ABSTRACT
Although rap music and Hiphop elements have been adopted and adapted by many cultures around the world,1 this chapter, indeed this book, focuses on Hiphop discourse as a subgenre and discourse system within the universe of Black discourse which includes African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and African American Music (AAM) among other diasporic expressions. The central question that guides this analysis is: How do rappers display, on the one hand, an orientation to their situated, public role as performing products, and, on the other, that their performance is connected to discourses of authenticity and resistance? An aspect of my project is to shed light on the connection between the discursive (dis)invention of identity and the (dis)invention of language. In attempting to do this, I bring together issues and concepts that are explored in disciplines of folklore, ethnomusicology, sociolinguistics, and discourse studies. I begin by defining African American Vernacular Discourse (AAVD) as a genre system within Black diasporic discourses and in a selected sample of its various idioms, with a brief overview of the sociocultural, political, and economic contexts for selected genres. I then turn to an exploration of the function and use of Hiphop/rap discourse, using the example of a rap performance by the African American Southern rap group OutKast. The analysis is informed by principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Discourse is central to social practices and questions of power and can benefit from CDA which foregrounds the hierarchy of social structure and social inequality, unequal power arrangements. CDA illuminates the expression of such in its examination of the multiple and contradictory nature of signs and discourses. The semiosis of symbols, signs, and visual imagery are also analyzed as part of discourse as they too reflect these social practices. (Halliday, 1978; Fairclough and Chouliaraki, 1999; Sebeok, 2001; van Dijk, 2001)
The concept and practice of Black discourse refers to the collective consciousness and expression of people of Black African descent. This consciousness reflects (unconscious and conscious) ancestral and everyday knowledge. Broadly speaking, the designation the Diaspora of Black Discourse(s) allows us to group a range of
linguistic ideologies for comparative analysis of specific historical, political, sociocultural, and sociolinguistic features. Via slavery, colonization, neo-imperialism, migration, wars, global technological processes, and diasporic crossing, Continental Africans and their descendants participate in the (dis)invention and global flow of Black discourse. Black discourses are a direct result of African-European contact on the shores of West Africa and in what became the New World. For example, the use of English by Africans originated for purposes of negotiation and trade, initiated by Europeans. In 1554, the Englishman William Towerson took five Africans from a British territory in West Africa known as the Gold Coast to England, to learn English, to become interpreters. Three of these Africans returned to the Gold Coast in 1557. Thus, 1557 is accepted as the beginning of the African use of English (Dalby, 1970). We could say that Africans were already at a disadvantage because they were in the position of learning a language of trade and commerce while having no familiarity with its total system. In a language learning situation like this one, critical and multiple consciousnesses are built into the language acquisition process. In other words, a group makes the new language fit, to the extent possible, its epistemological, ontological, and cosmological system. This is how we can say that there are uniquely Black versions of English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese, for which Robert Williams and his associates coined “Ebonics.” Other scholars, Africologists, consider all forms of Ebonics as new African languages, rather than Black versions of European languages.2 Rickford and Rickford (2000) offer a balanced explanation, pointing out African, European, and creole sources for various language patterns in US Ebonics, for example. Most scholars of language agree that when Africans and Europeans “met,” their languages mingled to create new African-and European-influenced language systems. One thing is for sure, people of African descent have evolved and contributed Ebonic and Pan African discourses to the world wherever they have found themselves on the continent and in the diaspora, bringing with them that flava and spirit of survival. Dalby (1970: 4) gives a useful outline of this phenomenon:
“Black” enables us to group together a wide range of speech forms, on both sides of the Atlantic, in which a largely European vocabulary is coupled with grammatical and phonological features reminiscent of West African languages: . . . The clearest examples of [“Black Atlantic”] languages are what may be termed “creoles” or “creolized languages,” in each of which the divergence from the original European language has been so great that one may consider a new language to have come into being, no longer inter-intelligible with its European counterpart.
