Music and Traditions of the Global South Explored in Friday Lecture

October 29, 2015

Ali Colleen Neff

Ali Colleen Neff, a media anthropologist and multimedia artist whose work focuses on the creativity of young artists in the Global South, will speak at Old Dominion University on Friday, Oct. 30.

Neff, a Virginia Tech faculty member whose ethnographic research projects with young artists throughout the Global South, as well as the southern United States, will speak from 4 to 5:30 p.m. in the Burgess Room of ODU's Batten Arts and Letters Building, BAL 9024.

Her presentation "Sounding the Global South: Hip-Hop in the Age of Digital Globalization" is sponsored by Old Dominion's Humanities Institute, the Department of Communication, the Dean's Office of the College of Arts and Letters, the Department of English and the office of Acting Provost Chandra De Silva.

Neff's projects span both academic and public projects including award-winning digital documentary work, a book on hip-hop in Mississippi and contributions to discourses on cultural pedagogy and research methods.

In 2011, Neff authored "Let the World Listen Right: The Mississippi Delta Hip-Hop Story," a book on hip-hop in Mississippi that chronicles the creativity, community and rich expressive culture that persist in the Mississippi Delta despite widespread poverty in the region.

"Let the World Listen Right" draws from classic studies of the blues as well as extensive ethnographic work to document the "changing same" of Delta music making. From the neighborhood juke joints of the contemporary Delta to the international hip-hop stage, this study traces the musical networks that join the region's African American communities to both traditional forms and new global styles.