The Hiplife in Ghana West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop

The Hiplife in Ghana explores one international site - Ghana, West Africa - where hip-hop music and culture have morphed over two decades into the hiplife genre of world music. It investigates hiplife music not merely as an imitation and adaptation of hip-hop, but as a reinvention of Ghana's century-old highlife popular music tradition. Author Halifu Osumare traces the process by which local hiplife artists have evolved a five-phased indigenization process that has facilitated a youth-driven transformation of Ghanaian society. She also reveals how Ghana's social shifts, facilitated by hiplife, have occurred within the country's 'corporate recolonization,' serving as another example of the neoliberal free market agenda as a new form of colonialism. Hiplife artists, we discover, are complicit with these global socio-economic forces even as they create counter-narratives that push aesthetic limits and challenge the neoliberal order.

Halifu Osumare is Professor and Director of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis, USA. She is also the author of The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop.

1. 'Every Hood Has It's Own Style'
2. 'Making an African out of the Computer': Globalization and Indigenization in Hiplife
3. 'Empowering the Young': Hiplife's Youth Agency
4. 'Society of the Spectacle': Hiplife and Corporate Recolonialization
5. 'The Game': Hiplife's Counter-Hegemonic Discourse