In the last decade, multi-racial hip-hop scenes in Kharkiv, a predominantly Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainian city close to the Russian border, have fostered the development of socially-conscious hip-hop among African students. Drawing on musical elements from their respective home countries, the US and local hip-hop traditions, African male youths use Ukrainian-, Russian- and English-language lyrics to express concerns about socio-economic status, personal struggle and racial inclusion. This study analyses how African musicians use hip-hop as a social means through which to fight the escalating violence against dark-skinned foreigners and migrants. It draws on ethnographic data to identify several ways in which African-performed hip-hop has influenced contemporary public opinions regarding ‘black’ identity in eastern Ukraine.
Chapter 5 offers a history of development programs for Roms in Ukraine. It analyzes their impact on local, regional, state, and international levels and evaluates the positive and often unintended consequences of such interventions. Essential to an understanding of the outcomes is that initial programming initiatives did not include Romani voices and that the patterns set in place in the early years of post-Soviet collapse set the scenes for intervention programs of the twenty-first century. This chapter focuses on programs explicitly aimed at cultural development and how culture has been used as a political tool in the context of the broader post-Soviet society. Shaped by non-Romani imaginings of Romani engagements with music, this chapter explains how and why Romani music has become so politicized and analyzes its continued importance within the Romani rights movement.
Chapter 8 examines expressions of emotional health among the Romani poor. It takes a critical look at the impact of living in a state of financial, emotional, and political instability and how such emotional states impact Romani psychological well-being. This chapter looks particularly at vocal expressions of pain and suffering. It also celebrates aural expressions of joy while pushing back at the historically rooted tropes that reduce Roms to nothing more than happy stage performers, somehow devoid of full humanity (and the attendant pain and suffering that comes with it). In discussing the processing of trauma that music allows, this chapter offers space to express raw emotion that impoverished Roms cannot afford. It also critiques the exploitation of female Romani vocality in development discourse. Breaking the silence of the visual gaze that frames development reports, this chapter analyzes the aural soundtrack that accompanies media depictions of the Romani poor.
Chapter 4 focuses on the history of Romani musicianship in Transcarpathia, Ukraine’s westernmost region that shares borders with Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. A micro-ethnography of music-making in Uzhhorod, Transcarpathia’s administrative capital with a sizable Romani population, and home to one of Ukraine’s largest Romani organization, Romani Yag (Romani Fire), the chapter charts the history of associations between Romani musicians and Romani cultural, educational, political, and human rights organizations in post-Soviet Ukraine. This chapter uses music to highlight how shifts in borders have shaped and influenced Romani music traditions. It analyzes developments in Romani music concerning local, state, and international patronage, and offers perspectives on Romani modes of self-presentation.
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