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The title of this book wouldn't predict opening and concluding chapters on hip-hop and hip-hop cultures worldwide. What does hip-hop have to do with global Englishes? And what are transcultural flows? In this well-written, incredibly wide-ranging, and still slender volume, Pennycook connects the dots for us. What impresses Pennycook, quoting from Mitchell (2001:2), is that "hip-hop and rap cannot be viewed simply as an expression of African-American culture; it has become a vehicle for global youth affiliations and a tool for reworking local identity all over the world" (8). And along with the break-dancing, DJ-ing, and graffiti, the culture of hip-hop, through rap, is also causing English to take root in these youth cultures. What impresses Pennycook is that these "transcultural flows," as he calls them, have comfortably rooted hip-hop (and English) in youth culture worldwide without uproars over the imperialism of spreading English to the world and without the time and effort of establishing national language policies calling for English to enter a particular country's school system by a particular grade. What is hip-hop doing right that academics scornful of studying funk and popular culture need to know? This is the fundamental question driving Pennycook's book.
As it turns out, hip-hop is doing quite a lot right, particularly in its hidden theoretical assumptions about cultural dynamics. First, indigenous cultures deserve more credit for their capacity to suit English to their own purposes than they are generally given by those (e.g., Phillipson, Skutnabb-Kangas, Hoerkeimer, Adorno) conceiving English and Anglo-American culture as monoliths able to steamroll local difference. Wherever English has entered hip-hop cultures worldwide, be it East Asia, France, West Africa, or the Pacific Islands, it has entered as congenial, one of many codes in a code-switching neighborhood of imported and indigenous languages.
Second, nation-states and their Enlightenment understandings of language, knowledge, and colonization are out of step with the contemporary reality of cultural influence and change, particularly within youth cultures. Pennycook argues that even the "post" theories criticizing these understandings (poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism) lie trapped in the (outdated nationalistic) frameworks they are attacking. To understand the cultural dynamics of hip-hop, Pennycook seeks to replace "post" theories with "trans" theories - starting with theories of transgression. To transgress...