GLOBAL BLACK SELF-FASHIONINGS: HIP HOP AS DIASPORIC SPACE

This essay examines how the “black” racial significance of hip hop culture is received, interpreted, and redeployed within the Afro-Atlantic world. Beyond questions of cultural consumption and reproduction, it is argued that hip hop's expanding global reach has facilitated the contemporary making and moving of black diasporic subjects themselves. Here, African descendant youth in an array of locales use the performative contours of hip hop to mobilize notions of black-self in ways that are at one time both contestive and transcendent of nationally bound racial framings. Hip hop in this way can be seen as enabling a current global (re)mapping of black political imaginaries via social dynamics of diaspora. In pursuing this argument, this essay looks toward hip hop movements in Brazil, Cuba, and South Africa as compelling, yet varying examples of how transnationally attuned identities of blackness are marshaled in the fashioning of diasporic subjects through hip hop.