Building on Robin D. G. Kelley's (1998) argument that hip hop constitutes a form of play-labor for working-class black youth, this article argues that the creation of hip hop as a form of racialized play-labor in the 1970s constitutes an Afro-diasporic labor regime and can best be understood as such when located within a specific period of racial capitalism in the United States characterized by a low demand for formal black labor. Accordingly, this paper argues that the emergence of hip hop in the South Bronx can be explained by the way in which several social-political factors dictated by the needs of the world economy converged with the resistance and labor of black people in the United States and the Anglo-Caribbean in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Can we talk of a collective, diasporic memory? Argues that in the case of the African-Caribbean community, there are distinctive features - such as the need to tell and the need to connect - which suggest that this diasporic memory is framed through identifiable cultural templates, which distinguish it from the memories of migrants.
