Description
Use The 5 Articels to help
These are the definitions to go by:
Language as a non- nuetral medium
Alessandro Duranti. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into. the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others.
Language ideologies
cultural conceptions about language, its nature, structure and use, and about the place of communicative behavior in social life. Useful definitions and exemplary studies are presented in Woolard and Schieffelin (1994) and Schieffelin et al. (1998).
White public space
Jane H. Hill
White public space is constructed through (1) intense monitoring of the speech of racialized populations such as Chicanos and Latinos and African Americans for signs of linguistic disorder and (2) the invisibility of almost identical signs in the speech of Whites, where language mixing, required for the expression of a highly valued type of colloquial persona, takes several forms. One such form, Mock Spanish, exhibits a complex semiotics. By direct indexicality, Mock Spanish presents speakers as possessing desirable personal qualities. By indirect indexicality, it reproduces highly negative racializing stereotypes of Chicanos and Latinos. In addition, it indirectly indexes “whiteness” as an unmarked normative order. Mock Spanish is compared to White “crossover” uses of African American English. Finally, the question of the potential for such usages to be reshaped to subvert the order of racial practices in discourse is briefly explored.
Linguistic profiling
John Baugh, Ph.D., the inventor of the term “linguistic profiling,” says that when a voice on the phone sounds African-American or Mexican-American, racial discrimination might follow.
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ANTHRO 4 FALL 2023: Paper One Prompt
Read this quote from a leading sociolinguist:
“Let’s face it. There are certain consequences for not speaking a standard dialect.
For example, people may make fun of you, or you may have certain limitations in
terms of the job market. If you don’t wanna deal with the negatives, it may be
very helpful to learn a standard dialect for certain situations. It may not be fair,
but that’s the way it is.”—Walt Wolfram
Now read this quote from former U.S. President Barack Obama:
“None of us – black, white, Latino, or Asian – is immune to the stereotypes that
our culture continues to feed us, especially stereotypes about black criminality,
black intelligence, or the black work ethic. In general, members of every minority
group continue to be measured largely by the degree of our assimilation – how
closely speech patterns, dress, or demeanor conform to the dominant white culture
– and the more that a minority strays from these external markers, the more he or
she is subject to negative assumptions.”
How do these quotes relate to the comments made by the “well-meaning teacher” in Alim’s
(2004) chapter about African American students in Haven High? How would you describe the
ideologies of linguistic supremacy and linguistic equanimity at play in what they are describing?
Please be sure to use and define the following four terms in your own words: (a) language as a
non-neutral medium, (b) language ideologies, (c) White public space, and (d) linguistic profiling.
Bold & underline these terms when you use them in your paper!
Use the readings and the lectures from Weeks 1-3 to guide you. You got this.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION:
Due Date:
Tuesday November 7th, 2023. You have over 3 weeks to write the paper, but
time flies when you’re having fun! Sorry, NO LATENESS will be accepted. If
late, you will lose 10% of your grade for the course.
Submission: Your TAs will tell you how they would like the papers submitted to them. Please
put your name as it appears on the roster and your section number at the top.
Length:
1-2 pages, single-spaced—yes, that includes references. Times New Roman, 12
point font. A longer paper isn’t necessarily a better paper. Papers should be tight
and meet all the criteria above.
References:
Your reference list should include at least 4 readings from the course.
Parenthetical citations should be made in the paper itself. Points will not be
deducted for incorrect reference format. I’m more interested in your ideas.
Language Sciences 65 (2018) 58–69
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Language Sciences
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci
Linguistic creativity and the production of
cisheteropatriarchy: A comparative analysis of improvised rap
battles in Los Angeles and Cape Town
H. Samy Alim a, Jooyoung Lee b, Lauren Mason Carris a, Quentin E. Williams c, *
a
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
University of Toronto, Canada
c
University of the Western Cape, South Africa
b
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Available online 10 July 2017
This article presents a comparative analysis of the creative, improvised linguistic performances of gender, race and ethnicity by young men in freestyle rap battles in Los Angeles
and Cape Town. Employing a long-term ethnographic, discourse analytic approach, we
explore how these improvised verbal duels are both constitutive and transformative of
social realities. In particular, we illustrate how Hip Hop emcees creatively perform and are
performed into gendered and racialized identities in freestyle rap battles in strikingly
similar ways across the Atlantic. While these youth, across both contexts, temporarily
transform social meanings attached to race and ethnicity in these verbal duels, a more
nuanced examination suggests that they challenge some forms of dominance while (re)
producing others. Specifically, it is not simply the case that ‘Blackness’ or ‘Colouredness’ is
dominant in these improvised interactions, but it is a particular kind of Blackness/Colouredness (masculine, working-class, local, street-affiliated and heterosexual) that both
challenges White domination as it marginalizes other classed, gendered and sexualized
identities. We conclude by making the link between everyday linguistic creativity and the
maintenance/subversion of social categories.
Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Hip-hop
Freestyle rap
Cisheteropatriarchy
Creativity
Los Angeles
Cape Town
Gender
Race
Ethnicity
Blackness
Colouredness
1. Introduction
Recent literature on the globalization of Hip Hop Culture explores how youth around the world have creatively employed
global and local linguistic resources to forge local Hip Hop Cultures that speak to their specific contexts and life experiences
(Pennycook, 2007; Haupt, 2008; Alim et al., 2009; Terkourafi, 2010; Williams, 2016, 2017). For us, Hip Hop is an important site
of creative language practice. By engaging critically with key concepts in sociolinguistics and social theory, we offer an
analysis of Hip Hop performances that gives us a valuable, sociolinguistically-informed understanding of linguistic creativity
more broadly. In doing so, we present the first comparative analysis of the creative, improvised linguistic performances of
gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality by young men in freestyle rap battles and ciphers in Los Angeles (United States) and Cape
Town (South Africa). In particular, we illustrate how Hip Hop emcees creatively perform, and are performed, into gendered
and racialized identities in freestyle rap ciphers in strikingly similar ways across the Atlantic.
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: [email protected] (Q.E. Williams).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2017.02.004
0388-0001/Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
H.S. Alim et al. / Language Sciences 65 (2018) 58–69
59
While these youth, across both contexts, use language and the body to temporarily transform social meanings attached to
racial identity, our comparative interactional analysis suggests that they challenge some forms of dominance while (re)
producing others. Specifically, it is not simply the case that these youth de-center ‘Whiteness’ while centering ‘Blackness’ or
‘Colouredness’, though this alone is a notable discursive achievement. This creative, progressive disruption of White supremacist ideologies, however, also provides a window into the discursive production of oppressive forms of cisheteropatriarchydan ideological system that naturalizes normative views of what it means to ‘look’ and ‘ act’ like a ‘straight’ man and
marginalizes women, femininity, and all gender non-conforming bodies that challenge the gender binary, i.e., how cisheteropatriarchal structures are formed and maintained. Building upon and extending bell hooks’ (2004) analysis of ‘white
supremacist capitalist patriarchy’, we argue that while youth in both contexts challenge the dominance of Whiteness, they
simultaneously celebrate and reify particular kinds of Blackness/Colouredness at the expense of already marginalized
gendered and sexualized bodies.
In line with the goals of this special issue, we conclude by problematizing straightforward links made between linguistic
creativity and progressive politics, and emphasizing the role of linguistic creativity in both the disruption and maintenance of
forms of social oppression. In doing so, we seek to check purely celebratory views of linguistic creativity by exploring how
verbal creativity in Hip Hop ciphers can present challenges for any uncomplicated readings of creativity as wholly counterhegemonic or liberatory. Our cross-cultural, cross-generational perspective not only positions freestyle rap battles (which
have been so maligned in popular discourse) within the field of human verbal experience, but it also allows us to explore
empirically how these verbal genres sometimes set the stage for the production of oppressive forms of creative languaging.
