Marc D.

Perry (2008) GLOBAL BLACK SELF-FASHIONINGS: HIP HOP AS DIASPORIC SPACE, Identities:
Global Studies in Culture and Power, 15:6, 635-664, DOI: 10.1080/10702890802470660

635 hip-hop’s global reach has facilitated the movement of Black subjects themselves.

635 ‘African descendant youth in an array of locales use the performative contours of hip hop to
mobilize notions of black-self in ways that are at one time both contestive and transcendent of
nationally bound racial framings’.

636 in many ways, hip-hop has formed the kind of imagined community Benedict Anderson
writes of.

637 ‘blackness’ global resonance as a hip

hop-informed signifier of social marginality’

637 hip-hop is simultaneously global, whilst also being particular of a certain racialised experience –
race cannot be erased from the equation.

637 we must take our starting point as an idea of blackness that is rooted in the idea of diaspora. So
turning traditional ideas of the relationship between place and identity, and place and race, upside down.
Moving beyond essentialisms. E.g. hip-hop is first and foremost diasporic, in that it is fundamentally
African-American.