Chapter 5. Cultural Identity of the Turkish Hip-Hop Youth in Kreuzberg 36

The previous chapter portrayed the prevalent life-worlds of the diasporic Turkish youth in order to demonstrate the major constituents of their identity formation processes. This chapter primarily sets out to delineate the process of cultural bricolage and the cultural sources that shape the processes of identity formation of the working-class Turkish hip-hop youth. Being subject to a kind of structural outsiderism, the working-class ethnic minority youths tend to celebrate their past and cultural authenticity. This tendency becomes apparent in their rising orientation to their homeland, religion and ethnicity, which thus become their main cultural sources. Secondly, I shall describe both the particularist and universalist constituents of the Turkish hip-hop youth culture in Kreuzberg. The particularist components of their leisure culture are ‘âlem’ (meeting with friends), dügüns (wedding ceremony) and arabesk music, while the universalist ones are rap, graffiti, dance and ‘cool’ style. Turkish hip-hop youngsters tend to express themselves by means of these expressive forms of culture as they are seldom represented positively in the German media. In mapping out the main framework of the cultural identity formation process and leisure culture of these youngsters, I shall demonstrate the multicultural competence of ethnic minority youths.