Guest host Anjali Misra speaks with Nitasha Tamar Sharma, author of “Hip Hop Desis,” explores the aesthetics and politics of South Asian American hip hop artists.

In the book, Sharma argues that through their lives and lyrics, young “hip hop desis” express a global race consciousness that reflects both their sense of connection with Blacks as racialized minorities in the United States and their diasporic sensibility as part of a global community of South Asians.

Nitasha Tamar Sharma is the Charles D. McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence, and Associate Professor of African American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Her first book, Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness, analyzes how second generation members of an upwardly mobile and middle-class immigrant group use hip hop to develop racial–and not just ethnic–identities.