Belonging and Community

Day and time: Thursday (March 19) · 15:15–16:45
Location:  Info Center
Format: Talk

Pussy Power: Global Feminist Flows and the Politics of Belonging in French Hip-Hop

Presented by: Marianna Krumrine

Once dismissed as the music of immigrant youth from the suburbs, rap is now France’s most popular genre—yet it remains structured by gendered and racialized hierarchies. Women and gender-nonconforming artists are vastly underrepresented, and those from immigrant backgrounds often achieve only conditional success, gaining recognition primarily when their work aligns with ideals of republican and European modernity. Within this terrain, where cultural legitimacy and belonging remain unevenly distributed, artists must navigate intersecting exclusions of gendered and racialized citizenship. This paper asks how women and gender-nonconforming rappers create belonging and claim space within both a masculinist genre and a postcolonial nation that situates them at the margins of each. While scholarship on French hip-hop is extensive, few studies have examined hip-hop feminism at the intersection of immigrant identity—and even fewer through ethnographic engagement. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Paris and its suburbs in 2025, this paper shows how performers mobilize global feminist references and interactive performance techniques to theorize belonging through aesthetics. In doing so, they extend the legacy of immigrant laborers who rebuilt postwar France—by reconstructing the nation’s cultural fabric through their art. These performances transform exclusion into collective power, imagining new forms of feminist and national belonging.

Hip Hop at the Margins: Articulating Identity and Belonging in Spain

Presented by: Genevieve Allotey-Pappoe

The global circulation of Hip Hop has positioned the genre as a significant cultural phenomenon and a powerful medium for individual and collective self-expression. Indeed, Hip Hop resonates with “marginalized people of various nationalities and ethnicities” (Perry 2004, 2). In Spain, Hip Hop is both a product of global trends and a response to local realities. This paper explores how Hip Hop reflects and articulates a complex, nested web of marginalizations—from Southern Europe’s peripheral status within the EU to the fraught politics of Catalan identity, and the exclusions faced by African and Arab immigrant communities. Through ethnographic exploration and critical analysis of lyrical content, I argue that Hip Hop in Spain embodies a multilayered politics of marginal identity and subalternity, where multiple forms of exclusion and difference coexist and intersect. Hip hop in Spain illuminates the tensions, solidarities, and contradictions that emerge from nested and sometimes conflicting marginalizations. This analysis calls for a move beyond the perception of global Hip Hop as a cultural practice of resistance to a conceptualization of the genre as a space where the politics of identity and belonging are continuously negotiated amidst complex layers of power and exclusion.

Scratching Writing: Hip-Hop’s Damaged Signs of Civic Belonging

Presented by: Tyler Bunzey

In the United States, literacy has perpetually been used as a technology of civic belonging, and as such, it has also been used as a technology of racial control. As Soltow and Stevens (1981) argue in their history of the common school in the U.S., literacy was figured as a marker of civic capability, what they called an “ideology of literacy.” Leveraging the work of Critical Literacy Studies and Black Studies, I suggest that this ideology of literacy was also used as a technology of control in broader Western culture with access to literacy serving as a literal mark of inclusion in the racial nation state through practices such as voting literacy tests and racial literacy laws.

This paper examines how hip-hop’s writing practice challenges this ideology. Both theorizing how writing is central to hip-hop’s verbal artists like emcees and examining how writing is not exactly a “literate” practice as the West defines it, this essay makes a case for hip-hop’s writing as a para-literate practice. Pushing literacy beyond its nationalist bounds, writing becomes something else—what Paul Gilroy refers to in Black Atlantic as a “willfully damaged set of signs”—as individual artists adapt the technology of writing for their respective artistic purposes. As we can see through the disparate uses of writing among the case studies of Rakim, G Yamazawa, and $wank, writing is never a singular practice in hip-hop that exists on the written page, and as such, hip-hop writing articulates an aesthetic practice wholly separate from a nationalist ideology of literacy.