Hip Hop Diaspora: Memory, Technology, and the Politics of Electric Infrastructure

Posted: June 22nd, 2026 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Hip Hop Diaspora: Memory, Technology, and the Politics of Electric Infrastructure

Global Hip Hop Studies 8.1 — Spring 2027
A special issue of the journal Global Hip Hop Studies (Intellect Books, Bristol, UK)

About Global Hip Hop Studies

Global Hip Hop Studies (GHHS) is a peer-reviewed, rigorous, and community-responsive academic journal that serves as a hip hop cipher examining and expanding the ‘fifth element’—knowledge—and its intersections with all the culture’s material, embodied, and conceptual forms. GHHS privileges the insights of people of colour and supports marginalized, subordinated, and disenfranchised global citizens engaged in manifesting progressive political and social change. GHHS is Open Access through a Subscribe to Open model. No APCs or submission fees are charged. Authors retain copyright.

Theme and Scope

This special issue examines hip hop diaspora (HHD) in what Asante and others have identified as a “post-hip hop” moment, one where Afrobeats, Amapiano, and other sonic formations, from French, Latin and Polish trap to Korean hip hop to Indigenous Australian rap, challenge hip hop’s centrality in global musical expression and its assumed relationship to singular racial or cultural origins. Building on the critical foundations established by Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies (2005) and Louis Chude-Sokei’s The Sound of Culture (2015), we seek contributions that move beyond celebratory accounts of hip hop’s global spread to examine the infrastructural politics underlying its technological and aesthetic transformations.

Central to this inquiry is the politics of electricity, not as critique but as an exploration of what is at stake behind assumptions about and aspirations to particular forms of infrastructure. If in 1996, Appadurai’s concept of global cultural flows, particularly his technoscapes, named the uneven circuits through which technology moves across borders, this issue asks what happens when those circuits falter, break down, or never arrive. How do the uneven geographies of electrical power, internet connectivity, and technological access shape different hip hop practices? What happens when we decenter Anglophone assumptions about hip hop’s inevitable digital turn and attend instead to autochthonous analogue sounds and musical practices in cities like Havana, Lagos, Kingston, or Kampala, where infrastructural intermittency produces different sonic possibilities?

While US-based contributions are welcome, this issue actively prioritizes scholarship, practice-based knowledge, and creative work from beyond the United States. Hip Hop Diaspora, as a framework, asks what hip hop looks, sounds, and feels like when the US is not the default center of the conversation.

This special issue examines, rather than assumes, how hip hop’s evolution relates to technological and infrastructural conditions, questioning teleological narratives of inevitable progression from analogue to digital, from local to global, from underground to platform. By centring the politics of electricity and infrastructure, the issue seeks contributions that illuminate how hip hop operates not just as a global culture but as a set of profoundly local practices patterned and conditioned by specific material realities.

Topics of Interest

We welcome contributions that address, but are not limited to, the following areas:

Infrastructure and sonic practice: How do electrical grids, backup power, internet access, and technological availability pattern hip hop production, performance, circulation, and archival practice? What happens to sampling when vinyl is scarce, turntables lack stable power, or producers navigate digital platforms under data costs and power cuts?

The politics of the analogue-digital divide: How do assumptions about digital inevitability obscure the persistence of analogue practices, oral transmission, and non-digital knowledge production in hip hop communities outside the Global North?

Energy humanities and hip hop: How might frameworks from the energy humanities, including work on petrocultures, fuel economies, and infrastructural precarity, enrich understandings of hip hop’s material conditions?

Memory, archiving, and infrastructural precarity: How do hip hop communities preserve cultural memory when the infrastructures of preservation, electricity, internet, storage, institutional support, are themselves precarious? What role do non-institutional archives, mixtapes, oral histories, and embodied practices play?

Sound systems, generators, and backup power: How do sound system cultures, mobile DJ practices, and generator-dependent performance economies navigate the politics of electrical access? How do these practices relate to longer Caribbean and African diasporic histories of sonic technology?

