The blurbs are in for Flip the Script! Read the Endorsements
(p.s. I didn’t make these up!!!)
“After four decades, the old US cultural copyrights on hip hop have expired. The form has travelled and the style become a planetary phenomenon. This detailed, innovative and exhilarating book tracks their impact across the postcolonial world. At last we have a critical survey that can match the complexity and power of the music.”
-Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic
“Flip the Script takes us on a marvelous journey from Paris to Berlin, London to Cork, offering a brilliantly textured portrait of European hip hop. Rollefson’s lively readings of performances help us to hear hip hop music as a postcolonial art and practice that can lead us to a more equitable and just future. An inspiring and hopeful book.”
-Ellie M. Hisama, Columbia University
“Employing sophisticated theoretical analysis mixed with ample hip hop savvy, J. Griffith Rollefson deftly explains how hip hop artists not only flip the historical scripts of European colonial authority and narrowly defined national identities, but rip and shred them. Simply stated, this is a powerful book with a killer flow.”
-Murray Forman, Northeastern University
“Flip the Script is highly original and ambitious, and a substantial contribution to research on hip hop and postcolonialism. Rollefson combines ethnographic methods with close readings of media texts in a way that allows him to account for both the texture of everyday life in the communities he worked in, and musical and textual details of the art emanating from within those communities.”
-Thomas Solomon, University of Bergen
Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality 