1.
International Hip Hop
GLOBALIZED ANGER OR CO-OPTING AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE?
STEPHANIE LAUNIU
HIP HOP LITERATURE ENG 257C
UH WEST O’AHU

2.
Rap as global protest art
 Emmanuel Jal
 Sudanese peace activist and rapper
(Photo: factmag.com)
M.I.A., Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam
British-born Sri Lankan feminist and rapper
(Photo: www.ents24.com)

3.
Emmanuel Jal, witness to war
 Born in what is now South Sudan, Emmanuel Jal was a child when the Second
Sudanese Civil War began.
 His father joined the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). His mother was killed by
soldiers.
 He escaped with thousands of other child refugees to Ethiopia, where he eventually
began fighting with the SPLA as a child soldier.
 Jal on killing: "And, while I would not say I was sure that I shot somebody by myself, I
was told that I killed people. When you're a kid, you don't fire like adults (Batey).”
 With the help of a British aid worker, Jal escaped to Kenya where he lived in slums
and discovered hip hop music.
 "Music is powerful," he says. "It is the only thing that can speak into your mind, your
heart and your soul without your permission (Batey).“
 "For 25 years I was fed on aid. Knife crime and gun crime is poverty-driven, and
poverty leads to insecurity. Only a coward will use a gun to protect and get respect
for themselves (Batey)."

4.
Emmanuel’s work
 Emmanuel is more of a poet and doesn’t rap in the same fast freestyle way that
American rappers do (Jal, ted.com).
 He writes about war, peace, taking social and political action.
 Even though he’s witnessed the grime of war firsthand, he doesn’t include
hypermasculine images in his lyrics that are common in American “gangsta rap”
(Azcuy).
 His rap “War Child” starts out “I believe I’ve survived for a reason to tell my story
to touch lives” (Jal, genius.com).
 Allison Mackey writes that child soldiers who re-tell their stories for notoriety and
financial gain are a troubling new phenomenon in the 21st century(Mackey, 99).
 As he has become more well-known he has gained the support of many
celebrities not publicly supportive of American rappers (Kyulanova,28). I think
this is because he doesn’t write controversial lyrics and he’s not challenging
American institutions or policies. Who would be against world peace, genocide
or child soldiers?
 In his video for the release of We Want Peace – Reloaded, he has cameo
appearances from George Clooney, former president Jimmy Carter, Alicia Keys,
former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and more (rollingstone.com)

5.
M.I.A., controversial, refugee chic
 Maya Arulpragasam was born in London. She spent much of her
childhood in northern Sri Lanka.
 When the civil war broke out between the Tamil minority in the north
and Sinhalese government in the south, her father joined the militant
Tamil Tigers. Her family later fled back to London.
 She studied graphic arts and became the graphic designer for Elastica,
where she was exposed to the music industry (Encyclopedia Brittanica).
 Flamboyant and controversial, she performed while 9 months pregnant
at the 2009 Grammy Awards with Jay Z and Kanye West.
 At the 2010 Scream Awards, she arrived on the Red Carpet in a
memorable outfit. “The outfit was a custom-made black, light cloth
(perhaps silk) niqab that covered her entire body, face, and head
except for her eyes, which were heavily glittered in green…The niqab
featured imagery that might be called graffiti if it was on a wall as a
form of both public and private communication through
symbols”(Weems, 130).
 She made U.S. headlines for “flipping off the camera” when performing
with Madonna and Nicki Minaj at the 2012 Super Bowl halftime (Weems,
115).

6.
M.I.A.’s work
 I think that M.I.A. is unfairly dismissed, in some circles, as a “Tamil
hottie”, “refugee chic”, “racialized girlhood”, depoliticized and her
messages trivialized.
 Even though she is not portraying herself in the Jezebel image, it
seems as if some media outlets are trying to minimize her into that
image in a patriarchal industry.
 She was criticized for using the sound of gunshots in the chorus of
“Paper Planes”. In an interview with the Daily Beast, she said “Gun
sounds are a part of our culture as an everyday thing. If you’ve
been exposed to gunfights and violence and bombs and war then I
can use those sounds backing my thoughts, ya know (Weems, 123)?
 M.I.A. advocates for third world democracy. In Kala, she writes “Your
prime minister to your employer/Ego lovers need more power/.. All
poor people from all over/.. Cherokee Indian, Iraqi and Indians/..
Japanese, Moroccan, Caribbean, African/That’s your life but who
the f….’s your president?”

