Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

GLOBAL BLACK SELF-FASHIONINGS: HIP HOP AS DIASPORIC SPACE

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 15; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10702890802470660

1547-3384

Marc D. Perry,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Abstract This essay examines how the "black" racial significance of hip hop culture is received, interpreted, and redeployed within the Afro-Atlantic world. Beyond questions of cultural consumption and reproduction, it is argued that hip hop's expanding global reach has facilitated the contemporary making and moving of black diasporic subjects themselves. Here, African descendant youth in an array of locales use the performative contours of hip hop to mobilize notions of black-self in ways that are at one time both contestive and transcendent of nationally bound racial framings. Hip hop in this way can be seen as enabling a current global (re)mapping of black political imaginaries via social dynamics of diaspora. In pursuing this argument, this essay looks toward hip hop movements in Brazil, Cuba, and South Africa as compelling, yet varying examples of how transnationally attuned identities of blackness are marshaled in the fashioning of diasporic subjects through hip hop. Key Words: African diasporahip hopraceperformance I thank S. Craig Watkins, Bill Martin, and Matti Bunzl for their supportive engagements at various stages of this article. I also thank Identities editors Jonathan Hill and Tom Wilson and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Notes 1. In this essay I generally use the term "hip hop" to refer to the broad set of cultural practices, stylized aesthetics, and the larger cultural industry associated with, and inclusive of rap music. While the production and consumption of rap music may be central to many of these contexts, using hip hop's more expansive understandings underscores the contours of hip hop as a space of collective meaning making if not forms of subjectivity. 2. See, for instance, CitationMitchell 2001; CitationCondry 2006; and CitationOsumare 2007. 3. In developing this notion of mobilized diaspora, Edwards draws from the work of CitationHarris 1996 and CitationEdmondson 1986. 4. Consuming some 38.5 percent of all enslaved Africans brought to the Americas, Brazil's slave labor system operated from 1550 to 1888, making it the last nation in the Western hemisphere to officially abolish the institution (CitationBehrendt 1999). 5. For critical discussions of Brazil's "myth of racial democracy" and its impact on black political mobilization, in addition to Hanchard 1994, see CitationWinant 1994 and CitationLilly Caldwell 2006. 6. Original Portuguese lyrics accessed 18/9/2007 from http://www.coquim.hpg.ig.com.br/l1.htm. 7. Translation drawn from CitationRoth Gordon 2002. 8. Personal interview, 1993. 9. Personal interview, 1993. 10. Personal interview, 1993. 11. The prison complex was later closed in 2002. The massacre was more recently given cinematic form in the 2004 film Carandiru by Brazilian filmmaker Hector Babenco. 12. For a discussion of varying scholarly readings of and the relative effectiveness of Cuban Revolution's dealings with the historical problematics of race and racism, see CitationFernández 2001 and Citationde la Fuente 2001. 13. This scenario remained intact until November 2004 when the Cuban state, in an effort to reduce the island's dependency on U.S. dollars, sought to discourage the flow of dollars by way of exchange tariffs in favor of other forms of hard foreign currency. While such moves may have contributed to a de-dollarization of the Cuban economy, the fundamental mechanisms of foreign currency dependency continued to function intact as Cubans remain largely dependent on some form of foreigner currency—Euros, Canadian Dollars, or British Pounds—to survive in Cuba's new neoliberalized economy. 14. My analysis of the Cuban hip hop movement is drawn primarily from two years of ethnographic field research conducted in Havana, Cuba, for my Ph.D. dissertation. 15. Frequently marked using the racially-signified term barrios marginados (marginal neighborhoods), these predominately poorer black neighborhoods are often associated with criminality and other related social "pathologies" in ways that resonate with Cuba's long-standing racialized association of blacks with notions of social pathology and "the primitive." For further discussions see CitationMoore 1994; CitationPalmie 2002. 16. Personal interview, 2002. 17. See CitationThomas 2004 and CitationGodreau 2006. 18. Personal interview, 2001. 19. For a more detailed discussion of the Cuban state's efforts at institutionalizing Cuban hip hop see CitationBaker 2005. 