CALL FOR PAPERS

Callaloo Special Issue:
Hip-Hop and Diaspora
Kyra D. Gaunt, Finnie Coleman, & Joe Schloss, guest editors

This is a call for abstracts of manuscripts that address the globalization of hip-hop culture. We are also calling for submissions of hip-hop art, graffiti, recordings of performance, poetry, and fiction.

This issue of Callaloo will explore questions that attend relationships to hip-hop's point of origin from Black culture(s). Given that the term "diaspora" is generally taken to mean the dispersion of any originally homogeneous people associated with a nation-state or homeland, and given the conscious and unconscious international appropriation of African American-ness and Blackness, how do the journeys hip-hop partisans undertake to perform, inscribe, and re-member their heterogeneous "roots" compare to and contrast with constructions of the African or Jewish diaspora? More precisely, how do intra- and inter-national b-girls and b-boys, in Omaha, Dakar, Dublin, Tokyo, Berlin, or Port-au-Prince, perform this intellectual "refugee-ism" and multi-culturalism without physically leaving home? Such conceptions force a re-examination of the theories of filiation, citizenship, and ethnic identity paradigmatically associated with the patriarchal nation-state and allow the fruitful ambiguities of diasporan performance to emerge.

We invite ethnographic papers that:

• explore the continuities and discontinuities between contemporary hip-hop's heterogeneous cultures and an "originally homogeneous" African American template
• examine these issues within the context of the U.S. where the very ideas of "originality" and "homogeneity" continue to be critically interrogated
• illuminate the cultural processes at work in forging and disrupting a "nation" or diaspora of hip-hop
• interrogate specific issues such as sampling, performance, body language, style, musical aesthetics, gender, sexuality, religion, technology, class, age, and the internationalization of hip-hop values and mores

Poetry and fiction submissions will be reviewed without abstract.

In all cases, multi-lingual expression is welcome and should be accompanied by an English translation where appropriate.

POSTMARK DEADLINE FOR PAPER ABSTRACTS: JUNE 1, 1999. DEADLINE FOR FULL PAPERS AND OTHER SUBMISSIONS: DECEMBER 1, 1999

Abstracts should be no more than two single-spaced pages.
Acceptance of abstracts does not constitute acceptance of the final paper.

Please address questions and submissions to:
Kyra D. Gaunt, c/o Hip-hop and Diaspora
McIntire Department of Music, University of Virginia
112 Old Cabell Hall, Charlottesville, VA 22903