Song of the Displaced: Rap and Migration in Globalized Times

The discussion of conviviality, diaspora, a territorial aesthetic and cosmopolitan multicultural work over against poverty, struggle, resistance and power - the context in which a discussion of rap and rap video as immigrant art politics is translated here to help us understand a wider predicament. Words as weapons of a war fought on a mobile terrain - it might be the idiomatic expression that stops you and requires attention, thought demands reconsideration to assess what is going on here. If this study offers anything to take away, it is an exploration of possibilities - the Japan-Brazil-Greece-Chile-France nexus of creative resistance. Overlapping sound, technology, identity, political circumstance and transformative change, this book sings the songs in print to the music read as social refusal - the rap-ideological act is a key concept, more alive than much existing, prevailing, safe musicology. I am so happy to recommend this volume for readers, for the press, for the record. It is an enormous contribution of significance and effort. I commend it to the tables that turn, for your own recoding. -John Hutnyk, author of Critique of Exotica (2000), and Pantomime Terror: Music and Politics (2014).