Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration
ISBN: 9780253012081
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Indiana University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Rap (Music) -- Ukraine -- History and criticism; Hip-hop -- Ukraine; Blacks -- Race identity -- Ukraine;

"[A] magnificent study . . . adds to the burgeoning scholarship on global hip hop and furthers our knowledge of the African diaspora in Eastern Europe." -- Anthropology of East Europe Reviews

Featured in NPR's "Read These 6 Books About Ukraine"

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.

"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 influences to their origins in Uganda and back again." -- Slavic Review

"Portrays the music as a forceful influence on worldwide social and cultural expression." -- Slavonic and East European Review

"A well-conceived study of the role and significance of hip hop in Ukraine. It joins the ranks of other very timely chronicles on the impact of hip hop in various societies around the world." --Allison Blakely, Boston University


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.

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