Language, Ethnicity, and Media in South Africa

Abstract

as by distancing themselves from indigenous performance genres such as taasu, praise singing, and mbalax (i.e. the Orality myth), on the other. She finds that the perceived appeal and utility of hip hop lies in its ability to articulate experientially an urban lived experience of marginalization that speaks to the needs and desires of a disenfranchised ‘youth’ generation due to the conscious ‘social action’ impulse embedded in the culture. Appert complicates this narrative by pointing out how state intervention and the social pressure to respect adult authority place constraints on what she calls their ‘hip hop voice’. One of Appert’s most compelling and insightful chapters is Chapter Five, in which she focuses on the experiences and perspectives of women hip hoppers. She reveals their precarious status in Rap Galsen and how they are forced both to confront and negotiate a multilayered labyrinth of patriarchal attitudes and behaviors within and outside the movement. Appert problematizes male rappers’ ‘distinct masculinity’ (136), which reduces women’s role in Rap Galsen to the margins, while highlighting the agency women exercise in challenging sexism and exclusion to carve out a space of belonging and visibility. In the final chapter, she returns to her core conceptual framework to underscore the ways in which hip hop production constitutes a discursive diaspora experience and response to contemporary urban marginalization in Dakar. In seeking to understand not only how but why Senegalese practice hip hop, she makes a very appealing argument about hip hop as an alternative temporality that suspends the transition from youth to adulthood, as well as allows for the articulation and re-articulation of transatlantic diasporic connections. Appert’s thorough and self-reflective ethnography convincingly supplants dominant narratives of hip hop in Africa by honing in on the intellectual groundwork that sets the politicization of rap in motion. Although her study lacks sufficient critical engagement with the nature and meaning of how Senegalese consume US hip hop, as well as on how the exogenous impacts consciousness, aesthetics, and politics, In Hip Hop Time is a must read for anyone not only interested in music, but also in understanding the relationship between memory, agency, and cultural production in contemporary urban Senegal and beyond. Her theoretical insights into diaspora cultural identity making breaks new ground in what is possible when studying the globalization of hip hop music and culture in Africa.