This book results from a larger research project between TU Dortmund University and the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg which started with an international conference on "Popular Music and Public Diplomacy" in 2015.We would like to thank institutions and people who made this project possible. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the US Consulate in Düsseldorf, the TU Dortmund Society of Friends, and Oxford Music & Letters provided grants that enabled us to finance the initial conference. We would also like to express our gratitude to our colleagues at the English and music departments of TU Dortmund University and the music department of the University of Oldenburg. Walter Grünzweig and Holger Noltze supported the initial conference. Our Conference Advisory Board, consisting of

Sister Souljah is arguably one of the most important female “raptivists” in the United States. Published in 1994, her autobiography No Disrespect narrates the artist’s rise from poverty to become one of the most prolific writers, educators and activists in the 1990s. Yet critics tend to overlook the autobiography’s strong emphasis on activism, especially how it is embedded in larger Afro-diasporic female literary traditions. No Disrespect re-writes earlier traditions of black women’s writing, visual culture and social activism in order to educate a younger generation on the ongoing need to promote racial justice. The autobiography is located in the larger context of what Paul Gilroy has called the Black Atlantic by situating it not only in American, but also in African cultural traditions. I join Reiland Rabaka and others in moving forward the field of hip hop studies by establishing more cultural, literary and visual continuities between late twentieth-century hip hop culture and earlier literary forms of Afro-diasporic expression, such as poetry and autobiography. In tracing Sister Souljah’s oeuvre to the beginnings of African American women’s literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is the aim of the article to contribute a new perspective to the origins of hip hop culture and activism beyond the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Popular music constitutes an important mode of public expression which can stimulate not only a change in the public image of place but also wider social and cultural communities in shrinking cities. Focusing on the internationally successful indie-rap band Kraftklub from the Eastern German city of Chemnitz, we analyse how they visually, rhetorically and musically address shrinkage and the GDR as a critical comment on municipal memory and identity politis. Contextualizing Kraftklub's oeuvre with the official city marketing campaign, we show that popular music scenes help establish a new, inclusive and confident post-industrial identity as well as contribute to a more positive urban image.

While many Americans dismissed the borough of The Bronx in the late 1970s through the belief that »The Bronx is burning,« this study challenges that assumption. As the first explicit study on The Bronx in American popular culture, this book shows how a wide variety of cultural representations engaged in a complex dialogue on its past, present, and future. Sina A. Nitzsche argues that popular culture ushered in the poetic resurrection of The Bronx, an artistic and imaginative rebirth, that preceded, promoted, and facilitated the spatial revival of the borough.

No abstract