Remix Multilingualism: Hip Hop, Ethnography and Performing Marginalized Voice 9781472591111, 9781474295420, 9781472591142

Citation preview

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Remix Multilingualism is the book we’ve been waiting for ever since 1994 when the ‘new’ South Africa enshrined its eleven official languages policy in the Constitution. Williams’s clear, scholarly vision and rigorous, ethnographic labor in the Hip Hop vineyards of Kuilsriver have yielded a master text which demonstrates the rich multilingualism of marginalized voices in South Africa (and by extension, elsewhere in the Global South). It is a major contribution to the fields of Hip Hop Studies and Multilingualism and a must-read for scholars and teachers alike. Geneva Smitherman, University Distinguished Professor Emerita, Michigan State University, USA Hip Hop messes up with language, it takes it to a whole nother level, where the poetic is mixed with the political, where the global and the local meet in a space of métissage, and where the familiar is so worked-on that it becomes unfamiliar. Awad Ibrahim, Full Professor of Education, University of Ottawa, Canada An exciting and rich multi-sited linguistic ethnography of marginality in the South and its multilingual (re)mediation. Quentin Wiiliams has (re)mixed a tantalizing recipe for understanding how lives and selves may be materialized in and through Linguistic Citizenship. Christopher Stroud, Senior Professor of Linguistics and Director for the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research, University of the Western Cape, South Africa Remix Multilingualism takes readers into the heart of Cape Hip Hop’s rich multilingual politics in a detailed ethnographic study that lays the groundwork for rethinking hegemonic understandings of ‘race’, ‘gender’ and identity politics. Adam Haupt, Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa This is a dope book. Quentin Williams - this Kaalvoet Laaitie vannie Lavis – nails the ways Hip Hop is a driving force in remixing multilingualism, doing your ding, shifting the raciolinguistic politics of multilingualism. This vital book is not only about remixing linguistic resources in South Africa but about remixing how we think about multilingualism. Read it and remix. Alastair Pennycook, Distinguished Professor of Language, Society and Education, University of Technology Sydney ‘Remixing multilingualism’ is conceptualised in this book as engaging in the linguistic act of using, combining and manipulating multilingual forms. It is about creating new ways of ‘doing’ multilingualism through cultural acts and identities and involving a process that invokes bricolage. Quentin Williams is a Senior Lecturer in the Linguistics Department at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and also a Research Fellow in the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) at the same university

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Advances in Sociolinguistics Series Series Editor: Tommaso M. Milani, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa Since the emergence of sociolinguistics as a new field of enquiry in the late 1960s, research into the relationship between language and society has advanced almost beyond recognition. In particular, the past decade has witnessed the considerable influence of theories drawn from outside of sociolinguistics itself. Thus rather than see language as a mere reflection of society, recent work has been increasingly inspired by ideas drawn from social, cultural and political theory that have emphasized the constitutive role played by language/​discourse in all areas of social life. The Advances in Sociolinguistics series seeks to provide a snapshot of the current diversity of the field of sociolinguistics and the blurring of the boundaries between sociolinguistics and other domains of study concerned with the role of language in society. Discourses of Endangerment Ideology and Interest in the Defence of Languages Edited by Alexandre Duchêne and Monica Heller Globalization and Language in Contact Scale, Migration, and Communicative Practices Edited by James Collins Globalization of Language and Culture in Asia Edited by Viniti Vaish Language, Culture and Identity An Ethnolinguistic Perspective Philip Riley Language Ideologies and Media Discourse Texts, Practices, Politics Edited by Sally Johnson and Tommaso M. Milani Language Ideologies and the Globalization of ‘Standard’ Spanish Darren Paffey Language in the Media Representations, Identities, Ideologies Edited by Sally Johnson and Astrid Ensslin

