Hip hop is a global form of creative expression. In Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti, rappers refuse the boundaries of hip hop’s US genesis, claiming the art form as a means to empower themselves and their communities in the face of postcolonial racial and class violence. Despite the geographic and linguistic borders that separate these artists, Charlie Hankin finds in their music and lyrics a common understanding of hip hop’s capacity to intervene in the public sphere and a shared poetics of neighborhood, nation, and transatlantic yearnings. Situated at the critical intersection of sound studies and Afro-diasporic poetics, Break and Flow draws on years of ethnographic fieldwork and collaboration, as well as an archive of hundreds of songs by more than sixty hip hop artists. Hankin illuminates how new media is used to produce and distribute knowledge in the Global South, refining our understanding of poetry and popular music at the turn of the millennium. Published in 2023 by the University of Virginia Press, Break and Flow was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies by the Modern Languages Association.

Charlie Hankin (Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, UC Davis) specializes in music-literature relations in the twentieth and twenty-first century Caribbean and Brazil. His research and teaching bring together sound studies and ethnomusicology, Afro-Latin American thought and poetics, hip hop studies, and comparative literature.