Global Hiphopography

Abstract

In Travis Harris' seminal article on global Hip Hop studies, "Can It Be Bigger Than Hip Hop," he argues that "real Hip Hop" is something that transcends the stereotypes of Hip Hop as simply the commercial music disseminated on radios, online forums, and social media.As a Hip Hop scholar astutely aware of the field's development since its nascent birth in the mid-late 1980s, Harris' observation is one of appreciable significance. Rather, the internationalized community of Hip Hop practitioners responsible for universalizing Hip Hop's fundamental thesis, the attainment of self-knowledge (KRS-One 2009), has succeeded in frustrating essentialized connotations of Hip Hop as somehow an American-centric cultural form whose global/glocal expressions are merely secondary copycats, where Hip Hop is only "real" if it is mediated and ultimately defined by American formulations of what Hip Hop "real" is. As Harris aptly notes, "Global Hip Hop is Hip Hop" (2019). Thus, as part of the burgeoning "third wave" of global Hip Hop studies, the point which global Hip Hop studies become Hip Hop studies from a global perspective instead of the Oriental "Them" to the Anglophone "Us," Quentin Williams and Jaspal Singh's edited collection follows through with Harris' desire for scholars all around the world to "reveal what truly is Hip Hop" (69). This book is aimed at revealing the diverse, fruitful, explorative, awakening, "woke" world of the subaltern community who refuse to be subjugated, silenced, and curtailed. Global Hip Hop represents those who dare speak up and be vocal about the great discrepancies of contemporary life.Indeed, Williams and Singh, along with 31 other international scholars-qua-Hip Hop heads, have attuned the field's collective ear towards the question of which