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University of California Press

About the Book

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Nairobi Hip Hop Flow is an interdisciplinary study that combines ethnographic methods, political history, and music and performance analysis to illustrate the richness of hip hop's embodied performance practices. RaShelle R. Peck examines underground rap culture in Nairobi to illustrate how hip hop artists engage with political seriousness in lyrics and sound and foster a creative playfulness using bodily movement. Through these artists' embodiments, a persistent diasporic blackness circulates, indigenizing the music and working alongside lyrical content to interrogate Kenya's sociopolitical landscape. Peck presents an unprecedented study of Nairobi artists' interactions with localized lyrics and globally signified performative, masculinist, and diasporic embodiments—one that is critical for understanding how hip hop espouses a globalized locality.
 

About the Author

RaShelle R. Peck is Assistant Professor of Ethnic and Race Studies at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Reviews

"A much-needed addition to scholarship on Kenya and global hip hop studies. RaShelle Peck takes care to not examine hip hop culture in Kenya as if it is completely independent of the culture anywhere else, or as if it is an imitation of American hip hop. Instead, she appropriately places Kenyan hip hop within broader hip hop studies, while recognizing that Kenyan hip hop has its own identity."—Msia Kibona Clark, author of Hip-Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers

"A remarkable study that takes us into the heart of Nairobi hip hop and at the same time introduces a novel approach and framework in the corporeality of hip hop. Peck demonstrates not only what is meant by hip hop flow, but how those who have come to define their lives by Kenyan hip hop embody such a practice."—Quentin Williams, co-editor of Neva Again: Hip Hop Art, Activism, and Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa

"Peck offers a clear intervention into the diasporic and transnational elements of hip hop by exploring the distinctive verbal flows, production styles, and sociopolitical dimensions of Nairobi hip hop, while also relating her account to broader histories of hip hop and global formations of blackness that transcend and complicate the local."—Carter Mathes, author of Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights