ABSTRACT
This chapter describes rap’s ability to oppose two main meanings of the adjective Luso: one being drawn from Lusotropicalism and the other from Lusophony. Both perspectives manifest how the colonial legacy interacts in present-day conceptions of official language. The African and indigenous linguistic influences contribute to the reinvention of Portuguese as a major language, and produce minor uses. The policy of a single official language necessarily bears the marks of colonial violence because it conveys an attempt to preserve the colonial past, despite linguistic and cultural diversity. The language policy in Brazil is exclusionary, segregating, and reminiscent of the process of Lusitanization, and thus obliterates the heterogeneity of language as social practice. With the hip-hop movement, a large number of people living on the margins of society produced their own language of confrontation for the first time and denounced urban violence and exclusion.
