Msia Kibona Clark. Hip-Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2018. 312 pp. $32.95. Paper. ISBN: 9780896803190.
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: Clark's Hip-Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers extends and advances the scholarship on hip-hop as a Black Atlantic expression with various forms, functions, and cultural, linguistic, and artistic diversities.The six chapters, with foreword and afterword, pay attention to the role of the cultural artists as prophets and philosophers whose contributions are no less valuable than those found in the scholarly texts.Taking a culturally constructive approach, Clark presents how hip-hop artists construct narratives on political institutions, social change, sexuality, gender, migration, and identity, mediating and interpreting social-economic and political realities for their audience based on the artist's social, political, and ideological perspective.Clark opens up the definition of what constitutes African hip-hop beyond music produced by Africans on the continent by accounting for migration, descent, origin, and aesthetics; thus, African hip-hop or hip-hop in Africa accounts for and moves beyond nationality, geography, mobility, and movement to accommodate Africans with hyphenated identities, and multiplicities of geographical and social locations.The book offers a crossnational survey of artists from many African countries and provides specific and regional examples.Chapter One blends the history and the indigenization of hip-hop broadly and specifically in Africa.Clark explores the remote cultural links between African expressive and musical traditions and hip-hop while noting its specific and immediate origins in the Bronx borough of New York in the 1970s by African American and Caribbean immigrants.Extending the previous chapter, Chapter Two examines the historical, socioeconomic, and postcolonial condition in the politicization and indigenization of hip-hop in Africa and the labor of pioneering artists of the genre as well as the diverse ways that social reproduction and technological innovation in sounds and medium of distribution have contributed to the growth of the genre.Drawing examples from Ghana, South Africa, Senegal, Tanzania, and the East African region, Clark explores how the diverse elements of hip-hop culture, emceeing, DJing, graffiti, and breakdance worked together to produce localized versions or iterations of hip-hop on the continent.Clark advances the genealogies of hip-hop in Africa in Chapter Three by situating Franz Fanon's work on national culture and the evolution of
Source: African Studies Review
DOI: 10.1017/asr.2024.202
Author: Rosemary Oyinlola Popoola
Language: English
Topic: Music History and Culture
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4405212268