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Language and Power An Introduction to Institutional Discourse Andrea Mayr Language Testing, Migration and Citizenship Edited by Guus Extra, Massimiliano Spotti and Piet Van Avermaet Linguistic Minorities and Modernity, 2nd Edition A Sociolinguistic Ethnography Monica Heller Multilingual Encounters in Europe’s Institutional Spaces Edited by Johann Unger, Michał Krzyżanowski and Ruth Wodak Multilingualism A Critical Perspective Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese Remix Multilingualism Hip Hop, Ethnography and Performing Marginalized Voice Quentin Williams Semiotic Landscapes Language, Image, Space Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow The Languages of Global Hip-​Hop Edited by Marina Terkourafi The Language of Newspapers Socio-​Historical Perspectives Martin Conboy The Languages of Urban Africa Edited by Fiona Mc Laughlin The Sociolinguistics of Identity Edited by Tope Omoniyi Voices in the Media Performing Linguistic Otherness Gaëlle Planchenault

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Remix Multilingualism Hip Hop, Ethnography and Performing Marginalized Voice Quentin Williams

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Quentin Williams, 2017 Quentin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-​1-​4725-​9111-​1 ePDF: 978-​1-​4725-​9114-​2 ePub: 978-​1-​4725-​9113-​5 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover illustration © Martin O’Neill Series: Advances in Sociolinguistics Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

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This book is dedicated to the rap group Suburban Menace, the multilingual rap group that became MoBCoW, and to every emcee, rapper, b-​girl and b-​boy, graffiti writer and turntablist active in the Hip Hop community of South Africa. Keep to the Knowledge of Your-​Self, doen jou ding (do your thing) in your language, hustle hard with your meanings, and dala (do) what you must. Thanks for showing a Kaalvoet Laaitie vannie (barefeet kid from) Lavis love.

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Contents Foreword: Dit. Is. Die. Remix: Remixing Multilingualism Straight Outta Cape Town Preface Acknowledgements

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Introduction: Remixing Multilingualism in a Globalized World

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Designing Hip Hop Sociolinguistics Research on Multilingualism

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The Hip Hop Sociolinguist and Multi-​sited Ethnography: Collecting Multilingual Remix Data

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Multilingual Emcees up in the Club and Other Spaces

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Multilingual Braggadocio and Intertextuality

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Multilingual Freestyle Rap and Performing Locality

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Staging Masculinity: Emceeing Toughness, Toughing up the Emcee

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Precarious Femininity: The Performativity of Sexualized Bodies

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Conclusion: On the Future Study of Marginalized Voices

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Notes Bibliography Discography Index

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205 207 232 233

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Foreword: Dit. Is. Die. Remix: Remixing Multilingualism Straight Outta Cape Town As soon as I  got in the car I  told him that I’d been here only a few days and I already couldn’t stand having to speak to White people from behind bars (e.g. the barred security gates, doorways, storefronts, etc., that make up the intense security apparatus of Cape Town’s southern suburbs). ‘Feels alien and alienating,’ I  told him. ‘Feels like these folks are symbolically trapped by the very racism that they created.’ My ride, Shaheen Ariefdien, member of the legendary South African Hip Hop group Prophets of da City and one of the nation’s most critically acclaimed emcees, turned to me and said, ‘Now you understand Hip Hop in South Africa; we decided to speak through our bars!’ As we both laughed at the clever sociolinguistic pun (‘bars’ meaning ‘verses’ in Hip Hop poetics), we also both knew that those few words spoke volumes about the significant role the Hip Hop arts have played in the lives of young people living under the racial, economic and political terror of South African apartheid. Nearly three decades since Cape Town’s Prophets of da City released South Africa’s first Hip Hop recording, Our World, the publication of Quentin Williams’s Remix Multilingualism shows that Hip Hop continues to be a major site of identification for South African youth. In 2014, I taught a course about Hip Hop art and activism in ‘post-​apartheid’ South Africa in conjunction with University of Cape Town professor Adam Haupt’s and Prophets of da City’s DJ Ready D’s summer seminar on the same topic. During the course, we were honored to welcome Williams –​then a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oslo’s Centre for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan –​for a lecture on ‘Racing Multilingualism’. Williams shared early versions of the marvelous work presented within these pages, fielding questions from my students about his Hip Hop ethnographic research, the negotiation and interactional accomplishment of ‘Whiteness’ and ‘Colouredness’ in Capetonian Hip Hop ciphers, South Africa’s complex linguistic landscape, and a host of comparative questions about US and South African Hip Hop. This unforgettable session ended with an intense, impromptu debate on the meanings of ‘Coloured’ identity with Dmitri Jegels, insightful analyses of race and space from Sibonile Mpendukana, and a comparative look at race, gender and sexuality in

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Hip Hop ciphers in the United States and South Africa with African American Language pioneer Geneva Smitherman. As part of a new generation of sociolinguists working at a historically Black university, Williams, now a senior lecturer at the University of the Western Cape, demonstrates that this Hip Hop language movement holds serious implications for ‘decolonial language empowerment’. He argues that these Hip Hop artists ‘are doing the deconstructive work usually reserved for Afrikaans sociolinguists immersed in the study of language, race and power’. Importantly, he stresses that the Hip Hop language movement in Cape Town reclaims Afrikaans by extricating it from colonial Whiteness and laying fertile ground for the radical reshaping of the future of multilingualism in South Africa. Whereas Cape Town Hip Hop’s calls for reclaiming language are often explicit, the beauty of Remix Multilingualism is that it provides us a window to view how these language politics –​as well as the colonial, imperial politics of English, the raciolinguistic politics of multilingualism, the gendered politics of everyday Hip Hop linguistic practice and so on –​are formed and transformed implicitly through moment-​to-​moment interactions across Hip Hop spaces. Using audio-​ and video-​recorded data, Williams paid specific attention to these youths’ use of the multiple linguistic varieties and styles that formed the practice of multilingual remixing in Hip Hop contexts. Through his analysis of the Hip Hop linguistic landscape in Kuilsriver, a predominantly Coloured township in the Cape Flats, we witness the ways in which language and multilingualism are (re)created across Hip Hop spaces, from Club Stones, to the Menace Mansion, to social media sites like Facebook. Beyond scholars interested in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and the ethnographic study of Hip Hop cultural practice, Remix Multilingualism will be of use to scholars attempting to rethink the role and creative use of language in globalized societies, particularly those with a more recent interest in ‘new cities’ or ‘creative cities’ in the Global South, and anthropologists who study the prevalence of verbal dueling genres in global contexts, the spatial and corporeal turns in multilingualism, the linguistic processes of ‘stylization’ and ‘enregisterment’, the linguistic creativity found in Hip Hop nation language varieties, gender, race and language ideologies, as well as the social, political and educational implications of rethinking/​remixing multilingualism. Remix Multilingualism offers us one of the first full-​length global Hip Hop Linguistics (HHLx) volumes, and in that, it is a treasure. As Hip Hop linguistic practices continue to circulate beyond national borders, I, along with Alastair Pennycook and Awad Ibrahim, have argued that these ‘global linguistic flows’

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are central to understanding this profound cultural movement that has impacted youth language from Tanzania to Turkey to Thailand. Beyond understanding Hip Hop, Williams’s text will surely invigorate scholars of language through in-​ depth analyses of, deep engagement with and sometimes critical reframings of key concepts in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. As I wrote in the introduction to Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language in 2009, several key questions remained for the field of HHLx, among them:  How can we produce more ethnographic studies of Hip Hop –​or what James G. Spady termed ‘hiphopographies’ –​ that en-​voice our all-​too-​often silencing scholarly approaches? How can we produce more grounded work that focuses on interaction in Hip Hop cultural spaces in order to investigate the development of identities, ideologies and social structures and categories? How can our analyses of global Hip Hop cultures and languages move beyond a mostly narrow focus on linguistic structure and towards examining Hip Hop’s broader semiotic, multimodal system of representation? How can we produce studies of language, gender and sexuality in Hip Hop cultures that take us beyond the all-​too-​easy ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ critiques and towards more complex, ethnographic, locally situated understandings of how youth make use of, reproduce and sometimes challenge circulating discourses? In this one text, Williams has managed to take up and answer all of these questions. The breakthrough notion of remixing multilingualism, for Williams, operates on at least three interrelated levels. Through rigorous interactional analysis, Williams’s Remix Multilingualism shows in painstaking detail how highly multilingual youth in the local Hip Hop culture of Cape Town creatively draw upon a range of local linguistic varieties –​including Afrikaaps, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sabela, SeSotho, South African Englishes and Tsotsitaal –​as well as African American Language and varieties of global Englishes to accomplish multiple goals. We can take this as the first level of remixing multilingualism. Second, Williams himself remixes our understanding of multilingualism by contributing to scholarly discussions of ‘translanguaging’ and ‘social approaches to multilingualism’ that can perhaps better address ‘multilingual practices found in the globalized contexts of transcultural flows’. As Williams shows, marginalized multilingual speakers ‘are carving out new and innovative multilingual spaces’ to display their voices through the creative and potentially transgressive use of language. However, even more importantly for Williams, these youth are not only ‘combining and manipulating multilingual forms and functions tied to histories, cultural acts, and identities’, but they

