This essay takes up David Tracy’s adjective ‘mystical-prophetic’ amid racialised North America. Since 1990 Tracy has employed the category to indicate the way concrete theological expression brings together the mystical-aesthetic-contemplative (and apophatic) and the prophetic-ethical-political (and apocalyptic) in tensive conjunction. Emphasising the hyphen, this essay applies Tracy’s term to hip-hop, elucidating the tension between hip-hop’s early overtly political character– ‘the sudden eruption of black and brown voices on to the stage of American life, a rumbling and riotous explosion of sound and self-expression’– and its later characteristically aestheticised (and commercialised) pleasures as primarily ‘renegade music, dance and art’. Those drawn to the politics may not rush past hip-hop’s multilayered artistic and participative exhilarations. Examining Childish Gambino’s powerful 2018 song and music video ‘This is America’, the author finds Tracy’s category relevant and applicable beyond religion narrowly defined, proposing ‘street theology’ as a form of public theology that emerges here as the genius of hip-hop is interpreted sympathetically as mystical-prophetic.

Black literature of the 1980s grew in conjunction with the multifaceted cultural phenomenon known as Hip-Hop. A key aspect of this growth was the subversion of Eurocentric rules and expectations. This mindset connected to deep African American traditions on multiple levels. First, in rejecting the general belief that art should be made in accordance with Eurocentric aesthetic principles, Hip-Hop took its place in a long line of African American literary and artistic forms that took that position either as an explicitly political statement, as a reflection of respect toward African American audiences, or as some combination.Second, Hip-Hop also questioned specific tenets of Eurocentric art, such as the idea that written literature was more sophisticated than oral literature, or that linear development was inherently superior to cyclical forms. Third, Hip-Hop developed aesthetic and pragmatic strategies for making art outside of a Eurocentric framework. Fourth, Hip-Hop drew upon Afro-Diasporic conceptual frameworks and traditions as the foundation of those strategies. Finally, it used artistic debates around all of these questions as part of the art itself.

Trey Ellis’s novel Platitudes, published within a year of his landmark essay “The New Black Aesthetic,” is the essay come to fictional life: a novel about a struggling experimental Black male novelist who “collaborates” with a Black feminist novelist to tell the competing-narrative story oftwo Black teen characters who maintain their personas throughout the novel, even though they exist in different historical eras. Ellis’s publication of “The New Black Aesthetic” alongside Platitudes allows students of 1980s Black cultural production to view Ellis’s manifesto and his novel as symbiotic texts that are companion pieces that comment on a nascent, post-Civil Rights Movement school of Black art that has come to be known as post-Blackness. These two texts not only grapple with Black feminism but also push back at a mid-twentieth-century prose style that was not limited to Black female writers, and Platitudes ultimately represents the unstable, fluid nature of Blackness itself. An examination of the way Ellis’s works present a coherent case for post-Blackness acknowledges Ellis’s late-twentieth-century position as a key transitional figure in African American literary history.

This chapter investigates the evolution of rap music in Guadeloupe at the end of the 1990s. Based on ethnographic data and grounded in both postcolonial and decolonial theories, the chapter explores the relationship between Guadeloupe and American hip-hop, as well as the role local French Caribbean cultural politics served in enabling new constructions of belonging to take root in Guadeloupe hip-hop.

This chapter traces the influence of paperback books on American literary subcultures after World War II. Cheap, handy, and accessible for most readers, the mass-market paperback format at once democratized the culture of letters and exploited stereotypes for profit. When it came to race relations, paperbacks’ capacity for disrepute collided with African Americans’ struggle for civil rights in a subgenre called “black sleaze.” In the 1940s and 1950s, books that tackled racial violence were repackaged with prurient covers that emphasized the taboo of interracial sex. This set the stage for the 1960s, when direct-to-paperback books bracketed social upheaval in the real world for sexual hedonism in fantasy. White readers’ problematic consumption of black sleaze was epitomized by the release of Iceberg Slim’s autobiographical novel Pimp in 1967 by the white-owned, tabloid-oriented Holloway House. However, after seeing the racial composition of its readership change in the 1970s, Holloway House sidelined sleaze for black pulp fiction formula stories by black authors for black readers. The switch may have appeared to vanquish sleaze, but elements of it remained embedded in this masculinist subgenre of books, which went on to inspire key figures in rap and hip-hop culture.

