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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1398

Part of Session 192: Margins vs Megapoles (Other abstracts in this session)

Rap on the borderland: transidiomatic practices and identity performativity

Authors: Moita-Lopes, Luiz Paulo
Submitted by: Moita-Lopes, Luiz Paulo (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

As a result  of global transcultural forces which crisscross the world and  bring about local effects, constituting what has been called glocalization (Canclini,  1997 ), rap - a cultural artifact created in the black neighborhoods of New York City -,  has been appropriated and relocalized (Pennycok, 2010) in different parts of the world, originating what has been called raplish: a kind of English  which has been locally created and used by rappers (Pennycook, 2007). As in the US, rap has been frequently used to voice a counter-hegemonic logic  from the margins of society in many countries. It  has been a strong constitutive element of the cultural life and of the literacy practices in the periphery of the big cities, including multisemiosis processes (musical, multilingual and somatic means of  engaging in discourse), which operate simultaneously and which are situated, by their own nature, on the borderland where new ways of thinking and new meanings are possible (Mignolo, 2000). Building on the concept of borderland and on rap as a literacy practice, this paper looks particularly into rap produced by the group Payé (a 25 rap corpus) in the triple frontier (Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay) – in a quite distant area from the Latin American megapoles - which makes recourse to  transidiomatic practices (Jacquemet, 2005), including Spanish, Guarany and Portuguese – and, contrary to the usual rap appropriations, excluding English.. By focusing on globalization and language processes in the margins, the central aim of this paper is  to show   a)  the pattern which defines how these three languages are transidiomatically  used as  “communicative resources” (Blommaert, 2010)  and b) how  identity performances (Butler, 1990; 2004), i.e., nationality, gender, race and sexuality,  are linguistically indexicalized in these borderland literacy events as semantic effects of globalization.

References:
BLOMMAERT, Jan (2010) The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
BUTLER, Judith  (1990) Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. Nova York: Routledge, 1990
BUTLER, Judith (2004) Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.
CANCLINI, Nestor G. (1997) Culturas híbridas. Estratégias para entrar e sair da modernidade. (Hybrid cultures. Strategies to get into and to leave modernity). Transl. H. Cintrão & A. Lessa. São Paulo: Edusp.
JACQUEMET, M. (2005) Transidiomatic practices: language and power in the age of globalization. Language and communication, 25 (3), pp. 257-277.
MIGNOLO, Walter (2000). Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border-Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
PENNYCOOK, Alastair (2010) Language as local practice. London: Routledge.
-(2007) Global Englishes and transcultural flows. London: Routledge.