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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 752

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Hip hop from the city and the periphery: Construction of polycentric authenticity

Authors: Westinen, Elina Elisabet
Submitted by: Westinen, Elina Elisabet (University of Jyväskylä, Finland)

The aim of this paper is to explore how rap artists from the city and from the periphery construct their authenticity through a range of linguistic and discursive resources. I will investigate the several scale-levels they operate on as well as the multiple centers of norms they orient towards. Drawing on sociolinguistics (of globalization) and discourse studies, my paper contributes to emerging research on translocal hip hop cultures and on authenticity as socially, linguistically, and discursively constructed.

My data consist of the lyrics and interviews of two Finnish rap artists: Cheek from Helsinki and Stepa from Sodankylä, Finnish Lapland. In my analysis, I am drawing on Blommaert’s (2010) concepts of  linguistic resources, scales and polycentricity as well as on concepts suggested in research on hip hop cultures (e.g. Androutsopoulos & Scholz 2002) and authenticity.

This paper contributes to the research areas of globalization, multilingualism and popular culture. My study will offer new insights into the interplay between the global and the local in the context of translocal hip hop cultures (see e.g. Pennycook & Mitchell 2009), by extending the dichotomous view (local-global) into a blend of various scales and centers. My findings indicate both similarities and differences between these two Finnish rappers in terms of their resources, scales and centers of norms. This supports the notion of Finnish hip hop as hybrid, with its convergences and divergences as well as its centers and margins. My paper will show that rap music, although originating from and having a strong presence in the urban areas, cannot be seen solely as an urban phenomenon but, rather, it is also clearly meaningful in the peripheral areas.

References:

Androutsopoulos, J. & A. Scholz (2002) On the recontextualization of hip-hop in European speech communities: a contrastive analysis of rap lyrics PhiN 19, 1–42. http://web.fu-berlin.de/phin. Accessed on January 24, 2011.

Blommaert, J. (2010) The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: CUP.

Pennycook, A. & T. Mitchell (2009) Hip hop as dusty foot philosophy. Engaging locality. In H.S. Alim, A. Ibrahim and A. Pennycook (eds), Global Linguistic Flows. Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language. New York:Routledge, 25–42.