February 5, 2015

“Hip Hop Ukraine” examines music, migration, black identity

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Book_Hip-hop“Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race and African Migration,” by Adriana N. Helbig, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2014. 258 pp. ISBN: 978-0-253-01204-3. $25 (paperback), $70 (cloth), $21.99 (e-book).

Prof. Adriana Helbig’s “Hip Hop Ukraine: Music Race and African Migration” is an examination of music and black identity during the Soviet era, the black experience in post-Soviet Ukraine, the commercial and underground hip hop scene in Ukraine, highlighting Afro-Ukrainian collaborative examples, as well as hip hop in Uganda.

The book offers multimedia examples that are accessed through the website www.ethnomultimedia.org, with links to videos to performances, interviews, advertisements and other files.

The publisher’s description states: “In ‘Hip Hop Ukraine,’ we enter a world of urban music and dance competitions, hip hop parties and recording studio culture to explore unique sites of interracial encounters among African students, African immigrants and local populations in eastern Ukraine. Adriana N. Helbig combines ethnographic research with music, media and policy analysis to examine how localized forms of hip hop create social and political spaces where an interracial youth culture can speak to issues of human rights and racial equality. She maps the complex trajectories of musical influence — African, Soviet, American — to show how hip hop has become a site of social protest in post-socialist society and a vehicle for social change.”

Dr. Helbig is assistant professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh. She is an affiliated faculty member in cultural studies, women’s studies and global studies, and at the Center for Russian and East European Studies. She is the author (with Oksana Buranbaeva and Vanja Mladineo) of “The Culture and Customs of Ukraine.”

Readers may obtain copies of the book via online retailers such as Amazon and Banres & Noble, or by contacting the publisher: Indiana University Press, Office of Scholarly Publishing, Herman B. Wells Library 350, 1320 E. 10th St., Bloomington IN 47405-3907; via telephone, 800-842-6796; or online, www.iupress.indiana.edu.

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