The ineligible majority: Urbanizing the postcolony in Africa and Southeast Asia

A theme that runs through contemporary hip-hop from Luanda to Jakarta to Phnom Penh to Kampala is an indifference to location. MCs claim not to care or pay attention to where they are. The street is a constantly expanding zone of subjugation and incarceration, yet it expands, it takes on space. The specificities of language, beat, and social conditions are engaged with precision, yet it is largely a matter of taking these specificities elsewhere, making them part of some other domain, as if the there is little to hold back even the most circumscribed of youth from moving across a larger world. The Angolan rap crew Vagabanda issues the warning that they are “coming to theater near you; and may already be there, but don’t look for them on the screen, because they are in the front row, unconcerned about who are “watching their backs.”