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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 492

Part of Session 165: Language, Place and Identity (Other abstracts in this session)

Discursive privileging of urban neighborhood identities in US hip-hop

Authors: Cutler, Cecelia
Submitted by: Cutler, Cecelia (City University of New York, United States of America)

There has been a great deal of interest in sociolinguistics regarding the globalization of U.S. African American hip hop culture and its subsequent indigenization to suit the linguistic and social needs of people at the local level (Alim 2009, Ibrahim et al 2008, Pennycook 2007). Yet, despite its pan-national and global popularity, U.S. hip hop culture still places great importance on place, and rappers commonly mention their borough, neighborhood, the housing projects where they grew up, and particular streets where they congregate in their lyrics (Melnick 2005). In New York City (NYC), these neighborhoods tend to be located in the outer boroughs (e.g. the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island) and in neighborhoods with housing projects and large African American and Latino populations (e.g. South Bronx, Harlem, Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant). The origins of hip hop culture in the streets, clubs, and community centers of particular neighborhoods has imbued these places with a great deal of social and symbolic capital among its followers (Bourdieu 1986). Participating in this economy of place are White hip hop youth who highlight their ties to hip hop’s origins via assertions of geographical proximity to African American and Latino neighborhoods within NYC. Drawing on interviews, performance and interactional data with hip hop youth, this paper examines how participants locate themselves discursively within hip hop culture’s symbolic economy of place. Although New York City already enjoys a high status within hip hop culture, White youth must go beyond simply invoking their NYC origins and suggest ties to particular African American and Latino neighborhoods in order to authenticate themselves. Thus, one young man, after explaining that he lived in Borough Park, Brooklyn, made a point of clarifying that he actually spent most of his time with his grandparents in Canarsie, a predominantly African American neighborhood in Brooklyn. Another young man from Astoria, Queens pointed out that his neighborhood was close to the Queensbridge Houses project where the famous rapper Nas grew up. Examples of this sort of geographical positioning abound in the data. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of social and symbolic capital, this paper analyzes the economy of place in the ways that White hip hop youth foreground urban, neighborhood identities in rap performance and in interactional discourse. Using the tools of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1989), it examines how the privileging of particular neighborhoods by hip hop youth acts as a counter-narrative to hegemonic discourses that stigmatize urban African American and Latino communities as dangerous and undesirable.