Global Linguistic Flows

Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language

H. Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim, Alastair Pennycook, H. Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim, Alastair Pennycook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135592981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Located at the intersection of sociolinguistics and Hip Hop Studies, this cutting-edge book moves around the world – spanning Africa, Asia, Australia, the Americas and the European Union – to explore Hip Hop cultures, youth identities, the politics of language, and the simultaneous processes of globalization and localization. Focusing closely on language, these scholars of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, cultural studies, and critical pedagogies offer linguistic insights to the growing scholarship on Hip Hop Culture, while reorienting their respective fields by paying closer attention to processes of globalization and localization.

The book engages complex processes such as transnationalism, (im)migration, cultural flow, and diaspora in an effort to expand current theoretical approaches to language choice and agency, speech style and stylization, codeswitching and language mixing, crossing and sociolinguistic variation, and language use and globalization. Moving throughout the Global Hip Hop Nation, through scenes as diverse as Hong Kong's urban center, Germany's Mannheim inner-city district of Weststadt, the Brazilian favelas, the streets of Lagos and Dar es Salaam, and the hoods of the San Francisco Bay Area, this global intellectual cipha breaks new ground in the ethnographic study of language and popular culture.

DISC 1
Styling Locally, Styling Globally

The Globalization of Language and Culture in a Global Hip Hop Nation

TRACK 1
Hip Hop as Dusty Foot Philosophy

Engaging Locality

ALASTAIR PENNYCOOK AND TONY MITCHELL

When asked what he means by the Dusty Foot Philosopher (the title of his recent CD, which received a 2006 Juno Award for Rap Recording of the Year, and was nominated for the inaugural Polaris Music Prize), Somali-Canadian MC K’Naan explains that this is both how he sees himself and a broader image of global representation. When images of Africa are shown on charity television (the most common means by which people view Africa, he suggests),

the camera always kind of pans to the feet, and the feet are always dusty from these kids. What they’re trying to portray is a certain bias connected to their own historical reasoning, and what I saw though instead, was that that child with the dusty feet himself is not a beggar, and he’s not an undignified struggler, but he’s the dusty foot philosopher. He articulates more than the cameraman can imagine, at that point in his life. But he has nothing; he has no way to dream, even. He just is who he is. (K’Naan interview, April 25, 2004)¹

In his track “For Mohamoud (Soviet)” he explains further:

Dusty foot philosopher means the one that’s poor, lives in poverty but lives in a dignified manner and philosophizes about the universe and talks about things that well-read people talk about, but they’ve never read or traveled on a plane. (K’Naan, 2005)

K’Naan’s vision raises several key themes we wish to pursue here. By looking at Hip Hop as dusty foot philosophy, as both grounded in the local and the real, and capable of articulating a broader sense of what life is about, K’Naan is not only talking about localization, about the ways in which Hip Hop becomes a means for the local articulation of identity, but also about a deeper sense of locality. To have one’s feet in the dust is an image of localization that goes beyond appropriation of sounds, or references to local contexts. It speaks to a particular groundedness, a relationship to the earth that is about both pleasure and politics. To walk barefoot is to be located in a particular way. In his adopted home, Canada, the impossibility of walking barefoot makes him “feel like a foreigner.” By contrast, “walking on the sand with your bare feet is therapeutic, you feel the sun” (Interview). Far from being a trivial point only about the weather or sartorial politics, this is a much more significant issue to do with the ways in which our histories, bodies, desires, and localities are intertwined.

Indigenous Australian Wire MC articulates this relationship in a different way, picking up the importance of the earth, dirt, and dust while simultaneously linking to a new digital era. Asked to explain what he means by his phrase abodigital, Wire MC explains that it

has an ambiguous meaning because of the word digital. I’m abo-digital because I’m a 21st century Aboriginal, I’m down with laptops and mobile phones and home entertainment. But digital also means your hands and your fingers, so I’m still putting my fingers in the dirt; I’m still using my hands to create things. So that’s the ambiguity. (Wire MC interview, March 31, 2006)

This image is important for several reasons: It pulls a sense of indigeneity away from an indelible link only to traditional ways of doing things. This is a 21st century Aboriginal performer at home in a digital, global era. Yet at the same time, like K’Naan’s dusty feet, he has dirty hands, fingers that create from the land to which Aboriginal Australians have been so deeply connected for thousands of years. Wire MC links the traditional and modern in another way, through his notion of Hip Hop as “the modern day corroboree.”² Hip Hop brings people together in new ways, to tell stories, to sing and dance, but “It’s still the same corroboree, still singing and dancing and telling the same stories about the immediate environment” (Wire MC).

Both Wire MC and K’Naan articulate the complexity of cultural and political influences here: They are 21st century digital artists who draw on and change traditional cultural forms; they are part of the global Hip Hop movement, identifying with and also rejecting different aspects of its global formation; they benefit from and participate in the rapid flows of music and ideas made possible in the digital age and yet they remain highly critical of Western ways of viewing the world and of the bias in particular forms of historical reasoning. Dusty foot philosophy is an argument to understand the impoverished of this world not as undignified strugglers but as dusty foot philosophers, as capable of articulating more than the outside observer can imagine. This chapter aims to open up an understanding of the ways in which localized Hip Hop can on the one hand still be part of a global, digital world and yet at the same time have its feet and fingers in the dirt; how it can participate in the global spread of Hip Hop and yet at the same time be part of the critique of those forms of global media that participate in the denigration of African and Aboriginal people; how local Hip Hop can be both part of international popular culture while at the same time articulating local philosophies of global significance; both dusty footed and philosophical. In taking up this line of argument, we are trying to get beyond common images whereby localization is merely the appropriation of the preexisting global, in order to explore instead how these artists’ articulation of the coevalness of origins obliges us to spatialize time and think differently about the already local (cf. Mignolo, 2000).

Localizations: Struggle, Engagement, Transformation

A central concern of this chapter, therefore, is to pursue what it means for Hip Hop to become localized. This has implications not only for an understanding of Hip Hop but also for broader concerns in anthropology and linguistics, particularly with respect to concerns about the global spread of English. If we only have a vision of a global spread of Hip Hop or English, emanating from one source before becoming localized through the adoption of various cultural or linguistic forms, we may be missing the dynamics of change, struggle and appropriation. As Robbins (2001) notes, in trying to understand the relationship between tradition and modernity, the tendency, at least among anthropologists, is to emphasize processes of localization and appropriation so that aspects of modernity become localized: “No matter what modernity is to begin with” this argument goes,

once cooked in the heat of local fires it will have lost its shape to a significant extent and become something indigenous and distinctive, a homemade product of the kind anthropologists have long studied. In this practice, keeping things culturally local implicitly becomes the only way of keeping them ethnographically real. (p. 901)

While it might be tempting to follow this line of thought in our approach to Hip Hop localization, thus suggesting that keeping it real means keeping things culturally local (Pennycook, 2007), we also want to develop Robbins’ concern that the proposition “when local cultures cut modernity to fit their own dimensions, they can make it assume almost any form they like” (pp. 901–902) is problematic.

This does not imply that there is an unchangeable essence to Hip Hop that resists localization; but nor does it assume that once cooked in the heat of local fires, Hip Hop loses its shape to such an extent that it becomes something else. What it does suggest is that when local practices of music, dance, story-telling, and painting encounter diversifying forms of globalized Hip Hop, they enable a recreation both of what it means to be local and of what then counts as the global. “In these self-consciously multicultural, globalized times” suggests Robbins, “reports of cultural difference do little to disrupt our own settled understandings” (p. 909). In order to come to terms with forms of linguistic and cultural localization, therefore, we need to look very carefully at current conceptualizations of the global spread of Hip Hop. In the same way that accounts of the current state of English as nothing but a global spread from the center to the periphery—whether from a triumphalist or a critical perspective (e.g., Phillipson, 1992)—fail to account for the many local identifications and appropriations, so it is still common to view the global spread of Hip Hop as if this were only the global take-up of a particular cultural form. An international Hip Hop conference in the German city of Chemnitz in August 2006, for example, which dealt mainly with Hip Hop in Germany, as well as France, Cuba, Slovenia, Poland, Australia, and the United States, was opened by the U.S. consul from Leipzig, who referred to the “uniquely American” nature of Hip Hop.

From this perspective, then, the global spread of Hip Hop is the global spread of (African) American culture: “Hip Hop is and always will be a culture of the African-American minority. But it has become an international language, a style that connects and defines the self-image of countless teenagers…” (Bozza, 2003, p. 130). While this perspective captures several important points—Hip Hop is indeed a globally marketed phenomenon, and American Hip Hop is dominant, particularly in English-language media—it fails to engage with the different circuits of flow through which Hip Hop circulates globally (Pennycook, 2007), the diversity of local appropriations of Hip Hop, or the coevalness of origins and the roles of mimicry and enactment (what may appear very similar may not in fact be so). Accusations of cultural imperialism, as with accusations of linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992), while important as critiques of media dominance and cultural commercialization, may ultimately fail to engage with the complexity of cultural flows and appropriations. Thus when Brown (2006, p. 138) in his discussion of German Hip Hop refers to the “‘cultural imperialism’ that overwhelmed local cultures with a flood of products and ideas, erasing old traditions and replacing them with new ones” in postwar Europe due to “U.S. military and economic dominance,” this critique of U.S. media dominance falls into the trap of denying cultural agency to others. There is no doubt that U.S. films such as Wild Style (1983) and Beat Street (1984) exerted a global influence on fledgling Hip Hop cultures, as Brown acknowledges, but so too did Hip Hop’s origins in Jamaican DJs toasting and sound system culture in the 1960s and 1970s, a factor dealt with extensively by Toop (1984) and Hebdige (1987) in two of the first books to deal seriously with Hip Hop. Thus, in the same way that a critique of English linguistic imperialism overlooks the complexity of local engagement, so arguments that simultaneously critique and celebrate African American dominance of global Hip Hop media fail to develop an appreciation of the complexity of localization.

Our point is not to deny the massive influence of American, and particularly African...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Shout Outs
• Intro Straight Outta Compton, Straight aus München: Global Linguistic Flows, Identities, and the Politics of Language in a Global Hip Hop Nation
• Disk 1 Styling Locally, Styling Globally: The Globalization of Language and Culture in a Global Hip Hop Nation
• Disk 2 The Power of the Word: Hip Hop Poetics, Pedagogies, and the Politics of Language in Global Contexts
• Hip Hop Headz aka List of Contributors