2. Language, race, and masculinity in Hip Hop ciphers
Over the past two decades, sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have been re-framing race as a central, theoretical
concern (Alim and Reyes, 2011; Bailey, 2000; Bucholtz, 2011; Chun and Lo, 2015; Reyes and Lo, 2009; Roth-Gordon, 2016). This
shift in focus has given rise to the field of raciolinguisticsd‘an emerging field dedicated to bringing to bear the diverse
methods of linguistic analysis–discourse analysis, ethnographic linguistic anthropological studies, quantitative variationist
sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and language educational analyses, etc. – to ask and answer critical questions about the
relations between language, race, and power across diverse ethnoracial contexts and societies.’ (Alim et al., 2016: 27; see Rosa,
2017). Following Makoni et al. (2003), we join a critical mass of scholars committed to theorizing language and race together,
paying particular attention to how both social processes mediate and mutually constitute each other.
Importantly for this article, the emerging focus in raciolinguistics foregrounds ‘intersectional approaches that understand
race as always produced in conjunction with class, gender, sexuality, religion, (trans)national, and other axes of social differentiation’ (Alim et al., 2016: 6). While much of our previous work has examined Hip Hop ciphers specifically with respect to
race, our more recent research takes a more intersectional approach, drawing from the well-established research traditions
on the articulation of gender ( Hall and Bucholtz, 1995) and feminist linguistics (Eckert and McConnell-Genet, 2003), as well as
Johnson and Meinhof’s(1997)landmark volume on language and masculinity.
Writing two decades ago, Johnson (1997: 25) called for increased focus and attention to the language of men: ‘What we
really need is to know more about the complex role played by “difference” in the construction of “dominance”.’ Johnson
concluded that, ‘[t]he study of language and masculinities is not simply one way of exploring such a role’ but that ‘.it [is]
difficult to envisage how this can be done without looking at men’ (Johnson, 1997: 25; italics in original). Today we live in
globalized societies where heterosexual men, in particular, their ideas of being men, and their practices are placed under the
spotlight and studied with intense scrutiny (see Shire, 1994; Bourdieu, 2001; McConnell-Ginet, 2011; Atanga et al., 2013;
Milani and Shaikjee, 2013, etc.). As Milani (2011: 183–4) argues, ‘it is imperative to develop a critical focus on heterosexual
men not only in order to grasp the plurality of masculinities, but also to constantly question how, why, and with what linguistic and semiotic means do men produce cisheteropatriarchy’.
In this article, we focus on the joint production of race, gender and sexuality in freestyle rap ciphers and battles to highlight
the role that these creative verbal duels play in creating, and possibly disrupting, social categories. In these battles, or verbal
duels, which often occur in improvisational rhyme ciphers, constituted by and within highly-charged, communal, yet
intensely competitive circular arrangements of improvisational rhymers (Norfleet, 1997), participants come together to
display their lyrical inventiveness and to share their views of the world. Through these intensely competitive verbal displays,
they construct social organization and identities through rhyming practices (Spady et al., 2006; Lee, 2016; Williams, 2017). As
pioneer poet-rhymer Abiodun Oyewole of the Last Poets explains: ‘You weave your words in such a way that it’s somewhere
in between song and speech, but it’s not a speech and it’s not a song. It’s – you become you in your poetry.’ (Fitzgerald, 2005).
