The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop

The Hiplife in Ghana explores one international site - Ghana, West Africa - where hip-hop music and culture have morphed over two decades into the hiplife genre of world music. It investigates hiplife music not merely as an imitation and adaptation of hip-hop, but as a reinvention of Ghana's century-old highlife popular music tradition. Author Halifu Osumare traces the process by which local hiplife artists have evolved a five-phased indigenization process that has facilitated a youth-driven transformation of Ghanaian society. She also reveals how Ghana's social shifts, facilitated by hiplife, have occurred within the country's 'corporate recolonization, ' serving as another example of the neoliberal free market agenda as a new form of colonialism. Hiplife artists, we discover, are complicit with these global socio-economic forces even as they create counter-narratives that push aesthetic limits and challenge the neoliberal order

Author: H. Osumare
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 09/06/2012
Pages: 219
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.70w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781137021649

About the Author
HALIFU OSUMARE is Associate Professor and Director of African American & African Studies at the University of California, Davis, USA. She is also the author of The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop.