Imagining the Global: Transnational Media and Popular Culture Beyond East and West by Darling-Wolf Fabienne

Author:Darling-Wolf, Fabienne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

No One Is Pure: Hybridity as Hip-hop’s Productive Potential

Because of the tensions that inevitably arise when subaltern voices attempt to gain recognition within the environment responsible for their domination, hip-hop has long been mired in identity politics. Its global spread has, however, rendered its politics of representation exponentially more complex. Hip-hop’s claims to authenticity are, for better or for worse, as varied as the different cultural environments to which the genre has been adapted. As Condry suggests, whether or not one accepts these claims is based on one’s location and is, to some extent, arbitrary. Thus, assertions of hip-hop’s “true” essence, if useful in helping us “understand conventions of inclusion and exclusion” (Condry, 2006, p. 35), are problematic at best, particularly when considering hip-hop as a globally influential genre.

But just because hip-hop has come to mean different things to different Page 98 → people in different places does not mean that it has lost all meaning, or its productive potential. One of the most positive side effects of hip-hop’s commercial success and its transnational spread is the multifaceted nature of the tensions it has introduced into notions of political engagement vs. commodification, into constructions of racial, ethnic, national, cultural, and class identities, and into the relationship between the global, the national, and the local. Global hip-hop’s productive potential rests, in other words, in its (ethnic, racial, cultural, (trans)national, commercial, underground, linguistic, regional, and so on) hybridity, which, rather than granting individuals ownership over essentialized identities, destabilizes boundaries. It rests on its ability to produce a “different notion of authenticity” that “affirms the value of mixing and what might be called creolization” (Gilroy, 2004, p. 91)—a form of authenticity, as Gilroy concludes, “premised on the notion of flows” (2004, p. 91).

In this sense, the most “political” aspect of Japanese and French rappers’ intervention into their respective socio-cultural contexts is perhaps their potential to ignite a discussion—at the local, national, and transnational level—about what it means to be Japanese and/or French. When Japanese rappers point to the plight of burakumin, nikkeijin,20 or Korean immigrants and their descendants, when they ask their audience to acknowledge the legacy of Japan’s imperialist history, they challenge hegemonic constructions of Japan as a racially and ethnically homogeneous nation21 and engage in a “transnational cultural politics of race by critiquing the enduring racism among right-wing Japanese toward their Asian neighbors” (Condry, 2006, p. 45).

Likewise, when French rappers claim their position as both representatives and producers of “French culture” while simultaneously addressing the legacy of colonialism and celebrating hybridity, they help destabilize culturally and racially essentialist notions of what it means to be French and “create other cultural forms that will become new references for French society and will be reappropriated within [France’s] cultural heritage” (Boucher, 1998, p. 366). While France’s institutions may be slow to change, scholars have pointed to the profound effect hip-hop has had on conceptualizations of French cultural identity (see, for example, Orlando, 2003; Stam and Shohat, 2012, p. 146). “Contemporary French hip-hop culture’s music

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