CfP: Hip-Hop Diaspora: Memory, Technology and the Politics of Electric Infrastructure (Global Hip Hop Studies Journal) Deadline: 01.08.2026
Call for Papers: Global Hip Hop Studies
Special Issue: ‘Hip-Hop Diaspora: Memory, Technology and the Politics of
Electric Infrastructure’
View the full call here>>
https://www.intellectbooks.com/global-hip-hop-studies#call-for-papers
Guest editors
Pablo D. Herrera Veitia, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy
Francesca D’Amico Cuthbert, University of Toronto, Canada
Myrtle D. Millares, University of Toronto, Canada
Dennis Howard, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica
For inquiries about the Special Issue, please contact the guest editors at:
hiphopdiasporaghhs@gmail.com
GHHS is a Diamond Open Access journal. All articles are published Gold Open
Access and no APCs are charged to authors.
Deadlines
Abstract submissions due: 1 August 2026 (sent to
hiphopdiasporaghhs[at]gmail[dot]com)
Invitations to submit full manuscripts: mid-August 2026
Full manuscripts due: 15 November 2026 (via Pubkit Submissions:
https://submission.pubkit.co/publisher/29/journal/392/login)
Theme and scope
This Special Issue examines hip-hop diaspora (HHD) in what Asante and others have identified as a ‘post-hip-hop’ moment, one where Afrobeats, Amapiano and other sonic formations challenge hip-hop’s centrality in global Black musical expression. Central to this inquiry is the politics of electricity, not as critique but as exploration of what is at stake behind assumptions about and aspirations to particular forms of infrastructure. How do the uneven geographies of electrical power, internet connectivity and technological access shape different hip-hop practices? What happens when we decenter anglophone assumptions about hip-hop’s inevitable digital turn and attend instead to autochthonous analogue sounds and musical practices in cities like Havana, Lagos, Kingston, or Kampala, where infrastructural intermittency produces different sonic possibilities? This Special Issue examines, rather than assumes, how hip-hop’s evolution relates to technological and infrastructural conditions, questioning teleological narratives of inevitable progression from analogue to digital, from local to global, from underground to platform. By centering the politics of electricity and infrastructure, the issue seeks contributions that illuminate how hip-hop operates not just as a global culture but as a set of profoundly local practices patterned and conditioned by specific material realities.
We especially encourage submissions from scholars, scholar-practitioners and artist-researchers working in hip-hop studies, sound studies, Caribbean studies, African diaspora studies, digital humanities, energy humanities, cultural memory studies, archival studies, media and technology studies and decolonial studies. We welcome contributions from the Global South, from infrastructurally precarious locations and from practitioners whose work bridges academic and community spaces.
Topics of interest
We welcome contributions that address, but are not limited to, the following areas:
Infrastructure and sonic practice: How do electrical grids, backup power, internet access and technological availability pattern hip-hop production, performance, circulation and archival practice? What happens to sampling when vinyl is scarce, turntables lack stable power, or producers navigate digital platforms under data costs and power cuts?
The politics of the analogue-digital divide: How do assumptions about digital inevitability obscure the persistence of analogue practices, oral transmission and non-digital knowledge production in hip-hop communities outside the Global North?
Energy humanities and hip-hop: How might frameworks from the energy humanities, including work on petrocultures, fuel economies and infrastructural precarity, enrich understandings of hip-hop’s material conditions?
Memory, archiving and infrastructural precarity: How do hip-hop communities preserve cultural memory when the infrastructures of preservation, electricity, internet, storage, institutional support, are themselves precarious? What role do non-institutional archives, mixtapes, oral histories and embodied practices play?
Sound systems, generators and backup power: How do sound system cultures, mobile DJ practices and generator-dependent performance economies navigate the politics of electrical access? How do these practices relate to longer Caribbean and African diasporic histories of sonic technology?
Climate, infrastructure and hip-hop futures: How do intensifying climate impacts on electrical and communications infrastructure reshape hip-hop practices, economies and communities, particularly in the Caribbean, the Global South and island contexts?
Decolonial and diasporic sonic epistemologies: How do hip-hop practitioners and scholars draw on African diasporic, Indigenous and decolonial knowledge traditions to theorize sound, technology and infrastructure beyond Euro-American frameworks?
The DJ as infrastructure navigator: How do DJs, producers and sound engineers function not only as artists and archivists but as navigators of available and unavailable technological infrastructure, working with and against material conditions to maintain cultural practice?
Submission types
Articles: 6000–7000 words
Dive in the Archive (archive-centred) and In the Cipher (artist-centred)
sections: Shorter interventions, reflections, or archival engagements.
Consult guest editors for format.
Show and Prove: Image-based contributions with 400–2000 words of accompanying text.
Reviews: Critical reviews of recent publications and media relevant to the issue’s themes.
Submission guidelines
All submissions should include:
A 250-word abstract
6–8 keywords
A 150-word author biography for each author
Full contact information
Full manuscripts should follow GHHS’s written style. See the journal’s
Notes for Contributors (
https://www.intellectbooks.com/global-hip-hop-studies#aims-and-scope) and
Intellect’s House Style Guide (
https://www.intellectbooks.com/asset/3182/intellect-house-style-guide-8th-ed..pdf)
for details. All full articles will undergo double-anonymous peer review.