ABSTRACT
French hip hop emerged from the housing projects or banlieues built to accommodate large numbers of immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean brought in to solve labor shortages following the two World Wars. The rap songs stemming from the banlieues sought to capture the realities of these urban spaces in order to make them more visible. Departing from the plethora of studies that focus on French urban hip hop, this contribution examines instead how rural French black identity is humorously represented and defined in the works of Kamini Zantoko, a French rapper of Congolese origin, who grew up in Marly-Gomont, a village in the French countryside.