Focusing on linguistic creativity, the rap battle and cipher can be productively viewed in terms of the large, cross-cultural
and cross-generational literature on verbal duels, such as playing the dozens (Abrahams, 1964), ritual insults (Labov, 1972)
and signifying (Mitchell-Kernan, 1974; Smitherman, 1977)dall collected from Black speech communities in the United States
nearly half a century agodand the verbal dueling of the Chamula Indians of Chiapas, Mexico (Gossen, 1976), Italian Sardinian
shepherds (Mathias, 1976) and Italian contrasto (Pagliai, 2000), the Bono of Central Ghana (Warren and Brempong, 1977), the
Guyanese tantalisin (Edwards, 1979), the Maltese spirtu pront (Herndon and McLeod, 1980), and others discussed in the crosscultural review by McDowell (1985) and Pagliai (2009).
In this article, we view freestyle rap battles as an extension of the tradition of verbal dueling in Black American speech
communities, much the same way that the Turkish boys’ verbal dueling rhymes explored in Dundes et al. (1970) have been
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recontextualized through an examination of Turkish youths’ participation in Hip Hop (Kaya, 2001; Eksner, 2006). Research on
the discourse genres within Hip Hop culture in the U.S. has focused on the freestyle rap a discursive space where play must be
sustained (Lee, 2009); where ‘Black Language is. the prestige variety’ (Alim, 2006: 102); where ‘Whiteness is rendered the
‘other’’ (Cutler, 2009: 80); and where specific Hip Hop identities are contested (Newman, 2001; Spady et al., 2006). Internationally, this work has been extended to consider multilingual, multiracial contexts where the Hip Hop ciphers become
sites of agency and voice as well as the formation of new registers (Williams and Stroud, 2010; Williams, 2016).
To date, studies have concentrated largely upon the status and construction of Blackness and masculinity within Hip Hop,
and how both constructions maintain their dominance despite notable challenges from feminist Hip Hop practices (Pough,
2004; Richardson, 2006). Complementing Cutler’s analysis of ‘whiteness’ in Hip Hop, Alim et al. (2010) show how Asian,
Black, and Latino youth in freestyle rap battles in Los Angeles draw from a wider array of racial and ethnic resources and
perform a broader range of ethnoracial identities. The study also demonstrated that the dominance of Blackness in this
particular scene does not always go unchallenged, nor does it straightforwardly produce alternative racial hierarchies. While
artists may have been producing new meanings of Blackness and Whiteness by reversing their status in this local scene (as
seen in Cutler, 2009), this ‘reversal’ comes along with the reinscription of White, hegemonic discourses of race and ethnicity
at the expense of Asians and Latinos.
Our collaborative work in this article contributes to new studies of race and masculinity and joins these scholars’ call to
question the conditions that enable the production of racialized, cisheteropatriarchal masculinities by focusing on how young
(presumably ‘ heterosexual’) men articulate the interconnected ideologies of language, race, gender and sexuality. We show
how a particular form of masculine ideology – ‘toughness’ – emerges in their improvised verbal duels. Below we explore how
power struggles for ‘toughness’ are negotiated and contested through language over the terrain of the body.
3. From Project Blowed in Los Angeles to Club Stones in Cape Town
Discourse analytic methods, when combined with deep, grounded ethnographies, are useful ways of revealing how youth
use and make sense of Hip Hop cultural practices in everyday settings. In our analysis below, we highlight how individuals
perform race, gender and sexuality in interaction, with the deployment of rhymers’ insults, audience members’ laughter, and
the complicity of those present at the scene. We follow much of the work by Goodwin (2006: 23–24) and Bucholtz (2011) who
write about the value of research on talk in interaction that brings together ethnomethodological work with longterm
ethnographic fieldwork and analysis. By focusing on the structure of everyday forms of coordinated social action (Goodwin
and Heritage, 1990) within a sustained ethnography, we examine the unfolding, face-to-face interactions that constitute
social identities (Pagliai and Farr, 2000).