The epilogue offers a series of vignettes meant to demonstrate the contemporary legacies of the dialectic between those who see fangyan as a more “flexible” notion of Chinese identity and homogenizing forces that seek to reframe them as nothing more than subsidiary variants of the Chinese standard language. These anecdotes, moving from local journalism to underground hip-hop to protest flash mobs, present a thematic epilogue, highlighting through example the significances of fangyan that continue to shape Chinese nationalism today.

In this chapter, using historical records and academic commentaries and research, we trace language contact in Cape Town from as far back as 400 CE. We detail how people indigenous to the area, as well as migrants from the rest of Africa and abroad, adapted their speech for social, political and economic reasons, with the result that Dutch, and later Afrikaans and English, gained prominence. After this diachronic account, we focus on two contemporary speech communities in Cape Town, and through interviews and participant observations confirm that while English is considered a prestige language and the key to future success, people still speak vernacular varieties of their own languages and of English. Examination of the linguistic landscape of the city in a number of research articles shows that English (some of it non-standard) is used far more widely in signage than African languages, which are used primarily for stylistic and affective reasons. Finally, we use research into hip-hop and rap performances in the city to argue that in this domain of music, local languages and mixed codes are preferred over English.

The airing of the documentary Style Wars on public television in 1984 was a seminal moment in the adoption of hip-hop style art by urban youth in Aotearoa New Zealand, particularly young M?ori and Pasifika men in Auckland and Wellington. Today, non-commissioned art is not the preserve of a specific ethnic or cultural group, indeed, a research paper written for the Ministry of Justice found “little evidence to suggest that graffiti writers are a distinct subgroup among young people”. Askew One (Elliot O’Donnell) is probably the best-known Auckland street artist. The works of BMD, the most prominent Wellington street artists, adorn many of the capital’s walls. Other often-encountered pseudonyms include “Component, Eeks, Ghstie and Yelz”. Kerryn Pollock observes: “Street art is male-dominated, but some women have gained recognition for their work, including Diva, Misery (Tanja Thompson), Flox (Hayley King), Erin Forsyth, Xoe Hall and Mica Still.” Yarn bombing is also common, notably in Wellington, and, because it is perceived as feminine and non-threatening, widely accepted across generations.

India has a long history of murals although its street art and graffiti scene has begun to develop in a manner which would be immediately recognisable to the West only in recent years, and that too primarily in major urban centres. The impetus appears to be to engage in enjoyable work, to acquire what commissions are possible, to promote traditional arts, and to raise awareness not just about art but also about socio-political issues.

Assuming that the content in question was not socially inflammatory or illegal from the viewpoint of Indian content laws, which are spread across more than thirty statutes, and assuming that the content had not been illegally placed on a ‘high profile’ surface, addressing vandalism, though it is an offence, does not appear to necessarily be accorded a very high priority by the police. On one hand, there exist anecdotal indications that creators are not always the recipients of police beneficence or forbearance while, on the other, there are also cases where the illegal creation of works is not investigated by the police-certainly not of its own accord-which is entirely unsurprising given that its resources are often stretched

Despite the extraordinary presence of rap and bounce in New Orleans and of New Orleans practitioners of these forms in the wider world, this expressive tradition has had little institutional support in a city that devotes great resources to other forms. For this reason, an archive was set up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to preserve this cultural history in ways that would give those closest to this world as much control over the archive as possible and preserve the cultural geography of pre-Katrina.