Like the blues and rock and roll before it, hip-hop has moved far from its roots in African-American culture, a journey charted in a new book edited by UTS academic Dr Tony Mitchell.

Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA contains 13 essays exploring the hip-hop scenes of Europe, Canada, Asia, Australia and the Pacific. It has been published in the US by Wesleyan University Press.

"Global Noise looks at how hip-hop has been 'indigenised' by performers around the world who've adapted the template to fit their own language and political concerns," Dr Mitchell said.

"While the genre in America now seems cliched and brutal and lacks any political perspective, elsewhere rappers with divergent backgrounds of race, nationality, class and gender are using the form as a powerful expression of opposition and resistance."

"It might not have seemed likely at the time hip-hop emerged in America, but now there are artists rapping in European and African regional dialects, Cantonese and Mandarin."

Contributors' subjects include Islamic rap in the UK and France; German-language rappers' expressions of second-generation immigrant experience; the attempt to forge a white, Australian-accented, nationalistic hip-hop culture; the revolutionary rhetoric of Italian "combat" rappers; mainland China's Cui Jian, who questioned the 1997 handover of Hong Kong; and artists in Aotearoa-New Zealand who combine rap, soul and reggae with traditional Maori music.

A review of Global Noise in Publishers Weekly has described it as a "an intelligent, engaging contribution to pop cultural studies" and predicts that "artists, activists and academics will look to this benchmark collection for a long time".

Dr Mitchell is a senior lecturer in cultural studies in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. He is the author of Popular Music and Local Identity: Rock, Pop and Rap in Europe and Oceania (1996).