This chapter examines the emergence of hip hop in contemporary South Korea. Drawing on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s concept of “signifying” and Achille Mbembe’s idea of “becoming black,” it looks at hip hop as a phenomenon where “Blackness” has gained a fungible agency that counters neoliberalism. The chapter explores the ways hip-hop performers in South Korea draw on their own experiences of social marginality in the ghetto-like world produced by unrelenting academic and economic competition to create their work. It also considers how the Korean language obliges rappers to experiment with its syntax and prosody in order to generate the rhymes and repetitions associated with hip-hop poetics. The author argues that rap in the South Korean context has become a successful adaptation of a foreign musical genre, in a manner that recalls the discovery and mastery of Western popular music by Korean musicians in the years following the Korean War. The recent popularity of hip hop reestablishes ties to premodern and precolonial practices of oral musical storytelling that were neglected and overlooked during the period of modernization.

The 1980s was a decade in which African American literary production was starting to get the long overdue attention it deserved, but also a decade in which African American artists were emboldened to explore new territory, mainstream recognition be damned.The juxtaposition of James Baldwin’s funeral in 1987 and Trey Ellis’s essay “The New Black Aesthetic” in 1989 represent not a mere passing of the torch from the old guard to the avant-garde.Rather, the old guard was flourishing, and younger artists were also getting attention on new frontiers.In an unprecedented way, the 1980s marked an era when Black writers were sought out and recognized, to the point that their work dominated the critical conversation.This was especially true of Black women writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Rita Dove who enjoyed a readership unlike anything they had ever seen before.

Chapter 3 presents an overview of work carried out prior to the emergence of rapid ethnographies. It briefly goes over approaches such as rapid rural appraisals (RRA), participatory rural appraisals (PRA), rapid ethnographic assessments (REA), rapid assessment procedures (RAP), rapid assessment response and evaluation (RARE), rapid appraisals, rapid qualitative inquiry (RQI) and rapid evaluation. The purpose of the chapter is to situate rapid ethnographies within a wider field of rapid research, demonstrating the diversity of approaches and their rich history. The chapter also makes comparisons across rapid approaches to highlight their characteristic features and trends that have developed in the way in which we do rapid research.

Despite the extraordinary presence of rap and bounce in New Orleans and of New Orleans practitioners of these forms in the wider world, this expressive tradition has had little institutional support in a city that devotes great resources to other forms. For this reason, an archive was set up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to preserve this cultural history in ways that would give those closest to this world as much control over the archive as possible and preserve the cultural geography of pre-Katrina.