4. Friday, January 12: "Performing race, gender, and sexuality in Russian hip-hop"

In the emergent literature on Russian hip-hop, one often occurring assumption suggests that the racial dimension of US hip-hop was entirely untranslatable to post-Soviet Russia. In this lecture, using the case of the Black Star music label and its ex-celebrity Timati, I will challenge this assumption by presenting the framework of racial translation to analyze the (geo)politics of race/ethnicity and gender/sexuality in mainstream Russian hip-hop of the 2010s. The lecture will trace the racial translation strategies utilized in Timati’s music videos throughout the 2010s, such as regional originals, vicarious realness, and racial/sexual metonymy of the beard.