Battling the Race: Stylizing Language and Coproducing Whiteness and Colouredness in a Freestyle Rap Performance. (December 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Williams, Quentin E.; Stroud, Christopher
• Is Part Of: Journal of linguistic anthropology. Volume 24:Number 3(2014:Dec.)
• Page Start: 277
• Page End: 293
• Publication Date: 2014-12
• Subjects: performance -- stylization -- race -- whiteness -- colouredness -- hip‐hop; Anthropological linguistics -- Periodicals; 306.44089
• DOI: 10.1111/jola.12064
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1055-1360

Abstract

Abstract : 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.