If we can develop an understanding of how global rap and hip-hop and the spread of English are related, there are important considerations for educational and curricular outcomes. Since these are the forms of popular culture in which many people are investing, as educators, we too need to start engaging with these forms. In the case of the African youths he studied in Canada, Awad Ibrahim asks: ‘whose language and identity are we as TESOL professionals teaching and assuming in the classroom if we do not engage rap and hip-hop?’[1] There is, then, the need to incorporate ‘minority’ linguistic and cultural forms into the classroom: ‘To identify rap and hip-hop as curriculum sites in this context is to legitimize otherwise illegitimate forms of knowledge’.[2] Further, it is important to get those in dominant cultural groups (teachers, other students) to ‘be able to see multiple ways of speaking, being, and learning’.[3] Ibrahim concludes that, ‘maybe the time has come to close the split between minority students’ identities and the school curriculum and between those identities and classroom pedagogies, subjects and materials’.[4]
Global Noise is a fascinating book. Its central theme is that rap and hip-hop have moved far beyond what are still claimed by some as their intrinsic US contexts. Mitchell stresses that rap and hip-hop:
now operate in a global conglomeration of different local contexts, where many of the same issues of roots, rootlessness, authenticity, appropriation, syncreticization, and commodification in notions of ‘world music’ … have again come into play. The diverse ‘glocal’ musical and social dynamics that hip-hop scenes from Greenland to Aotearoa-New Zealand have developed in establishing their ‘other roots’ illustrate that the globalization of rap music has involved modalities of indigenization and syncretism that go far beyond any simple appropriation of a U.S. musical and cultural idiom. (33)
This book is very useful in thinking through issues of appropriation and globalisation in relation to the spread of English, and the inevitable gaps in its coverage leave me wanting to read more. Further work might fruitfully consider modes of organisation other than the nation. If hip-hop is such an urban phenomenon, what does rural hip-hop look like? It might also consider the implications of English and non-English appropriations; the forms and implications of white middle-class hip-hop appropriations; or how non-national, diasporic alternative identities operate in relation to the national formations discussed here. There is certainly scope for a follow-up volume to Global Noise.
ALASTAIR PENNYCOOK is Professor of Language in Education at the University of Technology, Sydney. His interests include the cultural and political implications of the global spread of English.
