Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration (Ethnomusicology Multimedia) - Hardcover

Helbig, Adriana N.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253012007 ISBN 13: 9780253012005

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2014

Synopsis

In Hip Hop Ukraine, we enter a world of urban music and dance competitions, hip hop parties, and recording studio culture to explore unique sites of interracial encounters among African students, African immigrants, and local populations in eastern Ukraine. Adriana N. Helbig combines ethnographic research with music, media, and policy analysis to examine how localized forms of hip hop create social and political spaces where an interracial youth culture can speak to issues of human rights and racial equality. She maps the complex trajectories of musical influence―African, Soviet, American―to show how hip hop has become a site of social protest in post-socialist society and a vehicle for social change.

About this title

About the Author:

Adriana N. Helbig is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh and an affiliated faculty member in Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, Global Studies, and at the Center for Russian and East European Studies. She is author (with Oksana Buranbaeva and Vanja Mladineo) of The Culture and Customs of Ukraine.

Review:

This is a unique and admirable book that traces a complex trail from hip hop created by African migrants in Ukraine through remote African-American infl uences to their origins in Uganda and back again. (Slavic Review)

Hip Hop Ukraine portrays the music as a forceful influence on worldwide social and cultural expression. Its origins in the American dispossessed gave a voice to many who identified with a similar race/class/ethnic experience, which has become tailored to local contingencies. Nevertheless, as Helbig suggests, despite the complexity that is hip hop, at times the music is in practice the expression of an individual voice and about how that voice is used to silence others. Thus Hip Hop Ukraine also speaks to that which can become lost in translation. (Slavonic and East European Review)

About this edition

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0253012007
• ISBN 13: 9780253012005
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240