalil, ed. Native Tongues: An African Hip-hop Reader. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011.
  • Saucier, P. Khalil and Kumarini Silva. “Keeping It Real in the Global South: Hip-Hop Comes to Sri Lanka.” Critical Sociology 40 (2014): 295–300.
  • Schain, Martin. The Politics of Immigration in France, Britain, and the United States: A Comparative Study. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
  • Schmieding, Leonard. “Das ist unsere Party”: HipHop in der DDR. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2014.
  • Sharma, Nitasha Tamar. Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
  • Singh, Nikhil Pal. Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
  • Smith, Zadie. On Beauty. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005.
  • Steingo, Gavin. Kwaito’s Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
  • Stovall, Tyler. Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light. New York: Mariner Books, 1998.
  • Tate, Greg. Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture. New York: Harlem Moon, 2003.
  • Taylor, Timothy. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. New York: Routledge, 1997.
  • Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
  • Villegas, Mark R., Kuttin’ Kandi, and Roderick N. Labrador, eds. Empire of Funk: Hip Hop and Representation in Filipina/o America. San Diego: Cognella, 2014.
  • Von Eschen, Penny M. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism 1937–1957. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
    •  Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
  • Wagnleitner, Reinhold. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria After the Second World War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
  • Weheliye, Alexander. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
  • West, Cornel. Race Matters. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
  • White, Miles. From Jim Crow to Jay-Z. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011.
  • Williams, Justin. Rhymin’ and Stealin’: Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014.
  • Williams, Quentin. Remix Multilingualism: Hip Hop Ethnography and Performing Marginalized Voices. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
  • Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
  • Wright, Michelle. Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
  • Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001.
  • Zuberi, Nabeel. Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

CIPHER ERC Research Team Wandesford Quay Research Centre Cork, Ireland,

Choose areas of the website to search
Top