AAAL 2025: Invited Colloquium

Hip Hop Linguists as Players of Multiple Games

Convener:

Jaspal Naveel Singh, The Open University, United Kingdom

Discussant: 

Quentin Williams, The University of the Western Cape, South Africa

Abstract:

Applied linguists are players in multiple Wittgensteinian language games that have different purposes and meanings for different people and actors, such as line mangers, research participants, reviewers, peers, members of the public, students, their own friends and families, and so forth. Oftentimes, we say one thing to one group of people and another thing to another group of people, shifting between registers, languages and meanings. Usually, this isn't seen as a problem and even deemed a necessary skill to be celebrated and passed on to the next generation of scholars. However, when working with research participants who dedicate their entire lives to the cultivation of black diasporic hip hop, applied linguists are frequently confronted with the accusation of extracting knowledge for the global north academy and not giving back to the communities who have generated this knowledge against the odds of colonial oppression and social exclusion. In this colloquium, we want to reflect frankly about our hiphopographic commitments to the people of the culture that we use to advance our own careers and live our lives as scholars.

“Always been here” – Togetherness, Race and Belonging via Finnish hip hop

Elina Westinen, Finnish Youth Research Society

A recent Finnish rap song by Hassan Maikal feat. Yeboyah, Aina ollu tääl (Always been here), highlights how Finland (and Finnish hip hop) have never been homogenously white – as the myth of monocultural Finland suggests – but rather always diverse, with different kinds of minorities: not only the ‘new’ ethnic minorities, such as African-Finnish people, but also the ‘old’ minorities, i.e. the Roma people and the indigenous Sámi. With this as the backbone of the paper, I discuss not only multifaceted Finnish hip hop but also multifaceted Finland and Finnishness. More specifically, I will focus on how Black / Brown / POC Finnish rappers talk (and ‘talk back’) about their identities, belonging, (anti)racism, cultural appropriation and their relationship with Finland and Finnishness. With this, my aim is to delve into questions of togetherness. Significantly, I will also reflect on our discussions around racial issues and – relatedly – my own role, (dis)advantages and privileges as a white, middle-class female researcher, aiming for hiphopographic research.

Take Your Shoes Off in The House: Guardians or Gatekeepers of UK Rap Music?

Wanda Canton, University of Brighton 

Canton’s PhD project was designed as a participatory, abolitionist study of the criminalisation of rap music and epistemic violence. As a former mental health practitioner and freelance facilitator, she had already been working for several years exploring rap music, spoken word, and sound as a recovery and community art form. Building on her interest in co-production, peer support, and her own lived experience personally and artistically, she hoped the PhD could centre voices of rappers to critique the brutality of the criminal justice system. 
Her fieldwork with community partners was designed to include group rap and writing sessions, interviews, and an anonymous survey, using Essex Discourse Analysis to interrogate the brutality of policing. However, she quickly experienced obstructions, including explicit accusations that the research was extractivist, futile, and even in the service of police. Whilst she had anticipated some hesitance due to her Whiteness, her status as a researcher and perhaps her gender were notable points of tension. Assessing the developing risk to participants, the project, and to herself as researcher, she left the field early as an ethical decision. Inspired by decoloniality and the call for introspection, uncertainty, tolerating mistakes, and listening politics, her project was redirected to consider what other approaches could have been more sensitive, holistic, and what resources might be required to provide this. However, she also reflects on the mistrust of researchers and its anti-intellectual associations, noting in particular the entanglements of power that are pertinent to understand in the development of abolitionist politics. The charity sector, for example, is not immune to disciplines and discourses of policing. And, without radical praxis which includes theoretical research, do we fall danger to reproducing power?

The Extraction, Encoding and Entitlement of Researchers Towards Hip Hop Cultural Experiential Sharing

Emile Jansen aka Emile YX?, Pioneering South African Hip Hop Black Noise & Heal The Hood Project 

I will share my Hip Hop practitioner, activist and lived experience of 42 years of being interviewed by scholars and journalists. The older Hip Hop Cultural Community was initially excited and happy with media coverage and academic interest. It soon changed to shock and disbelief. The entitlement of the media and academia, while they extracted information from the community, was further shown by the “academic speak” encoded our lived experiences. This really hurt after being so open to share what was so hard earned. The media manufactured their own name for Hip Hop Culture's original dance and Rap as Hip hop today. The name Breakdancing exposed that the "white gaze" felt entitled enough to nullify the black lineage from which Hip Hop Culture came. It diminished black heritage and culture by saying it came from nothing, all the while mining what it created because of that same exclusion and mentalities of superiority. I remember countless interviews where they would not even have the decency to forward me a copy of their final interview or paper. I would later find them and my words were justified by quoting someone I have never heard of, as if my words or ideas can only have power if they sanctioned it. It was as if they felt that we were unable to speak for ourselves and because of their degrees or PHD’s allowed them to speak for us. Many older heads stopped sharing their hard earned knowledge and refused to do interviews. Initially, I did the same, but created my own magazine, wrote and published my own books. It’s funny how when Hip Hop used references from collective cultural memory, when sampling beats, we had to pay and academia and media cite Hip Hop Cultural Practitioners and get their degrees and get paid.  

Hip Hop, Hope and the Palestinian Subjectivity: The Personal is Political

Jaspal Naveel Singh, The Open University, UK
Muzna Awayed-Bishara, Tel Aviv University, Israel / University College London, UK

In this dialogue, Muzna and Jaspal reflect on the activist notion that the personal is political in relation to hip hop about and from Israel/Palestine. The two presenters speak from very different but also very similar positionalities. Muzna’s identity marks a complexity, as she is both Palestinian and Israeli and has studied Palestinian hip hop artists and indigenous pedagogies. Jaspal is German-Indian, works and lives in the UK and has studied as well as artistically collaborated with Indian hip hop artists and activists. However, our ethnographic interest in hip hop is not the only connection between us; we also share a political commitment to the Palestinian struggle for liberation and this commitment is partially connected to our personal lives and future aspirations both within the academy and outside of it. In our dialogic presentation, we will carve out how hip hop and our personal life stories connect us to Palestinian ways of living in resistance and how institutional as well as private networks attempt to silence us. This will lead also into a critical celebration of the affordances of hip hop and hiphopography for articulating pedagogy, resistance and hope

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