Climate, infrastructure, and hip hop futures: How do intensifying climate impacts on electrical and communications infrastructure reshape hip hop practices, economies, and communities, particularly in the Caribbean, the Global South, and island contexts?

Decolonial and diasporic sonic epistemologies: How do hip hop practitioners and scholars draw on African diasporic, Indigenous, and decolonial knowledge traditions to theorize sound, technology, and infrastructure beyond Euro-American frameworks?

The DJ as infrastructure navigator: How do DJs, producers, and sound engineers function not only as artists and archivists but as navigators of available and unavailable technological infrastructure, working with and against material conditions to maintain cultural practice?

Submission Categories

Full articles: 6,000–7,000 words, double-blind peer reviewed.

Dive in the Archive (archive-centred) and In the Cipher (artist-centred) sections: Shorter interventions, reflections, or archival engagements. Consult guest editors for format.
Show and Prove: Image-based contributions with 400–2,000 words of accompanying text.

Review essays: Critical reviews of recent publications and media relevant to the issue’s themes.

All manuscripts must be submitted in English. Authors are welcome to provide abstracts and keywords in both English and a second language of their choice. Companion translations of published articles may be hosted online at globalcipher.org, linked to the print publication via a stable URL. This initiative sits outside the journal’s formal
remit but reflects the editors’ commitment to multilingual access and the recognition that hip hop scholarship is produced in many languages.

Submission Guidelines

Abstracts should be submitted via this form and must include:

1. A 250-word abstract
2. 5–6 keywords
3. A brief author biography (100 words)
4. Full contact information

Full manuscripts should follow GHHS’ house style (consult Intellect Books’ guidelines). All full articles will undergo double-blind peer review.

For inquiries about the special issue, please contact the guest editors at: [email protected]

Timeline

CfP released: May 2026
Abstract submissions due: 1 August 2026
Invitations to submit full manuscripts: mid-August 2026
Full manuscripts due: 15 November 2026
Peer review: December 2026 – January 2027
Reviews returned to authors: mid-February 2027
Revised manuscripts due: 15 March 2027
Final editorial review and submission to Intellect: late March 2027
Publication: Spring 2027 as GHHS 8.1

Guest Editors

Pablo D. Herrera Veitia (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) — Lead editor and GHHS liaison
Francesca D’Amico Cuthbert (University of Toronto) — Co-editor
Myrtle D. Millares (University of Toronto) — Co-editor
Dennis Howard (University of the West Indies, Mona) — Co-editor

Who We Seek

We especially encourage submissions from scholars, scholar-practitioners, and artist-researchers working in hip hop studies, sound studies, Caribbean studies, African diaspora studies, digital humanities, energy humanities, cultural memory studies, archival studies, media and technology studies, and decolonial studies. We equally welcome contributions from artists, DJs, producers, MCs, sound engineers, breakers, and community organizers whose practice-based knowledge addresses the issue’s themes. In many regions where hip hop activity is vibrant, practitioners rather than scholars hold the deepest understanding of how infrastructural conditions shape creative work. We want to hear from them. We welcome contributions that engage hip hop’s African American foundations while also examining how hip hop practices have been transformed by communities of diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds across the globe.

About This Special Issue

This special issue emerges from the Hip Hop Diaspora symposium series (University of Toronto, 2023 and 2025), the I-STREAM ERC research project on climate change, tourism, and music scenes in the Caribbean (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), and ongoing conversations about hip hop’s global reach and the material conditions underlying its technological transformations. It aims to consolidate and advance critical perspectives on hip hop diaspora as a field of study while opening new terrain at the intersection of hip hop studies, energy humanities, and critical infrastructure studies.

Global Hip Hop Studies is committed to publishing innovative, critical scholarship that advances understanding of hip hop as a global cultural phenomenon. We particularly seek contributions from Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, and from diasporic communities whose hip hop practices are shaped by infrastructural conditions rarely centred in existing scholarship. We encourage submissions that challenge existing paradigms, introduce new methodological approaches, and center voices from the Global South and diasporic communities.

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