4 research outputs found
From A-Town to ATL: The Politics of Translation in Global Hip Hop Culture
This article examines the linguistic and cultural tensions in global Hip Hop culture through an analysis of the performance of Gsann, an emcee from the Tanzanian Hip Hop crew X Plastaz, at the 2009 Black Entertainment Television (BET) Hip Hop Awards in Atlanta. Gsann\u27s rhymes in Swahili, his emphasis on religion, and his global travels distinguished him from his African American colleagues in the cipha. At the same time, the decision by the BET producers to translate Gsann\u27s Swahili rhymes into English has to be seen within the longer history of cultural and linguistic politics in Tanzania and the United States. Thrown into the primetime spectacle of the BET Awards, Gsann\u27s African roots became quickly incorporated into American Hip Hop culture, dominated by African Americans. As this case study of an artist from Tanzania shows, Hip Hop\u27s global journey has brought together artists from around the world without eliding their cultural and linguistic differences
From A-Town to ATL: The Politics of Translation in Global Hip Hop Culture
This article examines the linguistic and cultural tensions in global Hip Hop culture through an analysis of the performance of Gsann, an emcee from the Tanzanian Hip Hop crew X Plastaz, at the 2009 Black Entertainment Television (BET) Hip Hop Awards in Atlanta. Gsann\u27s rhymes in Swahili, his emphasis on religion, and his global travels distinguished him from his African American colleagues in the cipha. At the same time, the decision by the BET producers to translate Gsann\u27s Swahili rhymes into English has to be seen within the longer history of cultural and linguistic politics in Tanzania and the United States. Thrown into the primetime spectacle of the BET Awards, Gsann\u27s African roots became quickly incorporated into American Hip Hop culture, dominated by African Americans. As this case study of an artist from Tanzania shows, Hip Hop\u27s global journey has brought together artists from around the world without eliding their cultural and linguistic differences
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Islands of Labor: Community, Conflict, and Resistance in Colonial Samoa, 1889-1919
My dissertation follows the lives and struggles of the workers of Samoa from the last decade of the nineteenth century until the end of the Great War. Drawing on a wide range of sources—from travel reports and court depositions to photographs and maps—my dissertation reconstructs the experiences of Samoans as well as migrants from Melanesia, Micronesia, and China. This diverse group of peoples living in Samoa harnessed their own energy and that of their natural environment to create a colonial world often beyond their own control. At the same time, they succeeded in re-creating their own lifeworlds in ways that often defied the limits of this colonial world. I argue that community, conflict, and resistance among workers in colonial Samoa can best be understood by delving deeply into the particular dynamics of particular workscapes. Five workscapes—the subsistence economy, the plantation, the ethnographic show, the building of infrastructure, and the colonial service—became crucibles of lived sociality and, over time, political solidarity for the people living and laboring in colonial Samoa. As much as German, American, and New Zealand colonial officials tried to keep workers apart from one another, they succeeded in overcoming racial and colonial boundaries and formed new kinds of community.American Studie