Front cover · click to enlarge
Back cover · click to enlarge
About the Book
This Is What I Live For: An Afro-Italian Hip-Hop Memoir is a groundbreaking bilingual critical edition of Amir Issaa’s remarkable life story—at once a life narrative, a hip-hop archive, and a pedagogical experiment in how language, culture, and resistance travel.
Born in Rome to an Egyptian father and an Italian mother, Issaa chronicles a coming-of-age tale of life on the margins in an evolving Italian nation, where rap becomes both survival strategy and political language. His story unfolds against the backdrop of 1990s Rome, revealing a city rarely visible in official histories: peripheral, migrant, hybrid, and sonically alive.
More than a memoir in translation, this volume is a collaborative project that brings students, scholars, and artists into dialogue across Italy and the United States. Designed with the classroom in mind, the bilingual, side-by-side English/Italian format invites readers to engage language through lived experience, rhythm, and voice rather than abstraction alone.
Essays, annotations, and contextual materials model how translation itself can be a critical practice, linking hip-hop studies, Italian Studies, diaspora and postcolonial studies, and education. Innovative in form and purpose, This Is What I Live For shows how autobiography, music, and pedagogy can converge to rethink national identity, linguistic belonging, and the future of the humanities—on the page, in the classroom, and beyond.
Amir Issaa
Advance Praise
“Nothing is more hip-hop than an individual documenting their experiences from nothing to something and using those writings to take them all over the world. Amir's book does just that in an international B-boy stance.”— , host and co-creator of The Parker Edison Project podcast on KPBS Public Media
“Amir Issaa reflects with extraordinary maturity and honesty, pushing himself and others to grow and change reality. The stakes are high: Italy is increasingly falling prey to a morbid nostalgia for fascism. With his voice as an artist with a hybrid identity, Amir’s work helps reconcile Italy with a new future and the world of diversity. A beautiful autobiography, written with courage and sincerity.”— , author of Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio; Professor in the Practice, Italian Studies, Yale University
“Amir Issaa is the hip-hop chronicler of a generation Italy refuses to recognize. With strength and tenacity, he narrates his experience growing up as the son of an Egyptian father and an Italian mother. This Is What I Live For is a story of Rome in the ‘90s that will be new to most people—a Rome on the margins where rap is the soundtrack. It is a moving account that teaches so much. A must-read to keep forever on your nightstand for whenever you want to travel beyond stereotypes.”— , author of The Color Line: A Novel, Beyond Babylon, and Adua
“When hip-hop reached Europe in the 1980s, it was quickly picked up by young Europeans of color, persistently treated as foreigners, as strangers in their own countries, within a purportedly colorblind continent in denial about its pervasive racism. Over the next decades, the voices of these children of migrants, Black Europeans, Roma, were instrumental in changing perceptions of who is European and where the continent’s future lies. Amir Issaa was among the pioneers of this movement, and it is a pleasure to read his recollection of its beginnings in this careful bilingual edition.”— , Professor of Ethnicity, Race & Migration and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University
“Amir Issaa’s memoir is the amazing story of a graffiti and rap artist. It is also a unique account of one of Rome’s disadvantaged peripheries and of an entire generation. Amir’s powerful life narrative tells of immigration and racism and reveals aspects of Rome that few people have seen. This book is not about tourists and historical sites. It is the remarkable story of a brilliant man and of the diverse community he grew up in. This Is What I Live For is a must read for anybody interested in Italy and in transnational Italian, Cultural and Hip-Hop Studies.”— , Paul D. Paganucci Professor of Italian Literature and Language, Dartmouth College
“Too often, when told by or through unconventional means, stories fall through the cracks. Yet these are often the stories that best hold a powerful mirror to our societies, the ones that help us discover new meanings or reconstitute old ones. ‘Inossidabile,’ one of Amir Issaa’s early pieces, tells it all: culture happens when people meet. For him and others, hip-hop provides a language of translation for a diversity of stories. This Is What I Live For, a bilingual edition of Issaa's memoir, migrates an important story of cultural dialogue into yet another linguistic sphere, where it will no doubt find parallel voices and choral agreement.”— , Professor Emeritus of Italian, University of California, San Diego