This panel will discuss how transatlantic movement has shaped hip hop culture and perhaps legitimized its presence in academe and other cultural spaces once considered off-limits to members of the Hip Hop Nation (HHN).

By the late 1970s, rap music became transnational, reaching through radio airwaves with a voice of a new generation of movers and shakers, literally speaking. Moving across Caribbean waters, hip hop music surfaced in New York City’s South Bronx via a young Jamaican deejay who captivated a new listening audience. From this mobile beginning, hip hop has continued to expand stylistically, temporally and spatially. What, however, is the relationship between hip hop stylistics and expressions and its transatlantic expansion?

Non-aficionados of the genre point to rap music as “the signifier” of hip hop culture. However, the pioneers of hip hop culture provide the explicit correction: hip hop culture consists of: da’ music, da’ dance, da’ fashion and da’ language. These elements of hip hop culture are embraced worldwide by a distinct nation called the Hip Hop Nation (HHN). This panel explores historical, cultural and stylistic questions related to hip hop’s movements: How has the HHN moved across the Atlantic since 1979? What is hip hop culture in Africa? In the Caribbean? In North America? In Europe? How has hip hop culture expanded its influence to academia and highbrow entertainment industries on both sides of the Atlantic?

Please send a 200-250 word proposal with paper’s title to Atlantikos editor Kristina Quynn (quynn@msu.edu) before September 13, 2008. Please include your affiliation, mailing address, phone/fax, email address, and a brief CV (no more than 2 pages).