7.
Banana Ice and hip-hop in Japan

8.
Imitation + Imitation = Imitation
 In 1995, a Japanese rapper calling himself Banana Ice, released a
song “Imitation + Imitation = Imitation”.
 In this song, Banana Ice ridiculed young hip hop fans who darkened
their skin as a sign of respect to African Americans. “Your parents,
your grandparents are Japanese/You can never be the black
person you want to be.”
 A small percentage of Japanese rappers, break dancers and hip
hop fans tan their skin and wear dreadlocks as a sign of respect to
black culture (Condry, 637).
 As writer Greg Tate puts it, what do white people take from black
culture? Everything but the burden (Condry, 643).
 Ian Condry states that “It surely is a sign of globalization that in
addition to McDonald’s, Disneyland, and Starbucks, Japan now
boasts its own gangsta rappers, complete with “thugged out”
fashion, gold teeth, and platinum chains.

9.
So is Japanese hip-hop good or
bad for American hip-hop?
 Ultimately, I think that imitating “black culture” by learning to rap, break
dancing and tanning one’s skin misses the whole point of the American
hip-hop movement.
 I started out the semester saying that Hip-Hop was a musical genre, and
I have ended the semester saying that it is much more than that. Much
much more.
 Those who say that it is only a musical genre miss the point.
 Hip-hop fans in Japan are a good thing for American hip-hop, but if
they are going to try to develop their own “brand” of hip-hop, then it
trivializes American hip-hop and the political and social struggle of
black people in America.
 Hip-hop is in the cultural DNA of African Americans. You just can’t
photocopy that.
 Kenichi Ebina is a Japanese dancer that I discovered on ted.com, but
he has a unique style and doesn’t seem to be copying or emulating
anyone (Ebina, ted.com).

10.
Works Cited
 Azcuy, Phineas. Hip-Hop: The Hypermasculine Hype. 29 October 2012.
https://phineasazcuy.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/hip-hop-the-hypermasculine-hype/
 Batey, Angus. ‘I just wanted to kill’. TheGuardian, 7 April 2008. Guardian News & Media Ltd, 2015. Web.
 Condry, Ian. Yellow B-Boys, Black Culture, and Hip-Hop in Japan: Toward a Transnational Cultural Politics of Race. Positions:
East Asia Cultures Critique, Vol. 15, No. 3. Duke University Press, 2007. Print.
 Ebina, Kenichi. http://www.ted.com/talks/kenichi_ebina_s_magic_moves
 Encyclopedia Brittanica. 2015. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1537380/MIA
 Jal, Emmanuel. The Music of a War Child. http://www.ted.com/talks/emmanuel_jal_the_music_of_a_war_child
 Jal, Emmanuel. War Child. http://genius.com/Emmanuel-jal-warchild-lyrics
 Kyulanova, Irina. From Soldiers to Children: Undoing the Rite of Passage in Ishmael Beah’s ‘A Long Way Gone’ and Bernard
Ashley’s ‘Little Soldier’. Project Muse. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Print.
 Mackey, Allison. Troubling Humanitarian Consumption: Reframing Relationality in African Child Soldier Narratives. Research
in African Literatures, Vol. 44, No. 4. 2013. Print.
 Rolling Stone. Premiere: Emmanuel Jal Has One Demand on 'We Want Peace – Reloaded‘. 6 September 2012.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/videos/premiere-emmanuel-jal-has-one-demand-on-we-want-peace-reloaded-
20120906
 Weems, Lisa. Refuting “Refugee Chic”: Transnational Girl(hood)s and the Guerilla Pedagogy of M.I.A. Feminist Formations.
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Print.