Initially popularized by the work of Saskia Sassen, the term “Global City” encapsulates the flow of information and capital through cities that function as economic centers, and through which the world economy is managed and serviced. Sassen argues that the global city is not a singularity, as these cities are in fact part of a much larger global grid of transactions, and are not bound by national boundaries and systems of regulation. It is in these spaces that hip hop emerges as a creative and cultural force that embodies such a globality in varied forms.

The global city in the realm of hip hop makes itself visible, as it has not only an audible presence in rap music, but is also explicitly cited and digitally sampled as the urban environment is reproduced within it. Murray Forman expands on this relationship between space and rap music as he examines how The 'Hood Comes First in hip hop culture. Paul Gilroy, in speaking of the “hood,” asks the question of how “black life in one ’hood is connected to life in others? Can there be a blackness that connects, articulates, synchronizes experiences and histories across the diaspora space?” (192). As such, he insists on moving away from conceptions of the nation state, to focus on the finer topographies of cities and ‘hoods. In his articulation of a blackness that connects experiences and histories across space, we can turn to global hip hop and the manifestations of blackness it promotes, to find how these urban spaces form a larger network of not just economic flows, but also of cultural, racial, linguistic, and sonic intimacies.

With a panel of graduate students working with hip hop from across geographies such as England, Thailand, Vietnam, and India, this session emphasizes the role of the global city in the field of global hip hop studies. In doing so, the presentations in this panel also makes interventions in the study of racial feeling, subaltern urbanism, and extractionist performance practices.

In leading conversation, Lizzie Bowes’ paper ““Just a Young Boy in the Hood”: Imaginative Cartographies of the Ends in UK Rap’s Live Performances” explores how stage and set design in UK rap’s live performances enable artists to navigate the cityscapes they grew up in on their own terms, culturally claiming and marking these spaces as their own. Bowes discusses how London-centric experiences are globalized and extracted, and are consequently made into performative consumables. Drawing on the work of grime scholars such as Dan Hancox and Richard Bramwell, and cultural geographers like Joy White, Bowes interrogates what becomes of London’s hostile urbanity when it is displaced and transmuted in UK rap, and mapped onto stages in different areas, contexts, and countries.

Thereafter, Paige Chung’s paper “Hip-Hop Performances in Southeast Asia: The Rose that Grew from Concrete, the Lotus that Grew from Mud,” shifts our focus to Vietnamese and Thai hip hop, and discusses how the cities of Saigon and Chiang-Mai engage with hop to reflect their globality and interconnectedness through the racial feeling of blackness. Theorizing this racial feeling using Michelle Wright’s work, Chung argues that blackness is “imagined, defined, and performed” by artists such as Triple Edge and La Differénce in order to uplift local freedom struggles. Also drawing from traditional postcolonial theorists such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Chinua Achebe, Chung ultimately questions how hip hop facilitates a movement that traverses linguistic barriers and transmits structures of racial feeling.

Building on the transgressive potential of hip hop, Jomal Jose’s paper “The Subaltern Urbanism of Dalit Rap: The Choreopolitics of Cultural Assertion” discusses how Dalit rappers in India shatter the typical narratives of neoliberal capitalism that claim that markets are impervious to caste, and that urbanity has embraced desegregation. According to Jose, the rappers instead employ an Ambedkarite consciousness and challenge the dominant narratives of the megacity by centering the locales of marginality such as the slum, and curing the historical amnesia over the precarious existence of the subaltern. Focusing on how these sensibilities are translated into the artists’ discographies and music videos, Jose investigates their choreopolitics that foregrounds the economic and cultural contributions of Dalits to India’s metropolises.

The presentations will run for 17-18 minutes each, reserving 15 minutes at the end of the session for unstructured discussion.