This book focuses on the culture and politics involved in building hip-hop archives. It addresses practical aspects, including methods of accumulation, curation, preservation, and digitization and critically analyzes institutional power, community engagement, urban economics, public access, and the ideological implications associated with hip-hop culture's enduring tensions with dominant social values.
The collection of essays are divided into four sections; Doing the Knowledge, Challenging Archival Forms, Beyond the Nation and Institutional Alignments: Interviews and Reflections. The book covers a range of official, unofficial, DIY and community archives and collections and features chapters by scholar practitioners, educators and curators.
A wide swath of hip-hop culture is featured in the book, including a focus on dance, graffiti, clothing, and battle rap. The range of authors and their topics span countries in Asia, Europe, the Caribbean and North America.
Mark V. Campbell is a DJ, scholar and curator. His research explores the relationships between Afrosonic innovations, hip hop archives and notions of the human. He is assistant professor of music and culture and director of the Afrosonic Innovation Lab at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
Contact: University of Toronto Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail, Scarborough, ON m1c 1A4, Canada.
Murray Forman is professor of media and screen studies at Northeastern University. He is author of The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop and One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television. He is also co-editor of Hip-Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production and three editions of That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. In 2003–2004, he was awarded a US National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and he was an inaugural recipient of the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University (2014–2015).