Fight the Power: Hip Hop in a Time of Monsters

Day and time: Friday (March 20) · 16:00–17:30
Location: Job Lounge
Format: Talk

From Grand Narratives to Personal Struggles: Rap as An Everyday Life Narrative

Presented by: Marah Khalife

This paper examines Palestinian Rap as a cultural production that records and reflects the everyday reality under occupation, exceeding the themes of grand national slogans expressed in political songs. Rap here shifts towards intimate and lived experiences that affect the daily lives of Palestinians. Focusing on BLTNM’s Fawzi’s Youmi, this paper claims that rap works as a registrar of daily struggles; and how these struggles are very personal yet very collective. Instead

of longlining for a stolen homeland or liberty, Rappers choose to talk about navigating checkpoints, military invasions and the meaning of life and death under absurd\meaningful realities. These themes of personal experiences were often absent from dominant political songs. Rap here transforms individual experiences into a shared day to day collective narrative.

Rap as Self-Translation of the Social Body: From Individual to Collective Identity

Presented by: Waqaz Mirza

This paper examines francophone rap as a multilingual practice of self-translation that redefines how class, race, and belonging are voiced through rhythm and flow. Building on my research into bilingual authorship and translation across Samuel Beckett’s works, I analyse excerpts from four albums as a form of working-class narratives rewritten for a post-industrial and polyglot soundscape. These include Gaël Faye’s Pili sur un croissant au beurre (France, 2013), Médine’s Prose Elite (France, 2017), KT Gorique’s Akwaba (Switzerland, 2020), and Lous and the Yakuza’s Gore (Belgium, 2020). Their movement between French, verlan, Arabic, Creole, and English exposes a politics of legibility (Rancière, 2004), emphasizing how working-class and postcolonial experience makes itself heard within and against the institutions of culture.

Drawing from translation theory as articulated by Benjamin (1923) and from Bhabha’s (1994) concept of cultural hybridity), I argue that these multilingual flows perform a collective self-translation in which individual testimony becomes shared narrative. By placing translation alongside concepts such as authenticity and localisation (Alim, Ibrahim & Pennycook, 2008), this paper invites a broader methodological re-evaluation of how Hip Hop’s multilingual realities are studied. It outlines a framework that treats linguistic hybridity as a method for understanding how translation operates both as a bridge between worlds and as a site where new ones come into being.