With violin in-hand, Charlie Hankin elevated his field work experience from observer to participant. The new UC Davis faculty member spent years studying rap music and community in Brazil, Cuba and Haiti. That research culminated into the award-winning book, Break and Flow: Hip Hop Poetics in the Americas, as well as musical collaborations with the very musicians whose work he was studying.   

Hankin was recently awarded the Modern Language Association of America’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies for Break and Flow. The award committee wrote of Hankin: “In examining musical archives with poetic strategies, supplemented with the author’s live participation with the local, Break and Flow sets a high standard for all scholars engaging in comparative and transnational studies." 

Rap as empowerment 

Since joining the Department of Spanish and Portuguese last year, Hankin has taught courses at the intersection of literature and popular music in Latin America and the Caribbean. He teaches them within an Afro-diasporic framework. 

For Break and Flow, Hankin studied music in a similar way he would analyze a piece of literature. Rap is not just music but also poetry and a type of literature.  

“Rap is strange because it’s built on dance music — its beat comes from the funk break, which was closely tied to dance — but the words are really the most important thing,” Hankin said. “So audience members might move their arms up and down and dance a bit in a rap show, but never at the expense of paying close attention to the words.” 

“The power of words is kind of what brought me to this project,” Hankin said. 

Hankin’s earlier research didn’t just focus on words within rap music. He was interested in the effect these artists, their lyrics and the delivery of those lyrics had on listeners and fans — and how they empowered, mobilized and helped spark social movements.  According to Hankin, it is often less about what the words mean and more about what they do. 

“My aim is not to uncover meaning but to identify the conventions and ‘techniques that make meaning possible,’ the effects that rap lyrics have on their listeners,” Hankin writes in his introduction. “One of my central claims is that rap songs themselves, as acoustic objects, wield the force of community-building and world-making.”  

During his research, Hankin noted that the geographic areas he studied — Cuba, Brazil and Haiti — weren't just important to rap and hip-hop but were also important ports of the transatlantic slave trade. The commonalities led Hankin to wonder about connections between the locations.   

“There's a connection with the African diaspora and the legacies of slavery, of course, but there's surprisingly little contact between the three spaces, so it's really a comparative project where I look at a shared poetics,” Hankin said. 

From observer to collaborator  

Hankin knows music’s power to dissolve social barriers firsthand. Wherever he went for his research, whether it was attending an event or conducting an interview, Hankin brought his violin. And, despite his training in classical music, local rappers were willing to collaborate with him. 

“Being a musician opened a bunch of doors because it was like, I was always a musician first and then a researcher,” Hankin said. “It was really powerful and it allowed me to be sort of a colleague and collaborator. Their patience and guidance to help me improvise over beats was invaluable.”   

While rap and violins don’t sound like they’d pair well together, musicians were glad to experiment with Hankin.    

“A lot of artists are really into string sounds and they like that kind of darkness, and the smooth line of a string instrument pairs nicely with the kind of percussive roughness of a rap delivery,” Hankin said. “So, there's something interesting going on there." 

Hankin still works with an artist in Haiti, mostly via WhatsApp. He’ll get sent a beat track and send back violin tracks. He even co-produced a whole album with one friend he met while doing fieldwork in Cuba, which was nominated for a Cubadisco award.  

Listen to that album here. Find a playlist of the music referenced in Break and Flow here. 

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