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are also creating new ways of doing multilingualism. This third level of remixing multilingualism is a point not to be missed: remixing multilingualism could simply be about the creative ways that youth remix multiple linguistic resources to produce new narratives and varieties. But for Williams, the power of remixing multilingualism is also about being ‘involved in a process that invokes new linguistic possibilities’. These new linguistic possibilities, by which ‘cultural practices and symbols are mixed up and brought together’ in new ways, are, for Williams, centrally about creating ‘alternative futures’ for raciolinguistically marginalized, multilingual South African youth, ones of transformational ‘linguistic citizenship’. Remixing multilingualism is not merely about inventing new linguistic forms; it is ultimately about introducing new linguistic relations that disrupt hegemonic linguistic conditions and center socially and linguistically marginalized practices and identities. The power of Williams’s project is that it urges us to consider the new ways of being and becoming that are made available to us through innovative and inventive linguistic performance. In Remix Multilingualism, all of these themes and more are thoroughly analysed and contexted within South Africa’s current sociopolitical context. Because of Hip Hop’s social, racial, economic and political location, any conversation about Hip Hop is also a conversation about, and ideally a critique of, power. As Jeff Chang writes in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation, Hip Hop culture grew out of the context of the post-​industrial, urban ghettoes, so-​called ‘urban renewal’ (which Black folks critically refer to as ‘Negro removal’), the politics of abandonment and the concomitant politics of containment vis-​à-​vis communities of colour in the United States. Similarly, in ‘Colouring the Cape Problem Space’, Remi Warner writes about the ‘numerous and quite striking parallels’ between this US context and the policies that created the ‘experiential sharing of a brutal process of communal destruction and relocation’ in Cape Town. Importantly, however, he explains how overlapping policies and policy rationales ‘are in many ways illustrative of the relative non-​exceptionalism of racialized urban development policies in South Africa, as compared to other (post)industrialized urban metropolises’ (p. 127). Later Warner writes, ‘When we compare developments under the Group Areas Act in Cape Town [in the 1950s–​1960s] with those carried out under the auspices of New York’s Slum Clearance Programs [from the 1930s to the 1970s]’, we see links between what happened under apartheid and what happened in the United States and urban centers globally (take Paris, for example). According to Warner, ‘The very South Bronx housing projects from which Hip Hop’s first

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generation of cultural producers emerged after having been relocated there following the building of the Cross Bronx Expressway and completion of the Federal ‘Urban Renewal’/​‘Slum Clearance Program’ were likewise modeled after’ the work of the same Swiss modern functionalist architect, Le Corbusier, that influenced apartheid’s raciospatial segregation (p. 130; see Le Corbusier’s argument for ‘protective zones’ between the city center and its surrounding areas in his The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, 1929). So, as Blacks and Latinos were removed and contained in areas of poverty in the Bronx, Cape Town witnessed Coloured and Black South Africans removed and contained in the economically impoverished areas known as the Cape Flats. Hip Hop not only grew out of these locations but it continues to speak to these material conditions, highlighting the worsening economic circumstances for Black and Coloured South Africans since the ‘end’ of apartheid in 1994. As Cape Town artists like Emile YX? of Black Noise and Heal the Hood repeatedly point out, the internal dynamics of oppression in South Africa are best understood not in isolation, which limits the scale of systemic oppression that is operating in the here, nor in purely historical terms, which relegates this oppression to some long-​ago past by obscuring the contemporary local reality in the now. Rather, the critique of South African democracy, or ‘demockery’, as Emile YX? refers to it, can be productively articulated in terms of the continuation of colonial policies in the context of global capitalist, imperialist, White supremacy. Hip Hop for Emile and others, therefore, becomes a critical vehicle for raising consciousness, developing anticolonial resistance and upending the White supremacist legacies of apartheid through a radical re-​education. By returning to one of Hip Hop’s five elements, ‘Knowledge of Self ’, Emile and other artists involved in the Hip Hop theatre production Afrikaaps –​including Jitsvinger, Blaq Pearl, Bliksemtraal, Monox, Jethro Louw, Shane Cooper and Kyle Shepherd –​view language as a site for the disruption of colonial domination and the transformation of ‘the colonial mentality’ in the psyche of communities of colour. Language, to these artists –​and to Williams himself –​is no longer merely the medium that narrates the revolution; it is the revolution. As I  wrote with Adam Haupt in ‘Reviving Soul(s):  Hip Hop as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in the U.S. and South Africa’, Capetonian Hip Hop artists are explicitly revising hegemonic understandings of Arikaans. Specifically, they offer a creative re-​examination of the language variety they refer to as Afrikaaps (a neologism that combines the term ‘Afrikaans’ with the term ‘Kaaps’, meaning ‘from the Cape’ or ‘Capetonian’). This project of historical linguistic revisionism boldly and creatively contests traditional, static, colonial definitions of Afrikaans

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as ‘the language of the Dutch settlers’ in Cape Town, for example, as well as traditional resistance narratives of Afrikaans as ‘the language of the colonizer’. Through a clever, politicized orthographic manoeuvre, Afrikaans is rendered Afrikaaps, calling upon readers/​listeners to re-​evaluate their understanding of this language variety and, importantly, the people who speak it. Influenced heavily by prominent linguist and political revolutionary, the late Neville Alexander, as well as historical activist Tariq Patrick Mellet, the production not only supports multilingualism; it also is a project of revisionist historiography that draws centrally upon the remixing and reclamation of language (and other cultural symbols) to produce a new reality for the next generation of ‘Black/​Coloured’ South Africans. The production revisits and revises –​or appropriately for this book, remixes –​the creole history of Afrikaans and provides a more central role to the linguistic contributions of indigenous Khoisan peoples and enslaved Muslims from India, Malaysia and other parts of Southeast Asia. To his credit, Williams does not, in any way, depict the Hip Hop scene in Cape Town as a progressive, democratic utopia. In the analytic chapters of this book, Williams demonstrates that the transformative power of remixing multilingualism may be unequally available to some members of the Hip Hop community, particularly women. Williams’s goal here is not to further entrench the stereotype of young Coloured and Black men, or Hip Hop, as especially regressive; rather, these Hip Hop discourses, while problematic in the ways Williams has discussed, are but one domain in which sexism, transmisogyny and homophobia come together to oppress and exclude (think traditional religious and political institutions across ethnoracial communities, for example). That said, Williams not only shows the discursive construction of toxic masculinity in the form of ‘toughness’; he also demonstrates how emcees and their mostly male audiences jointly reproduce heteropatriarchy through their positioning of masculinity vis-​à-​vis femininity, their attempts to control women’s bodies (women in this study do attempt to resist, although mostly unsuccessfully) and their use of explicitly heterosexist language. Male emcees draw on stereotypical female figures –​from the dear little witch Liewe Heksie and versions of the gossipy neighbour Auntie Stienie, both characters in apartheid-​era local programming –​to depict their opponents as weak. Some even use terms from Gayle, a local variety spoken by queer folks on the Cape Flats, along with metaphors of anal penetration and homophobic insults relating to the body, to accomplish the same goal. In other words, some of these young men –​like their contemporary American counterparts, and like the Turkish young men who engaged in verbal duels and ritual insults in the 1960s documented by Dundes,

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Leach and Ozko, to name just two examples –​continue the deeply problematic tradition of drawing on heterosexist stereotypes of women and queer folks to represent themselves as stronger than their opponents. In addition to his analysis of these emcees, Williams is to be commended for his reflexive discussion of his own multilingualism, including his contributions as a member of the Hip Hop ciphers he analysed as well as a refreshingly honest look at his own complicity in the sometimes sexist, misogynistic practices found therein –​and his personal growth beyond them. This kind of intellectual honesty is rare in the academy, and is yet another way that Williams distinguishes himself from scholars in the field. In a similarly critical vein, some of the most insightful chapters in this book explore the racial tensions between ‘Coloured’ and ‘Black’ members of the Hip Hop community, a phenomenon very rarely discussed in the literature on South African race relations. In some Hip Hop spaces, the notion of a multilingual democracy caves under the prevalence of anti-​Blackness (e.g., referring to Black people as ninjas, a racial epithet in this context) and the pressure towards linguistic homogenization (e.g., mocking Black South African English, or the raciolinguistic ideology that rap battles would be understood in English and Afrikaans but unintelligible in isiXhosa, disparagingly referred to as kakalak taal, or ‘cockroach language’). Further, although these Hip Hop youth readily articulate the value of multilingual diversity, and in many ways powerfully and explicitly decenter English in their performance spaces, Williams argues that the economic pull of English still clearly has a grasp on some participants. Lastly, not all emcees value marginalized forms of Afrikaans, with some drawing upon apartheid’s monoglot ideologies to hail their opponents as racialized stereotypes of a ‘Bushman speaker of Afrikaans’. In a linguistic context where Afrikaaps is stigmatized across nearly all social domains related to power and upward mobility (from education to politics to the job market), one would certainly expect the partial reinscription of regressive, apartheid-​era raciolinguistic ideologies. In general, however, Williams writes powerfully about how these youths’ multilingual remixing challenges the supposed inferiority of marginalized varieties, their very use transforming long-​held stereotypes about Black and Coloured South Africans as unintelligent, lazy and criminal. According to Williams, these youth ‘deal with the social and sociolinguistic remains of apartheid, through Hip Hop . . . with the express purpose of articulating alternative futures’. It should be clear by now that Williams’s interest in the multilingual remixing of local Hip Hop youth in Cape Town is both about language and the politics of

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language. When Williams asks how these youth might be creating a more egalitarian sense of space, he does so with one eye on South Africa’s colonial past and the other on its (hopefully not too distant) democratic future. In one of the most powerful articulations of the potential of Hip Hop’s multilingual remixing in the book, Williams writes: Given the history of South Africa, the legacy of apartheid, and the deposited sediment of political and economic discourses that still haunt us to this day, exploring the possibilities afforded by the circulation and appropriation of alternative discourses across Hip Hop spaces inhabited by young multilinguals might hold the promise of understanding how everyday interactions can provide an escape out of apartheid’s enduring fault lines . . . and towards multingualism for greater voice, that is, linguistic citizenship.

Having himself grown up in and only recently moved out of the working-​class, Coloured township of Bishop Lavis, and speaking a local variety of Afrikaaps as his first language, Williams’s perspective is, ultimately, both sobering and optimistic. He continues his powerful narrative: Nevertheless, I, like my research participants, was born on the Cape Flats, far from the centre of Cape Town and its leafy Southern Suburbs. We are often forced to repeat the experiences of spatial discrimination and marginalization of our parents, and often have to confront barriers of a racial nature when crossing the hurdles of social class and interacting with other language communities. For example, in the apartheid past, our parents were prohibited from buying houses in places legally defined as white spaces, enjoying beaches defined as whites-​only, or from attending institutions of higher learning other than those designed at the outset for Coloureds and Blacks. Today, my research participants and I experience similar exclusionary effects, remnants of the apartheid past, though they are no longer entrenched in the law, but in racialized language stereotypes, and the continued essentialization of our identities as tied to space and place –​tied to the very townships we come from.

Given the stark economic and political realities of South Africa, Williams carefully and critically thinks through the potential for a transformative multilingualism. Even as he warns us that some multilingualisms are created more equal than others, so to speak, or how these youths’ multilingualism can potentially ensnare them because ‘authoritative discourses’ continue to devalue them, he writes about the inescapable power and mobility of multilingualism in the lives of Cape Town’s youth. Similarly, while Williams writes about how the youth he worked with ‘are disadvantaged almost by default’,

