Keeping It Real in the Global South: Hip-Hop Comes to Sri Lanka

Abstract

This article attempts to understand how hip-hop, as a uniquely black American articulation of marginalization and resistance, becomes a complex symbol of global belonging and post-colonial resistance in Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan hip-hop artists have established distinctive rap cultures, borrowing from their own local culture, as well as from US hip hop cultural practices in general. From more locally popular hip hop artists like Krishan, to internationally renowned M.I.A., these artists perform complex identities that symbolically centralize their ethnic identity, while simultaneously reproducing images of war, conflict and cultural displacement that articulate Sri Lanka’s complex relationship with the British empire, an ‘Americanized’ globalization, and a nationalist post-colonial identity.