Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Hip‐hop cultures and political agency in Brazil and South Africa

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 36; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02533952.2010.487998

1940-7874

Edgar Pieterse,

Diverse Musicological Studies

Abstract It is assumed in the article that the contemporary urban condition is marked by an increased pluralistic intensity in cities. Coupled to this shift in the nature of the urban context, one can also observe a proliferation of sites of political engagement and agency, some of which are formally tied to the various institutional forums of the state, and many that are defined by their insistence to stand apart from the state, asserting autonomy and clamouring for a self‐defined terms of recognition and agency. This article draws attention to the significance of one category of urban actors – hip‐hoppers – that can be said to occupy a ‘marginal’ location in relation to the state, but one uniquely relevant to the marginalised existence of most poor black youth in cities of the global South, particularly Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town. The article demonstrates that hip‐hop cultures offer a powerful framework of interpretation and response for poor black youth who are systemically caught at the receiving end of extremely violent and exploitative urban forces. The basis of hip‐hop's power is its complex aesthetical sensibility that fuses affective registers, such as rage, passion, lust, critique, pleasure and desire, which, in turn, translates into political identities, and sometimes agency (i.e. positionality), for its participants. In the final instance, the article tries to link conclusions about the potential of hip‐hop cultural politics to larger themes in urban studies, such as participation, public space, citizenship and security. Keywords: urban youth culturesurban exclusion/inclusionhip‐hopaffective registersinsurgent citizenship Notes 1. Versions of this paper were presented at two seminars, respectively, in Barcelona (6–8 November 2006) and Johannesburg (12–13 March 2007), both convened under the auspices of The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, The Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona and The Development Bank of Southern Africa. I want to thank the members of these seminars for their comments and engagements and also Christa Kuljian for her constructive feedback. Reviewer comments have also been most instructive. I obviously remain solely responsible for the content. An earlier version of this article was published in Portuguese as: Pieterse, E., 2008. Youth Cultures and the Mediation of Racial and Urban Exclusion/Inclusion in Brazil and South Africa, Revista Brasileira de Estudos Urbanos e Regionais, 10 (1), 105–124. 2. I use ‘hip‐hop’ as shorthand for contemporary popular music that is often referred to as rap music. As I explain later in the paper, rapping or emceeing is one aspect of a larger set of artistic and cultural practices that make up hip‐hop. In this broader sense, hip‐hop is often also seen as a particular cultural outlook or sensibility that pervades contemporary popular culture and is recently often soaked in crass consumerism. The groups and movements I explore in this paper align themselves with the ‘original’ imperatives of the hip‐hop movement to explore artistic autonomy, criticality and black pride. 3. It is beyond the scope of this paper to tease through the qualitative differences between favelas and townships. Even though both spatial categories represent residential settlements where poor and usually black people live, they have very different historical origins and unique relations with other parts of the city in the two countries. ‘Favela’ designates informal abodes that are built on occupied land (Caldeira Citation2006). Since the 1950s, Brazil experienced dramatic rates of urbanisation and the state was simply not able, and often unwilling, to provide housing for new migrants. These migrants, mainly from the north‐east of Brazil, occupied public and private land and, as a result, did not qualify for infrastructural investment; a situation that changed only after 1988, when a democratic constitution was introduced. Since then, Brazil has invested heavily in ‘regularising’ favelas – that is, providing services and extending title to residents – with considerable success, but much remains to be done. By contrast, in South Africa, townships emerged as a form of orderly and racist segregation of people born out of a paranoid fear that the co‐mingling of races would engender sexual vice and health epidemics (Lester et al. Citation2000). The Native Urban Areas Act of 1923 induced investment in modernist township settlements on the periphery of the city for black migrant labourers. This trend was consolidated by the Group Areas Act of 1950 that designated racially defined land‐uses and residential settlement. The townships were planned and designed to achieve modernist mono‐functionalism and extreme segregation between race groups (Dewar Citation1995). However, between 1930 and 1970 there was an active state‐driven housing programme for these areas, which saw the onset of informal settlements at a mass scale only after the 1970s. In Brazil, most favelas are on the periphery of the city, but some also exist in relatively close promity to the wealthy. In South Africa, townships have become less ‘orderly’, coexist with vast informal settlements, but remain relatively distant from wealthy areas. 