Africana Studies Program, Music Program, Russian/Eurasian Studies Program, and Bard Ethnomusicology Present
Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration
Monday, February 23, 2015
Olin 104
Ethnomusicology guest lecture by Professor Adriana Helbig
This talk draws on urban music and dance competitions, hip hop parties, and recording studio culture to explore unique sites of interracial encounters among African students, African immigrants, and local populations in eastern Ukraine. It combines ethnographic research with music, media, and policy analysis to examine how localized forms of hip hop create social and political spaces where an interracial youth culture can speak to issues of human rights and racial equality. Mapping the complex trajectories of musical influence—African, Soviet, American—Adriana Helbig shows how hip hop has become a site of social protest in post-socialist society and a vehicle for social change. Adriana Helbig is an Associate Professor of Music and an affiliated faculty member in Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, Global Studies, and at the Center for Russian and East European Studies in the University of Pittsburgh. A member of the graduate faculty, she teaches courses on global hip-hop; world music; music, gender, and sexuality; music and technology; and cultural policy. She is also founder and director of the Carpathian Music Ensemble, a student performance group that specializes in the music of Eastern Europe, including klezmer and Romani/Gypsy music. She is the recipient of numerous grants and research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Councils for International Education, IREX, and Fulbright. She has held a research fellowship at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and was an inaugural research fellow at the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh.
Adriana Helbig's articles on Romani (Gypsy) music, post-socialist cultural policy, music and piracy, music, race, and migration, and global hip-hop have appeared in edited collections and journals such as The Yearbook for Traditional Music, Current Musicology, and Popular Music. She is the co-author, with Oksana Buranbaeva and Vanja Mladineo, of The Culture and Customs of Ukraine (Greenwood Press, 2009). Her book Hip-Hop Revolution: Music, Race, and African Migration in Ukraine was published by Indiana University Press in May, 2014. Hip Hop From the East of Europe, a volume co-edited with sociologist Milosz Miszczynski, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].
Location: Olin 104