Break and Flow - (New World Studies) by Charlie D Hankin

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies

Hip hop is a global form of creative expression. In Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti, rappers refuse the boundaries of hip hop's US genesis, claiming the art form as a means to empower themselves and their communities in the face of postcolonial racial and class violence. Despite the geographic and linguistic borders that separate these artists, Charlie Hankin finds in their music and lyrics a common understanding of hip hop's capacity to intervene in the public sphere and a shared poetics of neighborhood, nation, and transatlantic yearnings. Situated at the critical intersection of sound studies and Afro-diasporic poetics, Break and Flow draws on years of ethnographic fieldwork and collaboration, as well as an archive of hundreds of songs by more than sixty hip hop artists. Hankin illuminates how new media is used to produce and distribute knowledge in the Global South, refining our understanding of poetry and popular music at the turn of the millennium.

Review Quotes

Break and Flow is the product of great learning and greater passion. It draws on Hankin's extensive fieldwork in Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti to showcase the poetic innovation and political impact of rap artists responding to colonial legacies, present-day political circumstances, and their own aesthetic imperatives. Hankin's book exercises close analysis (by eye and by ear), critical theory, and a keen historical sensibility to produce a work of scholarship that celebrates three underexplored sites of hip-hop artistry.

About the Author

Charlie D. Hankin is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Davis.