4. Here I am referring to the broad understanding of blackness in Brazil, which includes the pardo (brown) population that accepts the African lineages in their ancestry. Further on, shifting to South Africa, I also include so‐called coloured youth who often self‐identify as black, especially conscious hip‐hoppers, but many also do not. More generally, for analytical purposes I reproduce the four population group designations used by Statistics South Africa – Black African, Coloured, Asian or Indian and White – but use the term ‘black’ to refer inclusively to all so‐called non‐White population groups who suffered as a result of the institutionalised system of racial oppression and exploitation prevalent in South Africa until 1994. The usages of these terms are merely instrumental, for I do not subscribe to the biological possibility of race and seek rather to resignify their constructed character by using the small case. However, on the controversial term ‘coloured’, I endorse the following argument by Erasmus (Citation2001, p. 23): ‘We have to recognize that constructions of what it means to be “coloured” have shaped particular black experiences in South Africa in a very real way and that these identities are meaningful to many. This requires respect for ordinary people and their subjective experiences which should be valued in their own right’. 5. MV Bill (Alexandre Barreto) is a hip‐hop artist from one of the most violent regions of the city of Rio de Janeiro, the favela of Cidade de Deus (City of God). 6. A cultural ‘scene’ refers to a critical presence of a particular set of ideas and practices, even if its commercial expression, which one could call an industry, is limited. ‘Conscious’ hip‐hop is not a particularly profitable industry in South Africa, whereas in Brazil there are a number of artists who sell in excess of half a million units (Caldeira Citation2006). This reflects the size of Brazil population (180 million compared to 50 million in South Africa) and the nature of the market in the two countries. 7. On 2 October 1992 a riot broke out in the Carandiru prison due to clashes between rival gangs over exercise space. The police forcibly repressed the riot and as a result 111 inmates were killed. This is considered Brazil's worst prison massacre (see Graeber Citation2007). 8. It is important to recognise that there is a difference in the black conscious militancy of Racionais MCs compared to MV Bill and AfroReggae. The former is much more interested in the power of discourse and language to set young black men in the periphery apart from mainstream white society, embedded in a sensibility that escews the role of NGOs or external actors who may want to work with hip‐hop crews to undertake social development (see Caldeira Citation2006). 9. The Cape Flats denotes black townships that came into being on the plains of Cape Town, 10–30km to the southeast of the traditional central city area, after the Group Areas Act of 1950 was implemented. The purpose of the Act was to create racially defined suburbs and neighbourhoods that were divided by a system of buffer zones, roads and rail lines. 10. A prime example of simply clever and inventive hip‐hop is the Grammy award winning double CD by Outkast in 2004. This was a seriously funky and iconoclastic production that brought sub‐genres and lyrical (and visual) registers together in combinations not seen before in hip‐hop and managed to both secure street credibility in hip‐hop and appeal to constituencies outside of hip‐hop. 11. Perry (Citation2004, pp. 47–48) develops this point further, beyond my current scope: The historic construction of blackness in opposition to whiteness, in which blackness is demonized, has become part of the art form's consciousness. Whereas previous generations of black Americans utilized various means to establish a self‐definition that negated the construction of blackness as demonic or depraved, many members of the hip‐hop generation have chosen instead to appropriate and exploit those constructions as metaphoric tools for expressing power. Because this gesture is ultimately aggressive (in that it primarily claims power through the voice of black males, and this, given the dichotomized racial structure in the United States, takes power away from white America, even if only operating through white fear), the black community generally does not perceive these acts as those of self‐hating traitors, in the way it might the acts of black people adopting other stereotypical postures. Rather, these young men may even be seen as champions of a particular kind of black empowerment. Of course, such empowerment depends on a larger level of powerlessness. 12. Personal correspondence in response to a draft of this article. 13. This quote is drawn from an electronic chat room exchange between the participants of a research project convened under the auspices of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona and the Development Bank of Southern Africa, 6–28 June 2006. The chat site is no longer active but a copy of the exchange is available from the author.