Battling the Race: Stylizing Language and Coproducing Whiteness and Colouredness in a Freestyle Rap Performance

In the last 19 years of post-apartheid South African democracy, race remains an enduring and familiar trope, a point of certainty amid the messy ambiguities of transformation. In the present article, we explore the malleable, permeable, and unstable racializations of contemporary South Arica, specif...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Journal of linguistic anthropology 2014-12, Vol.24 (3), p.277-293
Main Authors:	Williams, Quentin E., Stroud, Christopher
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Cape Town colouredness Cultural anthropology English language (Modern) Ethnicity folk literature folk poetry folk song Hip hop Hip hop music Language linguistic approach Music Musical culture Negotiation Performing arts Post-apartheid society pragmatics race Racial discrimination Rap rap song Semiotics Sociolinguistics South Africa stylization Transnationalism whiteness
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Summary:	In the last 19 years of post-apartheid South African democracy, race remains an enduring and familiar trope, a point of certainty amid the messy ambiguities of transformation. In the present article, we explore the malleable, permeable, and unstable racializations of contemporary South Arica, specifically the way in which coloured and white racializations are negotiated and interactionally accomplished in the context of Capetonian hip-hop. The analysis reveals the complex ways in which racialized bodies are figured semiotically through reference to historical time and contemporary (translocal) social space. But also the way iconic features of blackness are reindexicalized to stand for a transnational whiteness.
ISSN:	1055-1360 1548-1395 1548-1395