Nairobi Hip Hop Flow

Nairobi Hip Hop Flow combines ethnographic methods, political history, and music and performance analysis to illustrate the richness of hip hop’s embodied performance practices. RaShelle R. Peck examines how hip hop artists in Nairobi’s underground rap culture engage with political seriousness in lyrics and sound by fostering a creative playfulness using bodily movement. This unprecedented study shows how Nairobi artists circulate diasporic blackness while at the same time indigenizing hip hop music to interrogate Kenya’s sociopolitical landscape.

“A much‑needed addition to scholarship on Kenya and global hip hop studies. RaShelle Peck places Kenyan hip hop within broader hip hop studies, while recognizing its unique identity.” — Msia Kibona Clark, author of Hip‑Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers

“A remarkable study that takes us into the heart of Nairobi hip hop and introduces a novel approach in the corporeality of hip hop. Peck demonstrates not only what is meant by hip hop flow, but how Kenyan hip hop artists embody such a practice.” — Quentin Williams, coeditor of Neva Again: Hip Hop Art, Activism, and Education in Post‑Apartheid South Africa

“Peck offers a clear intervention into the diasporic and transnational elements of Nairobi hip hop, relating her account to broader histories of hip hop and global formations of blackness that transcend and complicate the local.” — Carter Mathes, author of Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature after Civil Rights

RaShelle R. Peck is Assistant Professor of Ethnic and Race Studies at Borough of Manhattan Community College.