20. Drawing on the work of CitationNancy Fraser (1991), Dawson distinguishes an alternative, subalternly positioned black "counter public" from that of Habermas' bourgeois concept of the public sphere predicated on formal institutional civic structures such as the media, the academy, and other dominant organizational forms. 21. One only needs to glance at the website Africanhiphop.com to get a sense of the remarkable scope and depth to which hip hop has taken root in Africa. Although European administered, the vast majority of the site's inexhaustible collections of articles, news archives, interviews, web forums, and music and video clips are produced by contributors from the continent itself. And while possibly the most compressive, Africanhiphop.com is only one of more than 200 websites dedicated to locally produced hip hop in Africa. Networks of these kinds, in turn, provide a once inconceivable space for communicative interchange among African practitioners and followers of hip hop, while testifying to the technological savviness of those engaged in the production and promotion of hip hop in Africa, despite the continent's endemic levels of poverty and resource scarcity. 22. See, for instance, BBC Radio 1's audio documentary "The Beautiful Struggle" (2005). 23. Regarding Kenya hip hop see the documentary "Hip-Hop Colony: The African Hip-Hop Explosion" (2005) produced/directed by Michael Wanguhu. 24. Isicamtho is derived from a fusion of regional African languages such as Zulu, Tswana, Sesotho, and dominant Afrikaans. In the shifting parlance of the townships, the term has come to replace the expression tsotsitaal, or "gangster-speak," previously used to refer to ever-evolving township vernacular. 25. Interview with Johannesburg-based Skwatta Kamp, one of South Africa's most commercially successful hip hop crews. Electronic document, http://www.musica.co.za/eMusica/news_article.asp?segmentID=99&-GenreID=99&ArticleID=1296. Accessed 10/4/2006. 26. A vast network of townships were erected in the 1960s along Cape Town's sandy floodplains to accommodate large numbers of coloreds forcibly displaced by Apartheid's social geography. 27. Significant numbers of enslaved and indentured laborers from what are today Malaysia and Indonesia were brought to the Cape Town region starting in the late 1600s by Dutch traders. These "Malays" later inter-mixed with European settlers and indigenous Africans resulting in the racial codification of "coloureds" as a population group under Apartheid. Large segments of Cape Town's colored community still practice the Islam first introduced via Malay/Indonesian influences, and the religion continues to be an important component of a distinct cultural identity for many coloreds. Within the broader colored population, both Afrikaans and English are spoken with a distinctive vernacular accent, cadence, and intonation. 28. This observation is drawn from my personal observations in Cape Town in 1991 during the early formation of the region's hip hop movement. At this juncture youth participating in the scene, the vast majority of who were colored, self-titled themselves as the Black Hip Hop Movement. 29. Cited in CitationHaupt 2003. 30. Also see CitationWatkins 2001 and CitationBattersby 2004. 31. Kaffir is the Afrikaans term used derisively for black South Africans in ways historically resonant with the term "nigger" in the United States. 32. Cited from http://africasgateway.com/sections-viewarticle-105.html. Accessed 24/9/07. 33. The Zulu Nation was a social-cultural organization founded in the early 1970s in publichousing projects of the South Bronx by Afrika Bambaataa and is credited as a key cradle of early hip hop culture in New York City. The now "Universal" Zulu Nation has its own website (www.zulunation.com) containing information ranging from the history of hip hop, to afrocentric teachings and readings of world events, to black-produced consumer products. The site even provides an on-line application service for membership, enabling the expansion of what is now the organization's global network of local branches. 34. See http://www.zulunation.nl/projects/southafrica/introducing_emile_yx.php. Accessed 12/4/2006. 35. http://www.africanhiphop.com/update/hivhop.htm. Accessed 4/4/2006 36. Mario Pissarra, Contemporary African Database, http://people.africadatabase.org/en/profile/-11711.html. Accessed 24/9/2007. 37. Mario Pissarra, Contemporary African Database, http://people.africadatabase.org/en/profile/-11711.html. Accessed 24/9/2007 Darlington, Shasta 2000. Brazilian Rappers Speak to the Poor: Popular Duo Launch Recording Career From Notorious San Paulo Prison. The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 5 September. McDaniels, Andrea 1999. Striking Cord With Youths, Brazil Rappers Nudge Reform. The Christian Science Monitor, 11 January.