Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration

by Adriana N. Helbig

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253012043
Publisher:	Indiana University Press (Ips)
Publication date:	05/07/2014
Series:	Ethnomusicology Multimedia Series
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

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.

Table of Contents

Ethnomusicology Multimedia Series Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. Music and Black Identity in the Soviet Union
2. Music and Black Experiences in Post-Soviet Ukraine
3. Commercial and Underground Hip Hop in Ukraine
4. Afro-Ukrainian Hip Hop Fusion
5. Hip Hop in Uganda
Epilogue

Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Boston University - Allison Blakely

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

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

"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

Allison Blakely

"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

"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

From the Publisher