Haupt, Adam, Quentin Williams, H. Samy Amin, and Emile Jansen, eds. Neva Again: Hip Hop Art, Activism, and Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa.

• Author: Wa-Muiu, Mueni

Haupt, Adam, Quentin Williams, H. Samy Amin, and Emile Jansen, eds. Neva Again: Hip Hop Art, Activism, and Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council, 2019.

The editors of this book, the first to be published on hip hop in post-apartheid South Africa, have brought together diverse personalities in the hip hop world to make sense of its impact on education, politics, social justice, and gender. They tackle issues from #feesmustfall to opening up Stellenbosch University for all South Africans. Hip hop aesthetics are political because it "privileges black cultural priorities where whiteness insists on hearing only 'black noise" (11). With this in mind, the editors have brought together activists, scholars, and artists to debate what it means to decolonize the academy and the arts. The authors challenge Eurocentric approaches to knowledge production, distribution, and learning. A critical question raised in this volume is why research journals based in the Global North are held in higher esteem than those based in the Global South (Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Latin America). The volume seeks to answer the following questions: What is the origin of hip hop in South Africa? What methods does hip hop use to convey its message? How do hip hop artists rethink the use of language and education as well as the relationships among art, class, gender, and sexuality? How do these artists address the intersection between art and politics? Hip hop art challenges communities to critically examine the conditions facing them through breakdance, dance, graffiti, music, poetry, lyricism, and turntablism. Artists must represent their experiences as well as the communities they come from authentically by composing art based on these experiences. In the context of hip hop art, members of the community are not spectators to their own lived experiences. No one speaks for these communities, because they alone know the conditions and solutions to the issues that they face. These communities are politically and socially engaged. They also have agency in how they are represented as they empower themselves through reading critical texts. Hip hop challenges oppression in all its forms as it uses the motto "reach one, teach one." In the introduction, the editors trace the development of hip hop from the mid-1980s, with its strong influences from the United States, to the 1990s, when South African hip hop...