Our comparative approach focuses on how young men inside and outside of Project Blowed in Los Angeles (Leimert Park)
and Club Stones in Cape Town (Kuilsriver) use improvised verbal art to position themselves and others within a local, critical
circle of artists and within the broader discursive fields of race, gender and sexuality. Numerous examples of how rhymers
perform these intersecting social identities were collected in over 160 combined hours of videotaped footage and fieldwork
conducted across these two sites. We use this data to show how participants in freestyle rap battles make use of language,
gestures, facial expressions, and bodily comportment within interactions. Our videotaped data are informed by extensive
ethnographic participant-observation in Hip Hop ciphers and battles at these sites (Lee and Alim in Los Angeles, and Williams
and Alim in Cape Town), and numerous ethnographic interviews with artists, patrons, b-boys, b-girls, turntablists, graffiti
writers, Hip Hop heads, and other participants, which resulted in a considerable archive of observations.
The Los Angeles rap performance venue, Project Blowed, has been well-documented by Morgan (2009) and Lee (2016) and
is the longest-running open mic venue in the U.S. The open mic is hosted at KAOS Network, a community center run by
activist Ben Caldwell and located in Leimert Park, a Black arts district located along the Crenshaw Corridor in South Central
Los Angeles (sometimes referred to as ‘the Black Greenwich Village’). In addition to performing ‘writtens’ (pre-written as
opposed to improvisational rhymes) on a small stage inside of the club, emcees also engage in freestyle rap sessions on the
street corner outside of the club. Project Blowed occasionally hosts special events inside of the club; these include special
shows, ‘ beat ciphers’ where producers play Hip Hop beats for an audience, and organized rap battles.
For over two decades, KAOS Network has held weekly open mics on Thursday nights and remains one of the chief local
training grounds for aspiring verbal artists. While the majority of regulars (‘Blowedians’) are young Black men between the
ages of 18 and 30, some Latino, Asian American and White men, and a small contingent of women, also frequent the venue.
Racially, these observations mimic the Leimert Park’s ethnoracial demographics at the time of data collection: 80% Black, 11%
Latino, 5% Asian, 1% White and 3% other (see Lee, 2016 for an in-depth discussion of this context).
As in Los Angeles and much of the U.S., Hip Hop sites in Cape Town are typically racialized as Black or Coloured spaces,
depending in which township or suburb the venue is located (More than twenty years ‘post’-apartheid, Cape Town remains
highly segregated by race). ‘Coloured’ is an ethnonym created by South Africa’s apartheid regime to refer to those of predominantly ‘mixed-race’ who were not easily classified as either of the dominant categories, ‘White’ or ‘Black,’ and remains
fraught today, as an ‘identity in crisis’ (Adhikari, 2005: 6; Erasmus, 2001). Club Stones, the venue for the performance cipher
analyzed below is located in the predominantly Coloured Northern Suburbs of Kuilsriver. Like most clubs in Cape Town,
Stones became host to a weekly hip-hop show, entitled, ‘Stepping Stones to Hip Hop’, created by the Hip Hop groups Suburban
Menace and MoBCoW. The show comprised of drinking games, dance battles, rap performances by Coloured and Black male
H.S. Alim et al. / Language Sciences 65 (2018) 58–69
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and female emcees, performances by deejays, and freestyle rap battles. Hip-hop heads, predominantly Coloured and Black,
from all over Cape Town, attended the show and some participated in the many freestyle rap battles.
In this context, Stones hosts a gathering of predominantly Coloured youth every Wednesday night between 10:00PM and
2:00AM, consisting of turntablists, emcees and other Hip Hop heads who are there to enjoy the show. About one decade ago,
in 2008, Suburban Menace proposed and negotiated the hosting of a Hip Hop show with Club Stones’s management. A young
Coloured group at that time, their main purpose was to gain experience performing in front of an audience in a club. One of
the main features of their rapping was the performance of Hip Hop freestyle rap battles. As with Project Blowed, this site also
served as a training ground for aspiring rhymers.
The staff employed by Club Stones is predominantly Coloured and male. The regular participants who attend the show are
usually at least bilingual, speaking Afrikaans and English, with some being multilingual, speaking a variety of other languages.
While most of the employees live in the historically Coloured area cordoned off by the then Group Areas Act of apartheid, 1
many of the audience members who attend the show are from areas beyond the community of Kuilsriver, traveling from
as far afield as Mitchell’s Plain, Bellville, central Cape Town, and even Johannesburg. In the U.S. and South African contexts,
then, the majority of participants are racialized as ‘Black,’ ‘Brown,’ (used in the U.S. context to refer to “Latinas/os”) or
‘Coloured.’
4. Rapping the penis: race, gender, sexuality and the body in Los Angeles
Our first series of examples are drawn from an organized rap battle inside a small performance room in our Los Angeles
venue, where J-Smoov, a Black emcee, served as host by introducing participants before each battle, enforcing the 45-second
time limit allotted to each emcee per round, and finally, asking the audience to select the winner by cheering as loudly as they
possibly can. After sliding through their earlier rounds relatively unscathed, both Lyraflip – a (then) 22-year-old male Filipino
American emcee – and Flawliss – a (then) 25-year-old male African American emcee – met in the final round, which we detail
below. After winning the coin toss, Flawliss opted to take his turn after Lyraflip.
Lyraflip began his verse by immediately focusing on Flawliss’ body (Flawliss was a rather heavy young man), bringing
masculinity into focus within the first 10 s.
001 L: Yo
002 I’ma make your raps retire
003 the fool’s backwawdawneck
004 looks like a stackwawtires
005 ma::n
006 you can’t fuck wit me
007 you a pussy
008 plus you got double-D
(reaches out his left hand and fondles Flawliss’s right ‘breast’)
(Flawliss grimaces as crowd erupts in support of Lyraflip ‘O::::h!’)
In lines 1–8, Lyraflip draws attention to his own ‘toughness’ and masculinity (line 6: ‘you can’t fuck with me bitch’) as
contrasted with his opponent’s perceived femininity (lines 7–8: ‘you a pussy plus you got double-D tits’), and in a very rare
maneuver, actually reaches out and touches Flawliss’s chest in a sexualized manner. Flawliss is not only simultaneously
depicted as weak (line 6, the use of ‘bitch’) and as a woman (possessing ‘double-D tits’ in line 8), but he is also insulted as
possessing a body that is considered undesirabledand in this case, overweight, soft and femininedin lines 3–8. To put it
crudely, in Lyraflip’s rhyme, it is considered ‘abnormal’ for a tough (not a ‘pussy’), cis-gendered (where body type adheres to
dominant ideologies of ‘biological sex’; as opposed to ‘transgendered’) man to have ‘tits.’ Notably, Lyraflip uses linguistic
features widely racialized as ‘Black’ in U.S. Hip Hop to construct his own masculinity vis-à-vis his opponent’s (‘you a pussy’ is
an example of zero copula, a central feature of African American Language, henceforth AAL).
Flawliss begins his response with a clever rhyme that demonstrates his own ‘toughness’ and directly calls public
attention to Lyraflip’s race, setting up future comments that highlight Lyraflip’s ‘Asianness,’ by telling him that he would
slap him so hard that he’d ‘wake up back in the Philippines.’ By laughing, smiling, and shrugging after Flawliss’ comment,
Lyraflip displayed public understanding of Flawliss’ diss as ‘part of the game’ in battling. At this point, the audience is
complicit in Flawliss’s use of race as a resource in the battle (the audience begins cheering for him). Toward the end of his
turn, Flawliss once again uses a diss that indirectly indexes Lyraflip’s racial identity as an Asian American. Instead of a
specific, direct comment about Lyraflip’s race (‘you’ll wake up back in the Philippines’), Flawliss makes a witty reference
about Ryu, a Japanese martial arts figure from the Street Fighter 2 video game, which is intended to index Lyraflip’s
‘Asianness’.
1
The Group Areas Act was a South African apartheid law promulgated in the early 1950s to separate and forcibly remove racial groups into various urban
enclaves across the country’s cities and towns.
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H.S. Alim et al. / Language Sciences 65 (2018) 58–69
112 F: and here go a lighter,
113 here go the fi-yre
114 (this shit gonna) stop
115 remind me of a^diaper ((^wipes hand past face, indicating smelly diaper))
116^Wipe this muthawfucka off ((^wipes butt))
117 Freestyle hyper
118 Ryu,
119 street fighter hyper
As he concludes his turn, Flawliss goes beyond direct articulations of racial disses to a more indirect, indexical use of insults
that capitalize on his opponent’s perceived racial group membership. Indeed, the first direct ethnic diss, where Flawliss would
slap Lyraflip so hard that he’d ‘wake up back in the Philippines’, does not only invoke an image of degrading physical abuse,
but the image created is one of symbolic deportation in that it articulates with U.S. discourses of Asians as perpetual foreigners whose true ‘homeland’ is elsewhere (see Reyes, 2007). Flawliss makes use of indexical disses about Lyraflip as an
Asian emceedthe reference to Ryu links Lyraflip to martial arts, a popular stereotype of Asians in general.
In the second round, Lyraflip once again mocks Flawliss’ weight and playfully questions his skills as an emcee by making
use of popular cultural references as well. Halfway through his second turn, Lyraflip makes an indirect diss that indexes
Flawliss’ racial identity. Instead of making a bald comment about Blackness, he compares Flawliss to ‘Sherman Klump,’ a
severely obese character played by African American comedian Eddie Murphy in the film The Nutty Professor.
134 L: yo, yo.
135 you fucked up,
136 like smoking blunts on shrooms
137 it’s Eddie Murphy in a Sherman Klump costume
138 A: ooh!
Importantly, while Flawliss very directly employs race against Lyraflip, Lyraflip references Flawliss’ racial identity within a
‘fat joke’ as opposed to a ‘Black joke,’ which is entirely off-limits in interracial battles. Our data shows consistently that the
central means by which non-Black emcees reference Blackness in battles is through indirect appeals to popular culture or as a
racial modifier to jokes that are centrally about aspects other than their opponent’s race (Blackness is an unmentionable,
unless both emcees identify as Black).
These youth also employ a range of gestures and linguistic styles to accentuate their disses. Once again, these insults are
carried out on the terrain of the male body. For example, in his second turn, Flawliss draws on commonly held stereotypes
about African American and Asian American penis size. Although he does not explicitly articulate anything about Asian
American penis size, he does boast, ‘nigga, my dick longer than the damn election pole’ (Line 188), perhaps as an attempt to
counter the emasculation that he suffered, quite literally, at the hands of Lyraflip in the previous round. Immediately after
mentioning how ‘long’ his member is, he draws a sharp contrast with Lyraflip: ‘You a Chinese, short, short’ (Lines 192–194),
making a hand gesture for ‘small’ by leaving about an inch between his thumb and index finger.
187 F: and imma letchyu flow
188 nigga, my dick longer than the damn election^
189 L:
^((lip synch’s F’s rhymes))
190 F: You?
191 A: [o:h!
192 F: [You a Chinese, ((holds index finger and thumb together to indicate small penis
size))
193 L: ((shrugs shoulders with hands raised, mouthing ‘what the fuck’))
194 F: short short,
195 fried rice
196 your ass beat me
197 L: ((waddles side to side on the beat))
198 F: get
199 get dice
((F sweeps hand in air; L’s hands in air))
