Postcolonial Practices: Rhymes Across Borders, Memories Across Empires
Day and time: Friday (March 20) · 09:15–10:45
Location: Coop Himmelb(l)au
Format: Talk
To be Social or Political?: Proposing a new spectrum of “Conscious Rap” and its sub-genres, in the context of 1990s New York City and Santiago, Chile
Presented by: Ethan Crandall
In everyday conversations and academic discourse, the terms “conscious” and “political rap” are used in selective ways: often conflated and other times separate. Rapping started in the 1970s as a rhythmic vocal expression that almost required some kind of political or socially charged statement. By the 1990s, with the growth of, and changes in, the music industry, the idea of being conscious or political in American rap became “alternative” to the new standard of expressively violent music to entertain: gangsta rap. Due to this shift, an underground scene of “conscious” and “political” rap opened up beneath the mainstream and in the shadows of the “Black Conscious Era” of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. However, this stratification of critical content is not normalized internationally; in fact, politically and socially critical rap music is the mainstream in many other countries, like Chile. In this presentation, I aim break down the barriers between the sub-genres of “conscious” and “political” rap music; instead, proposing a new categorization of “alternative rap sub-genres”: socially conscious, politically conscious and militant/revolutionary; and placing them in 1990s Santiago de Chile and New York City.
Embodied Battles: a multimodal analysis of rap battles in Arabic-speaking contexts
Presented by: Dima Alkhateeb
Rap battles across Arabic-speaking regions are a growing phenomenon, yet multimodal research on their dynamics remains limited. This paper analyzes two rap battles: Kalash (Lebanon) vs. Al Darwish (Syria) and Illiam (Palestine) vs. Brother Bull (Lebanon) (The Arena, 2019) using ELAN software to annotate key sequences. In addition to exploring how these battles are transformative of social realities, I explore how MCs use silence, gaze control, gestures, and facial expressions to build momentum and control the audience.
While authenticity and affiliation are central to rap, this paper demonstrates how they are manifested via different cultural and semiotic resources. In these Arabic-speaking contexts, rappers represent their nation, rather than a crew. Code-switching is frequently seen as inauthentic, associated with sounding “American” or signaling higher status, both of which may conflict with what is considered authentic in rap. Regional differences also influence performance and meaning, negating the idea of one homogenous “Arabic rap” in the MENA region. In addition to lyrics, these dynamics can be seen in eye movements, pauses, gestures, and facial expressions.
This paper contributes regionally by revealing the diversity within Arabic rap, and methodologically by demonstrating how multimodal analysis uncovers the interplay of performance, power, and identity. These insights open new directions for cross-cultural performance and global hip-hop research.
History-makers, knowledge bringers: Anti-colonial imaginaries in Dutch and French rap
Presented by: Rachel Gillett
In ‘Les Colonies’ MC Solaar decries how France has been not just shaped but deformed by colonization. He links the long afterlife of colonial rule to neo-colonial capitalist institutions that structure ongoing global inequalities and misrememberings of history. That number is one of many created by French rappers and hip hop artists who have assertively placed France’s colonial history before the public. They collectively constitute a transnational web of allusions, of images and metaphors, instantly recognizable tropes and sounds, to create critical histories of colonialism. Scholars of French rap and hip hop have shown how this strand of knowledge-making within French rap should not be read as simple activism even as it does conscious cultural memory-work. This paper builds on their work to deliver close readings of French and Dutch rap that show how it participates in a practice of anti-colonial and transnational history-making and knowledge production. In doing so this paper responds to EHHSN 9.0’s call to think the European dimensions of global hip hop, it argues that history-making in hip hop is more than reminiscing, and it suggests the French and Dutch hip hop participates in a long genealogy of anti-colonial cultural politics that ‘crosses the pond’.
