Scholarship on rap has emphasized the propensity of rap to form and reinforce social boundaries. This is particularly the case in studies that focus on rap's relationship to regions, cities, and neighborhoods. 1 The dominant trend has been for
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Rapping French Cities in the 1990s
Blurring Marseille and Brightening Paris in Contested Processes of Boundary Making
Joseph Downing
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2020
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 136–154 (19 total)
Rapping the Republic
Utopia, Critique, and Muslim Role Models in Secular France
Jeanette S. Jouili
This article examines the work and public reception of two, outspokenly Muslim, French rap artists. While both promote similar visions of a cosmopolitan French nation inclusive of its racial and religious (in particular Muslim) minorities, they express very different kinds of affective attachments to the French nation. I show that it is these affective attachments rather than their piety that explains their different reception within France?s media and political landscape. My claim in this article is that while secularity can be considered to be more lenient than often expected towards religion, it does not show the same flexibility towards the political commitments that go along. Thus, the legitimate secular subject, especially when of immigrant and Muslim background, must be loyal to the nation-state and display the corresponding affective structures.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2013
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 58–80 (23 total)
Pelasgic Encounters in the Greek-Albanian Borderland
Border Dynamics and Reversion to Ancient Past in Southern Albania
Gilles de Rapper
In the last ten years, many books and articles dedicated to Pelasgians have been published in Albania, mostly by amateur historians and linguists. These works question the official discourse on the Illyrian origin of Albanians inherited from the socialist era. They also question the relationship of Albanians with Greeks, both in ancient times and in the present. Considering the fact that a significant number of those authors originate from southern Albania and that their books are widely read and appreciated in this Albanian borderland, this article argues that the recent success of Pelasgic theories can be partially explained by the new uses of the border in the post-1991 context and by the state of relations between Albanians and Greeks as experienced at the local level. Imagining the Pelasgians as prestigious ancestors appears as an answer to feelings of inequality and marginality related to new practices of the border.
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2009
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 50–68 (18 total)
The Needle Drop
History and Hip-Hop Mobility in the Transpacific (EP)
William B. Noseworthy
Scholarship in the field of hip-hop studies has convincingly argued against a “cultural grey out” and in favor of “local idiosyncrasies” in the mobility of cultural forms. That said, no published study has focused on the movements of the artists themselves in a transpacific context that places scenes in Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam in conversation with one another. Varying histories of colonialism and postcolonial movements are essential aspects of each social context. I argue that the transpacific lens allows scholars to draw out the movements of individuals, influences, and emergent trends in the art form to better understand how artists are, metaphorically, scratching back and forth between representing originality on the one hand and the need for popular appeal on the other. I draw on vinyl itself as a metaphor for this article, which is framed as an EP.
Soheila Shahshahani
This article aims to contextualise music as it was experienced in Tehran in 2004 (when the research for this work was conducted) - music that comes from various ethnic groups within Iran, and music coming from the diaspora. The relationships between various genres of music and people, as well as between music and the government, are examined. The malleability of musicians and their capacity to coordinate their expertise with popular and governmental expectations and limitations are then analysed. In this way, a fascinating yet little studied area in the anthropology of Iran at the time of research is addressed.
In Anthropology of the Middle East
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2013
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 24–39 (16 total)
Spatializing Black Girlhood
Rap Music and Strategies of Refusal
Asilia Franklin-Phipps
important differences between girls and women, in discussing visual, digital, and music cultures, both women and girls consume, engage, and create rap music so, for this reason, I discuss them together. Further, both are affected by spatial violence that is
In Girlhood Studies
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2022
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 89–104 (16 total)
“We Owe a Historical Debt to No One”
The Reappropriation of Photographic Images from a Museum Collection
Helen Mears
“Labau hka kadai hpe mung nkap” (We owe a historical debt to no one), asserts Kachin rapper Hpaujang Brang San in the track “Labau hte nga ai amyu” (A race with history), yet the video that accompanies it draws heavily on a collection of archival
Panique Celtique
Manau's Celtic Rap, Breton Cultural Expression, and Contestatory Performance in Contemporary France
Charles R. Batson
The highly successful 1998 album Panique celtique launched the group of rappers known as Manau and their self-styled "Celtic rap fusion" onto the French musical scene, bringing Breton binious to join the beatboxes on France's hip-hop radio stations and concert stages. As they engage a strikingly heteroclite blending of both rap and Breton musical traditions, Manau's work configures a Celtic Brittany as a rich site of contestation and revalorization. This article traces histories of French-language rap and Breton musical expression and analyzes their politicized uses in their respective historico-cultural contexts. Concluding with an exploration of current questions concerning how the past informs the shape of present performance, especially in light of Breton cultural particularities, the author suggests that Manau's rapped Celtic stylings both occasion an interrogation of cultural identity through music and point to charged social meanings attributed to performed Frenchness and Otherness in early twenty-first-century France.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2009
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 63–83 (21 total)
Patricia Anne Simpson
In this article, I analyze the social and cultural trends from within the music scene that counter challenges the moderate and extreme right. This music centers on the issue of ethnic exclusivity and aggressively insists on accepting Germany as a diverse society, however uncomfortable a fit that may still be for many. Certain bands and musicians move from politics to identity politics, in an attempt to generate a discourse about racism and national identity. By foregrounding the contingent relationship between citizen and nation, bands like Advanced Chemistry destabilize any naturalized or motivated link between self and state. Songs like "Fremd im eigenen Land" dismantle any proprietary relationship between German ethnicity and entitlement to the rights of citizenship. An image of a new Germany emerges that insists on the political acceptance of diversity. Nevertheless, this vision is subject to the pressures of reality: Germany is not by any stretch of the imagination a hate-free zone. Structured in part by responses to alienation within Germany, as well as by imported musical forms of male affinity, some bands, rappers, and musicians are organizing themselves into new fraternities. While criticizing or rejecting certain Americanized clichés of masculinity, the bands I discuss look beyond the caricatures of yuppies and cowboys to different models.
In German Politics and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2005
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 50–71 (21 total)
Rethinking Agency and Resistance
What Comes After Girl Power?
Marnina Gonick, Emma Renold, Jessica Ringrose, and Lisa Weems
With the current proliferation of images and narratives of girls and girlhood in popular culture, many ‘truths’ about girls circulate with certainty. Amongst the aims of this Special Issue is to examine critically these ‘confi dent characterizations’ (Trinh 1989), to trace the social conditions which produce these ‘truths’ along with the public fascination with girls and to analyze critically the eff ects of these ‘truths’ in the lives of young girls. Th e concepts of resistance and agency have been critical to the field of youth studies, sociology of education and school ethnographies (Hall and Jeff erson 1976; McRobbie 1978; Willis 1978) for conceptualizing the relationships between young people and their social worlds. Ground breaking scholarship by McRobbie (2000) challenges the gendered assumptions of political agency articulated in previous theories of subcultures developed in the 1970s and 80s. While feminist poststructuralist work in the 1990s has re-conceptualized agency in ways that are markedly diff erent to humanist notions of rational actors with free-will (Butler 2006; Davies 2000), feminist researchers have also shown the importance of a classed, raced and sexed analysis of agency. For example, scholarship by feminists of color have shown how girls of color challenge and defy dominant stereotypes of girlhood in culturally specifi c ways such as participating in spokenword contests, rap and hip hop, and ‘beauty contests’ (Hernandez and Rehman 2002; Gaunt 2006). In the changing social, economic, political and globalizing context of the new millennium, where ‘girl power’ has become a marketing tool and a branding (Klein 2000) of girlhood, it is important to look anew at the relations between girlhood, power, agency and resistance.