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

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

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.

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Websites and Blogs

  • European HipHop Studies Network: 
  • Universal Zulu Nation Website:  
  • Hiphop Archive: 
  • Cornell Hip Hop Collection: 
  • Veni Vidi Vici: European Hip Hop: 
  • Scratched Vinyl: 
  • World Hip Hop Market: 
  • RoyChristopher.com: 
  • 鈥淗ip Hop and Rap in Europe鈥� 鈥� Report for the European Music Office (Dated, but interesting EU Report by Marie-Agn猫s Beau from 1996): 

A Hip Hop and Postcolonial Studies Bibliography

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