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Editors H. Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim, and Alastair Pennycook assembled the contributions in Global linguistic flows from linguists, anthropologists, pop-culture scholars, and pedagogues specifically in an attempt to reframe the academic conversation on global Hip Hop. They attempt to nudge this conversation towards a greater focus on the competing processes of globalization and localization, and the specific linguistic practices deployed by Hip Hoppers around the globe to navigate the tension between the two. Alim, Ibrahim, and Pennycook modeled their work in this anthology, one of academia's central discursive arrangements, on one of Hip Hop's--the cipha. As Alim explains in his introduction, a cipha is "an organic, highly charged, fluid circular arrangement of rhymers wherein participants exchange verses" (1). The model of the cipha is invoked because of both its interactivity and its role in forming social organizations. Rappers in ciphas build off of one another's contributions, and in so doing discursively create and re-create their Hip Hop community. To that end, the anthology is fashioned as cross talk among contributors, and most cite at least one other essay contained in the volume.
The anthology is divided into two parts, or "Discs." Disc 1, "Styling locally, styling globally: The globalization of language and culture in a global Hip Hop nation," is organized around the specific ways in which Hip Hop practices interact with localized identities. Many of these studies challenge the notion of Hip Hop as an American export that is merely consumed and imitated in other contexts. Indeed, in Track 1, "Hip Hop as dusty foot philosophy: Engaging locality," Alastair Pennycook and Tony Mitchell discuss the work of an Aboriginal Australian MC who describes himself as "abo-digital ... a 21st century Aboriginal ... down with laptops and mobile phones and home entertainment" (26). This rapper argues that Hip Hop "always has been" (30) a part of Aboriginal culture by tracing linkages drawn between Hip Hop and a variety of Aboriginal cultural traditions. Other essays in the cipha, namely "So I choose to do am Naija style: Hip Hop, language, and postcolonial identities" by Tope Omoniyi, even cite challenges to the...