The Modern Language Association of America (MLA) announced it is awarding its thirty-second annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies to Charlie D. Hankin for his book Break and Flow: Hip Hop Poetics in the Americas. His book was published by the University of Virginia Press.  The prize is one of twenty-three awards that will be presented on 10 January 2025, during the association’s annual convention, to be held in New Orleans. The members of the selection committee were Lingchei Letty Chen (Washington Univ. in St. Louis), chair; Tom McEnaney (Univ. of California, Berkeley); and Melissa E. Sanchez (Univ. of Pennsylvania). 

The committee’s citation for Hankin’s book reads: 

“Charlie D. Hankin’s Break and Flow: Hip Hop Poetics in the Americas is a perfect illustration of how theory and practice can coalesce to produce an organically interdisciplinary, transcultural, and transnational study. At once an ethnographer and a practitioner, Hankin interweaves hip hop art in peripheral capitalist societies and recasts them as communities that transcend national borders and linguistic boundaries. Hankin injects poetic theories in his innovative analysis of rap songs and successfully brings together musicality and literariness to constitute what he calls hip hop poetics. Hip hop poetics embodies also the soul of African diasporic identity that is not bound by a shared origin but translatable and mobile. In examining musical archives with poetic strategies, supplemented with the author’s live participation with the local, Break and Flow sets a high standard for all scholars engaging in comparative and transnational studies.”

Charlie Hankin is Assistant Professor at UC Davis. He specializes in music-literature relations in the twentieth and twenty-first century Caribbean and Brazil. His research and teaching bring together sound studies and ethnomusicology, Afro-Latin American thought and poetics, hip hop studies, and comparative literature.  He is the author of his Break and Flow: Hip Hop Poetics in the Americas (UVA Press, 2023), for which he completed extensive ethnographic fieldwork and recording collaboration in Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti, and the editor of the dossier Words and Rhythm, Sound and Text (Latin American Literary Review, 2024). His current book project, “Writing in Clave,” proposes a rhythmic counterpoint between popular music and literature in the twentieth-century Caribbean.

Hankin has also taught, performed, and recorded as a professional violinist. In 2017, he recorded violin tracks and co-produced with Malcoms “Justicia” the Cuban hip hop album Sentimientos Desafinados, which was nominated for a CubaDisco award.