Francesca D’Amico-Cuthbert | Toronto Hip-Hop & the Music Marketplace

Dr. Francesca D'Amico-Cuthbert is the 2020-2021 Community-Engaged Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. A trained historian, Dr. D’Amico-Cuthbert’s research explores the history of American and Canadian Black popular music, the creative industries and the music marketplace with expertise in Rap music and Hip-Hop culture. Her PhD work traced how Black rappers in the era of mass incarceration constructed complex ethnographies of urban spaces, transformed dispositions of power, and unmasked the modes and mechanisms of a persistent and haunting coloniality in the afterlives of American slavery. Her current postdoctoral research explores Toronto Rap music’s relationship to commerce, anti-Black market segmentation and the availability of state revenue streams and marketplace exposure – and in doing so, highlight a social history of power relations between Toronto Hip Hop practitioners, creative marketplace elites, and state-actors. Currently, Dr. D’Amico-Cuthbert also serves on the Education Committee of the Universal Museum of Hip Hop – which is dedicated to the preservation of Hip Hop’s history and is set to open in 2024 in the Bronx, New York City.

Further Reading:

Francesca D'Amico, "'The Mic is My Piece': Canadian Rap, the Gendered 'Cool Pose,' and Music Industry Racialization and Regulation," Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Vol. 26 No. 1 (2015): 255-290.

Jesse Stewart and Niel Scobie, “Fantastic Voyage: The Diasporic Roots and Routes of Early Toronto Hip Hop,” in Contemporary Musical Expressions in Canada, eds. Anna Hoefnagels, Judith Klassen and Sherry Johnson. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019.

Remi Warner, “Hiphop with a Northern Touch!? Diasporic Wanderings/Wonderings on Canadian Blackness,” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 15 (2006): 45-68.