Periscope articles and content
Introduction: The Making of a Hip Hop Globe Pedro Alberto Martínez Conde, otherwise known as Perucho Conde, was probably the first rapper to compose a hit song outside the United States. A poet and comedian from the inner-city Caracas … Continue reading “Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation (Book Excerpt)”
As plenty of proud nostalgic discourses locate the residues of hip-hop culture circling the drains of sample exhaustion, scene fatigue, patched-in cameos, or the same old cushy R’n’B, people world over just keep going about inventing new worlds of musical … Continue reading “"In One, All": Senegalese Women Freestyle Artists Unify the Global Ghetto”
Kabu verdi / Nu bai / Gosi nu sta na Portugei / Nu bai / Es ta ben y sai / Chullage “Cape Verde / Let’s go / Now, we’re in Portugal / Let’s go / They [my people] … Continue reading “Bearing Witness and the Challenges of Community in Global Hip Hop”
Sujatha Fernandes’s Close to the Edge explores a variety of contexts in which hip-hop is practiced around the world, and draws them together with the thread of Fernandes’s personal experiences. My own work has been based on the ethnographic … Continue reading “"Wherever I Bless a Microphone": Ethnographic Perspectives on Hip-Hop's Transnational Flow”
One of my earliest recollections of the contradictions inherent in hip hop’s global spread happened in July 1995 when I, rather suddenly, noticed my friend Marwan’s younger brother Samir pointing at me and singing “I said Hello Everybody” from … Continue reading “Leaping Towards The Edge”
The financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent “Great Recession” have often been seen as crises of debt and credit. Political economists have attempted to unravel the financial instruments — the subprime mortgages and collateralized debt obligations — at the … Continue reading “Introduction”
How does debt act as a tool of labor discipline? As a catalyst of capitalist accumulation? As a method of labor degradation? I want to approach these questions by imagining a series of three lives, working lives, working lives … Continue reading “Working Lives in Debt”
Every winter millions of monarch butterflies migrate from the United States and Canada to forests in central Mexico. The sight of their arrival stops people and traffic not only by virtue of its uniqueness, but also due to the … Continue reading “Environment in Debt”
“Without memory, there is no debt. Put another way: without story, there is no debt.” That’s how Margaret Atwood put it in her book, Payback (2008), in which she foregos the structures of finance in order to explore … Continue reading “A Debt Remembered”
In the nineteen-teens, Concepcion García, a Mexican national, lived in Texas to attend school. In April 1919 she became ill, and attempted to return home. That same month Lt. Gulley of the U.S. Cavalry patrolled the U.S.-Mexico border. While crossing … Continue reading “Indemnity for State Murder”
The establishment of Chinese sociology was transnational from the very beginning. During the early decades of the twentieth century, Europe and Japan were two major sources of Chinese sociological knowledge, but starting from the 1920s, Chinese sociology developed a … Continue reading “Negotiating Intellectual Debt”
The German philosopher Ernst Bloch in his massive tome The Spirit of Utopia, devoted an entire section to what he called ” Little Daydreams”. Overflowing each page are mystical and impressionistic descriptions of phenomena like wishful thinking, social utopias, … Continue reading “Dreamworlds of Debt”
Two thirds of American College graduates graduate in debt. Traditionally, student debt, like a home mortgage, was thought of as “good” debt, a wise investment in the future. The current financial crisis has disrupted that common sense, and … Continue reading “The Banking Model of Education”
Why are we in debt? And, why do we believe we are in debt? It is not a question of whether we are in debt: we are. In recent years, from Turkey to the United Kingdom, credit card debt … Continue reading “The Fetishism of Debt”
It’s important to begin with a reminder of the reasons everybody is talking about debt these days. The threat of “debt crisis” hangs over the world economy. The United States “has been living beyond its means,” Greece “cannot pay its … Continue reading “Debt Dossier”
