ABSTRACT
Through the preceding chapters I have been suggesting at various points the need to take hip-hop seriously, to use an understanding of hip-hop in relation to global Englishes in order to develop a better understanding of transcultural fl ows. But why take hip-hop seriously? Is not hip-hop, like most of popular culture, just a superfi cial, commercialized, shallow form of cultural consumption, frequently misogynist, often homophobic, commonly violent, designed to capture a market among the young with the goals of political acquiescence, public consumption and (sub)cultural conformity dressed up as nonconformity? Such critiques of hip-hop should not be casually dismissed since popular culture, by its very nature, is always more open to commercial exploitation than unpopular culture; and its status as an oppositional, nonconformist, resistant cultural formation is often romanticized by both practitioners and those interested in the study of popular culture. Neither, however, should such critiques be casually adopted since there are also strong reasons to take hip-hop and other forms of popular culture far more seriously than such dismissive declamations allow. This and the following chapters locate hip-hop within a broad philosophical, cultural, linguistic and pedagogical understanding of transcultural fl ows.