200 A: ahhhhhhhh!
In this verse, Flawliss begins to perform the Other (Pennycook, 2003), producing a mock variety of English near the end of
this excerpt (lines 198–99). After attempting to diminish Lyraflip by using a stereotypical, sexual diss about the Asian male
body, he begins to rap in ‘Mock Asian,’ a style that draws on assumed features of linguistic production characteristic of users or
learners of English from Asian language backgrounds (Line 198 –199; see ‘mock Asian’ discussions in Chun, 2004). At this point
in the battle, the creative yet stereotypical construction of Asianness, along with the accompanying hand gesture, however, do
H.S. Alim et al. / Language Sciences 65 (2018) 58–69
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not elicit the same kind of response from Lyraflip, who has thus far not engaged Flawliss’ previous racial insults. This time, he
shrugs his shoulders and mouths the words, ‘what the fuck,’ in a display of protest.
At the end of two rounds, the host emcee, J-Smoov, grabbed the microphone and asked the audience to ‘make some noise’
in a show of approval for the best rhymer of this evening’s battle. After inconclusive ‘votes,’ J-Smoov decided that there was
going to be a third and deciding round, and that Flawliss would rhyme first. Eight seconds into his verse (beginning in line
304, and noted by the ‘#’ followed by italicized font), he starts rapping in Mock Asian for the second time in this same battle.
297 F: yo
298 uh-uh-uh-uh
299 yo uh
300 look, look,
301 you really ^ think you bout to beat Flawliss
^((touches L’s shoulder, L smiles back
302 nigga, no way.
303 i metchyo girl yesterday she say
304 ^ #no you ho ya may [ ]
^((uses index finger in scolding fashion throughout # to the beat))
305 L: ((shifts and looks at audience))
306 F: #no he ma say [ ]
307 L: ((grimaces at audiences with hands and shoulders raised))
308 F: #oh what he just say? [ ]
309 Flawliss say a Chinese joke
310 I did it anyway, hey!
311 I don’t give a fuck
Flawliss uses Mock Asian more forcefully in this verse, demonstrating how mock language varieties mark a variety of
assumed features. In his previous use, he styled Lyraflip through linguistic timing and assonance in ‘fried rice’ (195) and ‘chop
chop’ (198) using short, one-syllable English words to indirectly index race/ethnicity. In the second utterance, his use of Mock
Asian is more explicit, consisting of unintelligible words that mock Chinese tonality (represented in brackets to the right of the
transcript with tone letters). Line 304 results in fluctuating tones and lines 306 and 308 result in rising tones, in stark
juxtaposition to the more typical rise-fall intonation of the lines that precede and follow the mock Asian. This raciolinguistic
performance is later explicated in line 309 (‘Flawliss say a Chinese joke’), making explicit that Black emcees feel entitled in this
space to make jokes that focus centrally on race (line 310–311: ‘I did it anyway, hey! I don’t give a fuck’). Further, while Flawliss
articulates his dominance in this context, i.e., his ability to make racialized disses, it is important to recall that Lyraflip is not
Chinese, he’s Filipino American. Finally, it is important that these racialized insults, once again, occur in relation to and in
conjunction with stereotypical notions of masculinity, where men are more ‘manly’ if they take another man’ s love interest
(read: possessions). After all, what was Flawliss doing with Lyraflip’s ‘girl’ besides leading the audience to believe that he was
‘with her’?
5. Die komkommers in jou hol in is : race, gender, sexuality and the body in Cape Town
In the following analysis of rap ciphers in Cape Town, we demonstrate how similar Hip Hop cultural performances of
‘toughness’ in freestyle rap battles contribute to the production of cisheteropatriarchal masculine identities. We also show
how ideologies of ‘toughness’ circulating transnationally in global Hip Hop are relocalized by Capetonian youth. We also
illustrate how emcees articulate ‘toughness’ through use of Kaaps and AAL by using varieties associated with communities of
extreme violence (as in the case of Sabela, a local street register). Below, we show how these verbal artists draw on popular
cultural figures and personae to reify dominant discourses of race, gender, sexuality and the body.
The freestyle rap performances analyzed below owe their existence to ‘beef’ (conflict) starte
