This book explores the two major reasons for hip-hop culture’s proliferation throughout the world: 1) the global centrality of African American popular culture and the transnational pop culture industry of record companies and entertainment conglomerates; and 2) “connective marginalities” that are extant social inequalities forming the foundation for an “underground” network of hip-hop communities.  Both of these levels of hip-hop’s global circulation are based in the youth culture’s Africanist aesthetic, which is an extension of previous black artistic expressions such as verbal word play, polyrhythmic dance improvisations, radical juxtapositions of musical structures, and the folkloric trickster figure. Additionally, the text explores computer technology and the internet in this age of information that also serves hip-hop culture’s globalization.

“Now in the time where corporations have extracted the economic DNA of American hip-hop to fuel their bottom line with the lowest common denominator, Halifu Osumare’s reach into the global importance of the genre is a much needed cultural reclamation. With the power of rap music as a new world language, hip-hop’s style and substance is an explosive supplement to the new millennium that is currently lacking knowledge on world cultural and social history, as well as geography. The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop gives us a way to plough through these new global dynamics.”

—Chuck D, Public Enemy

“It may seem as though hip-hop has suddenly gone global, but Halifu Osumare’s The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop is a timely and important reminder that hip-hop has always lived in a world larger than the boundaries we impose upon it.”

—Mark Anthony Neal, Associate Professor of Black Popular Culture, and co-editor, That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader

“Halifu Osumare’s work—a power move in and of itself—compels us to acknowledge the power of technology and capitalism to co-opt and transform a culture-specific phenomenon into a global assault—for better or worse. It is required reading for those of us interested in the social, political, and cultural shifts that shake and quake our worlds. Highly recommended.”

—Brenda Dixon Gottschild, author of The Black Dancing Body, Waltzing in the Dark, and Digging The Africanist Presence in American Culture

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