MLA’s Scaglione Prize For Comparative Literary Studies Awarded To Charlie D. Hankin
The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its thirty-second annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies to Charlie D. Hankin, assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Davis, for his book Break and Flow: Hip Hop Poetics in the Americas, published by the University of Virginia Press.
The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding scholarly work that is written by a member of the association and that involves at least two literatures.
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.