This week introduces Africana Religious Studies and the concept of diaspora as a framework for understanding how race, religion, and history are socially constructed rather than naturally given. With discussion of Charles Long’s Significations the lecture examines how African-descended peoples have creatively remade meaning in the wake of displacement.

This session explores how music became a central vehicle for diasporic connection across the Atlantic world and beyond, drawing on Long, Paul Gilroy, as well as the work of ethnomusicologists of West African music. It interrogates authenticity, gatekeeping, and the ways Black sound has been both commodified and used to imagine global belonging.

Set in 1970s New York, this lecture situates hip hop within migration, urban crisis, and Black Muslim religious innovation. It shows how muslim communities like the Nation of Islam and the Five Percent Nation shaped hip hop’s early cosmology and positioned the culture as both spiritual practice and political expression.

The final week examines how artists from Rakim to Central Cee constructed transnational hip hop fan bases with aesthetics, music, lyrics, and/or personas that draw from Islamic culture(s). in an increasingly commercialized industry. Through case studies, the lecture asks whether Islam in hip hop operates as theology, cultural signifier, political critique, or all three at once.