This article shows how participants in freestyle rap battles coproduce and contest hip hop as a black space. Through discourse analysis of long-term ethnographic fieldwork at an open mic venue in Los Angeles, we show how black normativity is co-constructed and sometimes challenged by non-black emcees and audience members. Specifically, we examine videotaped data of verbal artistic duels between a black and a Latino emcee, analyzing instances in which the black emcee draws on stereotypes of Mexicans to racialize the Latino emcee. We show how the Latino emcee sometimes participates in his own racialization, while, in other instances, he opposes this process with the support of the audience. This multiparty coproduction and contestation of black normativity highlights the fact that the normative status of particular social identities across sociocultural contexts cannot be seen as given, but rather, as constantly challenged and maintained by invested actors.
Alim HS ( 2006) Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture . New York and London: Routledge .
2.
Alim HS, Ibrahim A. and Pennycook A. ( 2009) Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language. New York and London: Routledge.
3.
Alim HS, Lee J. and Mason Carris L. ( 2010) ‘Short fried-rice-eating Chinese MCs’ and ‘Good-hair-having Uncle Tom niggas’: Performing race and ethnicity in freestyle rap battles. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology20(1): 116-133.
4.
Bailey B. ( 2000) Language and the negotiation of ethnic/racial identity among Dominican Americans. Language in Society29(4): 555-582.
5.
Boyd T. ( 2002) The New HNIC: The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop. New York: New York University Press.
6.
Bucholtz M. ( 1999) ‘You da man’: Narrating the racial other in the production of white masculinity. Journal of Sociolinguistics3-4: 443-460.
7.
Bucholtz M. ( 2001) The whiteness of nerds: Superstandard English and racial markedness. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology11(1): 84-100.
8.
Bucholtz M. and Hall K. ( 2005) Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach . Discourse Studies7(4-5): 584-614.
9.
Chun E. ( 2004) Ideologies of legitimate mockery: Margaret Cho’s revoicings of mock Asian. Pragmatics14: 236-289.
10.
Cutler C. ( 1999) Yorkville Crossing: White teens, hip hop, and African American English. Journal of Sociolinguistics3-4: 428-442.
11.
Cutler C. ( 2009) ‘You shouldn’t be rappin’, you should be skateboardin’ the X-Games’: The coconstruction of whiteness in an MC Battle. In: Alim HS, Ibrahim A and Pennycook A (eds) Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language. London and New York: Routledge, 195-212.
12.
De Fina A. ( 2007) Codeswitching and the construction of ethnic identity in a community of practice. Language in Society36(3): 371-392.
13.
Garot R. ( 2010) Who You Claim: Performing Gang Identity in School and on the Streets. New York: New York University Press.
14.
Goodwin MH and Alim HS(2010) ‘Whatever (neck roll, eye roll, teeth suck)’: The situated coproduction of social categories and identities through stancetaking and transmodal stylization. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology20(1): 179-194.
15.
Hansen AD ( 2005) A practical task: Ethnicity as a resource in social interaction . Research on Language and Social Interaction38(1): 63-104.
16.
Lee J. ( 2009a) Battlin’ on the corner: Techniques for sustaining play. Social Problems56(3): 578-598.
17.
Lee J. (2009b) Escaping embarrassment: Face-work in the rap cipher . Social Psychology Quarterly72(4): 306-324.
18.
Markus H. and Moya P. ( 2010) Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century. New York: W.W. Norton and Co.
19.
Mason L. ( 2005) The Organization of Participation and Stance in Freestyle Hip Hop. Unpublished MS, Department of Applied Linguistics , UCLA.
20.
Morgan M. ( 2009) The Real Hip Hop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground. Durham, NC and London : Duke University Press.
21.
Neal MA ( 2005) New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity. New York: Routledge.
22.
Newman M. ( 2005) Rap as literacy: A genre analysis of hip-hop ciphers . Text25(3): 399-436.
23.
Ochs E. ( 1990) Indexicality and socialization. In: Stigler J, Shweder RA and Herdt G (eds) Cultural Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 287-308.
24.
Omi M. and Winant H. ( 1994) Racial Formation in the United States. New York and London: Routledge.
25.
Pagliai V. ( 2010) Performing disputes. [Special issue]Journal of Linguistic Anthropology20(1): 63-71.
26.
Pennycook A. ( 2003) Global Englishes, rip slime and performativity . Journal of Sociolinguistics7(4): 513-533.
27.
Perry I. ( 2004) Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop . Durham, NC: Duke University Press .
28.
Pollock M. ( 2004) Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School . Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press .
29.
Rampton B. ( 1999) Introduction. [Special issue]Journal of Sociolinguistics3(4): 421-427.
30.
Reyes A. ( 2005) Appropriation of African American slang by AsianAmerican youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics9(4): 509-532.
31.
Rivera R. ( 2003) New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
32.
Rose T. ( 1994) Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
33.
Sacks H., Schegloff EA and Jefferson G. ( 1974) A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language50(4): 696-735.
34.
Silverstein M. ( 2003) Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication23(3-4): 193-229.
35.
Smitherman G. ( 2006) Word from the Mother: Language and African Americans . New York: Routledge.
36.
Spady JG, Alim HS and Meghelli S. ( 2006) Tha Global Cipha: Hip Hop Culture and Consciousness . Philadelphia, PA: Black History Museum Press.
37.
Stokoe E. and Edwards D. ( 2007) ‘Black this, black that’: Racial insults and reported speech in neighbor complaints and police interrogations. Discourse & Society18(3): 337-372.
38.
Swedenburg T. ( 2002) Hip hop music in the transglobal Islamic underground . In: Alim HS (ed.) Black culture’s global impact [Special Issue], The Black Arts Quarterly6(3): 12-21.
