Global Hip Hop Studies - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2025

This article explores LGBTQ+ and women’s performativities in the rap scenes of Greece. Specifically, it delves into a multiplicity of issues related to women’s and gender queers’ positionalities in these particular music scenes. It explores street and hip hop femininities and their gendered resistances. It navigates us into the (audio)visualities of women and LGBTQ+ rappers in non-virtual and virtual spaces. It presents the performative negotiations of sexism and misogyny, feminist activism and female emancipation. At the same time it touches upon female rappers’ subcutaneous enslavement, women’s solidarities and anti-solidarities, different forms of queering, gendered de-authentication of hip hop cultural axioms and norms. It also explores the ways hip hop and rap intersect with Indigenous gendered categories and national identities, anti-authoritarian and left-wing gender activism, sociopolitical issues vis-á-vis wider contemporary feminist and transgender claims. In this text, following a multimodal methodological approach, content analysis on rap lyrics and long-term participant and media observation are qualified as the main tools of the anthropological hermeneutics.

The article provides a theoretical and methodological framework in beginning to map the meaningful role of Italian diaspora in North American hip hop culture between 1970s and 1990s. In particular, the article addresses the role of Italian American entrepreneurs, DJs and club dancers in building the early New York City hip hop and club scene, along with some of its most distinctive business and cultural traits. After a methodological introduction that discusses the state of the art and the diasporic notion of Italian heritage and ‘Italianness’ in the US context, the article draws upon a transcultural and ‘action-network’ vision of cultural exchange to underpin the fervid network of Italian-related agencies – products and people – which interacted with the hip hop community. Making use of scholarly literature, media sources of the period (magazines, photographs, songs and musical videos), and original interviews with key figures of the NYC club scene, the article reconnects the history of disco culture with that of hip hop, highlighting how Italian American DJs shared mixing techniques, musical tastes and venues with that of the hip hop generation. Secondly, the study provides an unprecedented in-depth history of two key NYC clubs owned by Italian Americans: the Disco Fever, credited as the first ‘hip hop club’ in the Bronx, and the Fun House in Chelsea, where an eminently Italian American dance called ‘kick dancing’ became a direct competitor of breaking. These places and the Italian heritage and business model they stood for provided a cross-racial and gender-inclusive space for the rise of hip hop music, dance and fashion, where different scenes – disco, hip hop, electro and new wave – influenced each other. In so doing, my article sheds new light on the multifaceted crosspollination between people and products of the Italian diaspora and the North American hip hop generation, informing and giving new hints for further research about ‘Italianness’ and ‘hip hopness’ through a genre- and gender-bender perspective.

The Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship at Harvard University was announced in 2013 and the inaugural fellows arrived at the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute (HARI) the next year.¹ Since then, 27 Nas fellows have passed though the programme, conducting research across a broad array of topics. This article features interviews with several of the former Nas fellows as they reflect on the importance of the fellowship for hip hop studies and on their general experiences at Harvard. Dr Henry Louis Gates Jr, the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, where HARI is housed, also offers his perspectives on the fellowship and its impact through its first decade.

Review of: This Is What I Live For: An Afro-Italian Hip-Hop Memoir, Amir Issaa (2023)

San Diego, CA: SDSU Press, 485 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-93853-772-1, p/bk, USD 24.95