Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness

368 Pages·2010·4.836 MB·English

by  Nitasha Tamar Sharma

Hip Hop Desis
Refiguring American Music
A series edited by Ronald Radano and Josh Kun
Charles McGovern, contributing editor

Nitasha Tamar Sharma
Hip Hop Desis
South Asian Americans, Blackness,
and a Global Race Consciousness
Duke University Press
Durham and London 2010
© 2010 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of
America on acid- free paper ∞
Designed by C. H. Westmoreland
Typeset in Quadraat by
Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-
Publication Data appear on the last
printed page of this book.
Duke University Press gratefully ac-
knowledges the support of the North-
western University Research Grants
Committee, which provided funds
toward the production of this book.
frontispiece: Deejay Bella spins
at a 4th of July event. Photograph
courtesy of Deejay Bella.
This book is dedicated with eternal love
to my parents, Miriam and Jagdish Sharma,
to Makaya McCraven with love
for his unending support and brilliance,
to the South Asian American hip hop artists
who make much more than music,
and to Ronald Takaki, who made generations
of activist scholars

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Claiming Space, Making Race 1
1 Alternative Ethnics: Rotten Coconuts and Ethnic
Hip Hop 37
2 Making Race: Desi Racial Identities, South Asian and
Black Relations, and Racialized Hip Hop 88
3 Flipping the Gender Script: Gender and Sexuality in
South Asian and Hip Hop America 138
4 The Appeal of Hip Hop, Ownership, and the Politics of
Location 190
5 Sampling South Asians: Dual Flows of Appropriation
and the Possibilities of Authenticity 234
Conclusion: Turning Thoughts into Action through
the Politics of Identification 283
Notes 301
References 315
Index 335

Preface
The lives of South Asians in America, or desis—a term meaning “of
the land” from the Hindi/Urdu word desh, or country—are both
historically constituted and circumscribed by global processes and
the limitations of what is possible today. Yet some members of this
community, such as South Asian American hip hop artists, take
active roles in their surroundings by disrupting seemingly fixed
ideologies in order to generate new possibilities. In chapter 1 of
this volume, “Alternative Ethnics,” I explore the artists’ ambivalent
relationships to ethnicity and the influence of South Asian par-
ents and peers from recollections of their childhood and college
experiences. While nearly half of the artists grew up in middle-
class, mostly White neighborhoods (as most desis do) where they
have contended with racism from a young age, the other half came
from racially and class-diverse neighborhoods in which they grew
up alongside Blacks and participated in creating hip hop culture.
Thus, class alone does not explain who becomes a hip hop artist;
however, where the artists grew up had broad implications for
their interactions with Blacks and their experiences with racism. I
illustrate the critique by these artists of expectations of ethnic au-
thenticity expressed within American South Asian communities as
hegemonic notions of desiness—that is, as conservative responses
to displacement, racism, and a desire to fit high up in American
society. Their production of “ethnic hip hop” illustrates a process
of sampling.
These individuals turn toward alternatives by rejecting not only