Coming to America : race, class, nationality and mobility in “African” Hip Hop (original) (raw)

Coming to America: Race, Class, Nationality and Mobility in "African" Hip Hop This report examines Hip Hop performance in Africa-with a focus on Nigeria-and analyzes how questions of race, racial identity, class and nationality feature in the works of African artists. The Nigerian/African artists themselves label their works "African Hip Hop" and they employ the aesthetics of the US and those of their local communities in their performances. Lately however, a couple of Nigerian artists-D'Banj and P Square-troubled the "African" in "African Hip Hop" by performing with popular African American Hip Hop artists, Snoop Dogg and Akon. It was a transnationalistic move that among other issues reflects the fluidity of identity. The performances in the videos of "Mr Endowed Remix" and "Chop My Money" also reflect identity (re)negotiation in postcolonial performances like Hip Hop. African Hip Hop, already, borrows the spectacles of US Hip Hop to express itself to African audiences. However, its collaboration with the US brings it in contact with various sociological issues-such as the conflation of race, class, gender and social mobility-that surround US Hip Hop. This report attempts a close reading of the meeting of "African Hip Hop" and "US Hip Hop" to understand how race, identity, and agency are negotiated in "African Hip Hop" vii Table of Contents Chapter One: Literature Review……………………………………………………...1 Chapter Two: Coming to America……………………………………………………43 References…………………………………………………………………………….80 Vita…………………………………………………………………………………….87 Chapter One: This dearth of scholarship is surprising considering the vibrancy of Hip Hop on the African continent. In fact, the paucity of scholarship on Nigerian Hip Hop, arguably the most vocal form on the African continent, partly fuels my interest in this work. Second, Hip Hop is dominated by a younger generation and the genre thus provides a useful discursive site for examining emerging patterns of intra-racial issues between Africans and African Americans. Third, Hip Hop, as we shall see in the pages ahead, is a genre of music that was created largely as a response to the challenges of living in a racist society. It is thus interesting how this music has travelled into Black Africa and appealed to other Black men. This study seeks to understand what has helped the circular motion of this culture and what plays out in Hip Hop collaborative videos. I will be analyzing videos of Hip Hop tracks jointly performed by both African and African Americans to understand how race, racial formation, racial access and some other aspects of intra-racial relationships are complicated by citizenship. This literature review is divided into four categories. The first section looks at scholarship on the Self-Other dialectic from different fields of study. It takes this multidisciplinary approach to contextualize the work within a broad frame of reference. The second category features a historical overview of the relationships between Africans and African Americans. It looks at select activities between Black America and Africa and how those have shaped Black identity on both sides. The third aspect examines the history, formation, progression and potentials of Hip Hop; while the fourth offers an extension of three in its examination of issues, trends and elements of Hip Hop performance in both America and Africa. I have chosen not to lump the third and fourth categories so they can benefit from cross-ventilation of narrowed-down ideas.