Editors H. Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim, and Alastair Pennycook assembled the contributions in Global linguistic flows from linguists, anthropologists, pop-culture scholars, and pedagogues specifically in an attempt to reframe the academic conversation on global Hip Hop. They attempt to nudge this conversation towards a greater focus on the competing processes of globalization and localization, and the specific linguistic practices deployed by Hip Hoppers around the globe to navigate the tension between the two. Alim, Ibrahim, and Pennycook modeled their work in this anthology, one of academia's central discursive arrangements, on one of Hip Hop's—the cipha. As Alim explains in his introduction, a cipha is “an organic, highly charged, fluid circular arrangement of rhymers wherein participants exchange verses” (1). The model of the cipha is invoked because of both its interactivity and its role in forming social organizations. Rappers in ciphas build off of one another's contributions, and in so doing discursively create and re-create their Hip Hop community. To that end, the anthology is fashioned as cross talk among contributors, and most cite at least one other essay contained in the volume.

The anthology is divided into two parts, or “Discs.” Disc 1, “Styling locally, styling globally: The globalization of language and culture in a global Hip Hop nation,” is organized around the specific ways in which Hip Hop practices interact with localized identities. Many of these studies challenge the notion of Hip Hop as an American export that is merely consumed and imitated in other contexts. Indeed, in Track 1, “Hip Hop as dusty foot philosophy: Engaging locality,” Alastair Pennycook and Tony Mitchell discuss the work of an Aboriginal Australian MC who describes himself as “abo-digital … a 21st century Aboriginal … down with laptops and mobile phones and home entertainment” (26). This rapper argues that Hip Hop “always has been” (30) a part of Aboriginal culture by tracing linkages drawn between Hip Hop and a variety of Aboriginal cultural traditions. Other essays in the cipha, namely “So I choose to do am Naija style: Hip Hop, language, and postcolonial identities” by Tope Omoniyi, even cite challenges to the narrative of the American origins of Hip Hop; Omoniyi argues that “some of the component features of Hip Hop are now being identified as composite elements of the essential culture and identity of some West African societies” (116). She argues that these alternative narratives directly challenge the notion of global Hip Hop as indicative of cultural imperialism. Rather, they serve as just one example of the ways in which global citizens disassemble Hip Hop to claim it as something of their own.

The remainder of the contributions in this first disc similarly devote themselves to identifying the significance of Hip Hop to localized contexts. Notably, Jannis Androutsopoulos adapts John Fiske's model of intertextuality to the study of global Hip Hop. He argues for immersive research into local Hip Hops that takes into account both horizontal relationships between different examples of music and vertical relationships between musicians, media, and audiences. Jennifer Roth-Gordon discusses how American Hip Hop's attention to black/white race relations has allowed Brazilian MCs to create a framework wherein they can call attention to racist practices in a society that prides itself on its alleged race-neutrality. Christina Higgins studies lyrics, message board postings, newspaper columns, and personal advertisements to demonstrate how youth in Tanzania use both street Swahili and African-American English to index themselves as members of the Global Hip Hop Nation. In the only essay in Disc 1 set in the US, Cecelia Cutler discusses the various linguistic resources, from stance to phonology, deployed by a white MC and his African American opponents in a New York City Hip Hop Battle. She argues that in American Hip Hop, traditional racial hierarchies are reversed so whites must recognize and cooperate in their markedness in order to be successful. Through such attention to linguistic detail in such disparate contexts, the contributions to this section effectively make a case for Hip Hop as something other than a primarily American hegemonic export. They show the ways in which it serves as a resource that individuals in localized Hip Hop communities tap into and stylize to identify both with membership of a global community and with their own local histories.

The contributions in Disc 2, “The power of the word: Hip Hop poetics, pedagogies, and the politics of language in global contexts,” pay the same attention to local and linguistic detail, but the organizing principle here is a focus on documenting social change through Hip Hop, and the opportunities for advocacy that Hip Hop presents. Sites of study here range from the sociopolitical to the artistic. For instance, In “‘Still reppin por mi gente’: The transformative power of language mixing in Quebec Hip-Hop,” Mela Sarkar analyzes the ways in which rapid code-switching across dialects of French, Caribbean Creoles, and English in Quebecois Hip Hop complicates the “unspoken grounding in ‘Whiteness’ and ‘Frenchness’” (153) of Quebecois identity. With a similar attention to challenges to dominant ideologies, Angel Lin focuses her essay on the work of Hong Kong rapper MC Yan, who was inspired by socially conscious US rap to dedicate his Hip Hop career to addressing controversial social topics. She argues that he is the only Hong Kong MC to do so, but that his commitment to social issues raises the possibility of using Hip Hop to create a critical street pedagogy to influence political consciousness. On the more artistic side, “Rhyme and the reinterpretation of Hip Hop in Japan” by Natsuko Tsujimura and Stuart Davis, discusses the “borrowing” of rhyme into Japanese Hip Hop (rhyme is absent from traditional Japanese poetry) and its subsequent modification to fit Japanese notions of moraic, as opposed to syllabic, assonance.

The remaining three chapters in Disc 2 focus more directly on the intersection between Hip Hop and pedagogy. In “That's all concept; it's nothing real: Reality and lyrical meaning in rap,” Michael Newman discusses a Hip Hop class at the Urban Arts Academy, a New York secondary school. He uses the lyrics students wrote to challenge the dichotomy between conscious and gangsta rap. Despite the often violent metaphors in their rhymes, Newman finds considerable evidence that the students in the program are using Hip Hop as an outlet to reject violence. H. Samy Alim discusses his own critical Hip Hop language pedagogy in “Creating ‘an empire within an empire’: Critical Hip Hop language pedagogies and the role of sociolinguistics” He argues that traditional language pedagogies, even those that try to be progressive, devalue minority dialects and calls for critical pedagogies that “begin with efforts to uncover and understand the complex and conflicting language ideologies within particular educational institutions” (217). In his own Hip Hop informed pedagogy, he has students do ethnographic research on their own linguistic practices and exposes them to research on linguistic profiling in order to help them see the relationships between language and power. Alim advises us that “as sociolinguists, we must do more than study the relationships between language, society and power—we must do what we can to alter those relationships” (228). Similarly, Awad Ibrahim ends Disc 2 and concludes the cipha by using Hip Hop as a framework for a similar call to arms, outlining the need for culturally critical, relevant pedagogies.

The division between Disc 1 and Disc 2 is, as might be evident from the above review, somewhat blurred. All of the contributions in Disc 1 deal in some way with language politics, and all of the “tracks” in Disc 2 deal with the specific linguistic practices of Hip Hoppers in localized contexts. Still, the anthology as a whole reads as incredibly on point: all of the contributors are unequivocal in their opposition to the notion of Hip Hop as cultural hegemony. Even if they do not explicitly oppose the idea (most of them do), they still set about dismantling it by exposing nuance after nuance in the way global Hip Hoppers use language to incorporate Hip Hop into their own communities and localities, or by pointing to the ways in which Hip Hop can inform critical pedagogy. In so doing, they not only provide an effective challenge to the imperialist model, they also reaffirm the effectiveness of attention to linguistic detail as a worthwhile research method in the study of both global media and educational practice. As such, this anthology would be of great use to scholars interested in language and linguistics, globalization, pop-culture, and the various ways they intersect.