potential of relationality to capture the ambivalence of entities (e.g., the demonic dead in Chapter 6) and social relations (for example, children in Chapter 4) under different cultural purviews. For the Korowai, the demonic dead are both deceased dear kinspeople and visually terrifying killers. The multiple valences of social and semiotic entities themselves can become the basis for analyses of social bonds and semiotic units that avoid reductionism by highlight- ing potentially unstable collections of valences that sit squarely but uncomfortably— more or less—between an “us” and a “them.” Though the Korowai may try to stabilize these ambiva- lences, Stasch is arguing that analysts of society must come to embrace them.And indeed, for scholars of contextualized events of interaction, Stasch’s work will most certainly help integrate analyses of the gradient relationality emergent in discourse and events of semiosis to the ethno-theories of social life that guide action and inform experience, now with their gradience firmly at the fore. Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics University of Chicago 1126 E 59 th St., Chicago, IL 60637 jslotta@uchicago.edu Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language. H. Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim and Alastair Pennycook, eds. New York: Routledge, 2009. xi + 260 pp. KARL F. SWINEHART University of Pennsylvania In the introduction to Global Linguistic Flows, its lead editor, H. Samy Alim, states that the volume aims, “to shed light on both our understanding of Hip Hop Culture(s) as well as expand our theoretical approaches to language choice and agency, speech style and stylization, codeswitching and language mixing, crossing and sociolinguistic variation, and language use and globalization” (p. 5). It is a tall order that the book tackles successfully, making a much needed contribution to hip-hop studies and to the study of mass-mediated culture more generally. While a robust academic literature exploring hip-hop has grown over the last decade, for a cultural form with language so clearly at its core, not enough of this literature has benefited from sociolinguistic or linguistic anthropological perspectives. In this regard Flows makes a tremendous contribution to hip-hop studies while simultaneously enriching linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics with new research on this dynamic realm of verbal art that has reached seemingly every corner of the globe. This volume situates the work of global MCs within ideologies circulating in their respective contexts of language, race, gender, youth and national belonging, marshalling the research of a varied group of scholars towards the devel- opment of whatAlim calls the “hip-hop linguistics of global hip-hop nation language variet- ies.” Flows is organized into two sections with 12 chapters, examining hip-hop from North America (Canada, United States), Europe (Germany, Italy, Greece),Asia and the Pacific (Aus- tralia, China, Japan), Africa (Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania), and South America (Brazil). The first section of Flows takes up style as its organizing theme, examining MCs language choice, the stylization of self, other and the self as other. The second section explores the “politics, poetics and pedagogy” of global hip-hop. The first section opens with Pennycook and Mitchell’s discussion of global MCs’ claims to hip-hop as their own, and their self-fashioning as legitimate members of a global hip-hop nation. They present the notion of “dusty foot philosophy” through engaging debates among Australian and Canadian MCs, emphasizing the contribution of K’naan, a Somali-born Cana- dian, and the insights of Aborginal Australian MCs like Wire MC. Pennycook and Mitchell call on studies of global hip-hop to move beyond, “an image only of spread and adaptation, beyond only a pluralization by localization (gobal Englishes and global Hip Hops) in order to incor- porate as well the self fashioning of the already local” (p. 40). In the following chapter, for example, Androutspoulous argues that the English used by the German, Greek, and Italian hip-hop artists serves as a central identity marker across local contexts and as an example of English spread “from below.” Androutspoulous applies Fiske’s (1987) framework of vertical intertextuality across primary, secondary and tertiary media texts to the realm of hip-hop and 250 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology