In Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness, Nitasha Tamar Sharma examines how South Asians in the United States (desis) use hip hop to form and create their identities. Sharma notes early in the study that there is no single genre of ‘desi hip hop’ because the participants ‘do not always identify as a group or live within a geographically circumscribed area’ (p. 6). Thus, rather than focusing on generic or stylistic characteristics of desi hip hop, this study concerns how desi hip hop artists confront, construct and reimagine their identities in terms of race, ethnicity, gender and authenticity.

Although there is no specific site, city or region that desi hip hop calls home or its point of origin, Sharma conducted the majority of her ethnographic research in the Bay Area. She notes that hers is the first ethnography of South Asian hip hop artists, and she frames her study as a ‘cultural studies ethnography’ (p. 34). In the interviews she conducts, Sharma investigates the contested relationships between identities such as Asian and American, black and not-black, white and not-white, and Asian and South Asian.

Each chapter is an investigation of a particular identity issue as it relates to desi hip hop artists. Sharma treats race and ethnicity as two distinct but related concepts, and although each concept has its own chapter, the two are tied together more often than not throughout the book. Chapter 1, ‘Alternative Ethnics: Rotten Coconuts and Ethnic Hip Hop’, focuses on how desi artists reject both ethno-national identities (Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan) as well as identities as assimilated members of the white mainstream. In Chapter 2, ‘Making Race: Desi Racial Identities, South Asian and Black Relations, and Racialized Hip Hop’, Sharma describes how desi hip hop artists ‘make race’, that is, how they produce their own versions of racial categories by rejecting extant meanings of those categories. Chapter 3, ‘Flipping the Gender Script: Gender and Sexuality in South Asian and Hip Hop America’, navigates the complex aspects of gender and sexuality in hip hop, society and insular immigrant communities. In Chapter 4, ‘The Appeal of Hip Hop, Ownership, and the Politics of Location’, Sharma links issues of the three previous chapters as she uncovers why hip hop appeals so strongly to South Asian Americans. In the final chapter, ‘Sampling South Asians: Dual Flows of Appropriation and the Possibilities of Authenticity’, Sharma employs the metaphor of ‘sampling’ to describe cultural exchanges and appropriations that occur between South Asian and black cultures.

Throughout the book, Sharma deftly weaves together quotations from hip hop artists, song lyrics, poetry, album covers and stills from video shoots and live concerts, dovetailing her primary source materials with theories from cultural and ethnic studies. She occasionally adds personal anecdotes from her experience as a desi. The text is accessible to those without a strong theoretical grounding in cultural or ethnic studies. At times, her tendency to use italics to convey her meaning is overused, as in, ‘The artists’ divergent styles and identities, however, lead them to identify with one another as South Asian hip hop artists rather than as South Asian hip hop artists' (p. 10). What ultimately emerges, though, is a thoughtful portrayal of a heterogeneous group of musicians who are linked by their desire to create music and to form identities.

Hip Hop Desis constitutes an important contribution to our understanding of South Asians in the US and how they create identities through hip hop. The focus in this study, however, is on identity rather than hip hop, and a lack of grounding of hip hop fundamentals and history at times detracts from Sharma's arguments. For example, Sharma attributes hip hop's origins, at least in part, to Ronald Reagan's national economic policies in the 1980s. By the beginning of Reagan's presidency, however, hip hop was already well established. DJ Kool Herc had been isolating the breakbeat for nearly a decade, ‘Rapper's Delight’ was released in 1979, and Blondie's ‘Rapture’ (for many listeners, one of their first mainstream exposures to ‘rapping’) was released the same month as Reagan's first inauguration. Additionally, Sharma claims that Richmond, California is ‘one of the birthplaces of hip hop’ (p. 8) but provides no evidence for this assertion. Certainly, Richmond has produced a number of successful hip hop artists, including Master P and Silkk the Shocker, but most of these artists did not become active until the late 1980s or early 1990s. Finally, Sharma's use of the word ‘sampling’ as a metaphor to describe ‘music, identity, and community formation that is anti-essentialist and dialogic or that is never created in a vacuum but always in dialogue with multiple influences’ (pp. 12–13) is problematic. To most scholars and creators of hip hop, ‘sampling’ refers to a musical practice, and attempting to reframe its meaning frequently undermines the term.

In this book, Sharma reveals that there is no single, unified identity for desi hip hop artists. These musicians constantly navigate personal, cultural and musical identities, exploring and establishing what it means to be South Asian, South Asian American, black, white, non-black and non-white. One of the most memorable figures in Hip Hop Desis is D'Lo, an MC who moves seamlessly and unapologetically among gender, sexual, racial and ethnic identities. In fact, D'Lo prefers the use of both male and female pronouns in order to highlight the malleability of gender paradigms. D'Lo's ability to embody a multitude of identities simultaneously is a cipher for desi hip hop: no single style, classification or set of rules can clearly establish the bounds of desi hip hop. Instead, the music is characterised by the individuals who make it and how they use it to create their identities.