Nigerian Hip-Hop: Race, Knowledge, and the Poetics of Resistance

Nigerian Hip-Hop examines questions lying at the intersection of rap poetics, race, knowledge, and popular culture. Troubling the conventional paradigm of reading in which hip-hop in Nigeria stands for imperial machinery, it directs attention to the culture’s provocative meditations on the afterlives of slavery and colonialism. The book tracks these meditations across a wide range of sources, including lyrics, music videos, cover arts, liner notes, photographs, social media, archival materials, and oral interviews with dozens of the key figures at the center of the culture. Placing these sources in conversation with one another, it examines them closely for what they reveal about the contemporary trajectories of African poetry, popular culture, transnational media flows, youth resistance, and pan-African solidarity. The first comprehensive and systematic account of Nigerian hip-hop—one of the world’s oldest and most vibrant of such scenes—this book attends to the literary forms, the density of ideas, historical encounters, ideological struggles, and the lively internal debates that have animated the culture for more than four decades.