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linguistically ‘they have mastered their own disadvantaged world for greater mobility’. Despite being born into communities created out of the ‘forced removals’ of the apartheid regime, these youth ‘have defined their own mobility through multilingualism’. Multilingual remixing in Hip Hop spaces, as an agentive practice, ultimately amplifies youth voices and increases access to democratic citizenship, thereby providing scholars and activists alike with new ways of imagining societies where all voices are, in Williams’s words, ‘heard and manifested’. As we approach twenty-​five years since the legal fall of apartheid, the transformational racial politics of the current moment call for South Africa to move beyond the rainbow politics of reconciliation and towards the radical politics of redistribution. Williams’s contribution here is about the redistribution and revaluing of linguistic resources, and how Hip Hop linguistic practice opens up new possibilities for both languaging and living. Returning to my conversation with brother Shaheen Afriefdien, I  will never forget the depth of his concise, poetic turns of phrase when it comes to describing the power of Hip Hop: ‘Hip Hop is the resilience of the human spirit,’ he said, ‘that process of transforming yourself and your environment.’ I think Williams would agree that the Hip Hop practice of remixing multilingualism has allowed this generation of youth to transform themselves and their current environment, or as Ariefdien would say, to continue speaking through the bars. H. Samy Alim Cape Town, South Africa January 2017

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Preface In highly mobile societies, the voice of multilingual speakers will differ across contexts depending on the linking of forms and functions, language varieties, registers and styles. This book is about the complexities introduced to the notion of (form-​function linkages) remixing multilingualism in globalizing and mobile Hip Hop spaces of Cape Town, an urban metropolis in transition. Essentially, it takes its point of departure in the idea that the remixing of multilingualism is a ‘spatial concept’  –​that is, the form that interacting languages, language varieties, register and styles take, how they are practised by young speakers and how multilingualism is perceived are determined to a large extent by the affordances of particular ‘places’. But additionally, as I postulate, a major parameter in the organization and differentiation of places is that of scale. Remix Multilingualism brings into focus an ethnography of the entanglements of voices within Hip Hop encounters and performance that are mapped on a scale from local (descaled) to translocal (upscaled), namely Hip Hop performances at a popular nightclub, in recording studios and other interconnected spaces. These encounters differ in terms of their basic semiotics: that is to say, the extent the interactions in Hip Hop spaces, and Hip Hop linguistic activities, are infused with local meaning and local values. Hip Hop sites are often characterized in terms of the assemblage of transmodal semiotics that contributes to defining it as a place of descaling and upscaling (buildings, linguistic landscapes, patterns of interaction and movement and posture, stylizations of selves, artefactual identities, etc.). What I hope the reader will find novel in this Hip Hop sociolinguistic study is how the local Hip Hop context of Cape Town is ‘predominantly’ local in branding, in who participates and in the linguistic landscape, aesthetics and authenticity. As we will see, pointing out the ‘normative orders of multilingualism’ is a pertinent or dominant task of the Hip Hop sociolinguistic researcher. And in this book I do just that, demonstrating how in the selected Hip Hop spaces in Cape Town a core ordering of multiple languages in the process of remixing multilingualism is in terms of economic value (consumption) with respect to what each language, or variety of language, and

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how such ordering contribute to the ideals of ‘keeping it real’, that is, creating ‘extreme locality’. What is more, the book illustrates how multilingual repertoires are ‘ordered’ –​discussed –​and seen to evolve and gain value in terms of a particular social trajectory of young multilingual speakers, namely their trajectory and history –​as temporally narrated –​towards becoming a Hip Hop head and a key actor in ‘keeping it real’. This book opens up how Hip Hop spaces in Cape Town are semiotically constituted and how they constrain and ‘prototypically’ facilitate particular kinds of marginalized voices in more detail by demonstrating the useful application of key concepts such as performance, performativity, stylization, entextualization and enregisterment. These theoretical concepts provide the framework for charting how different personae are voiced through, that is, entextualized and stylized in the interaction of different languages (in relation to the normative order or in how the combination of languages in voices and their competition more or less successfully enacted or perform the personae/​voice), and how these voices/​personae are enregistered, that is, the competitive processes in the linguistic conventionalization of the voices, and in the simultaneous construction of the downscaled and upscaled Hip Hop spaces. In Hip Hop practices and performances, multilingual voices are designed to produce local persona which more often than not reveal the deeply obvious truths of polycentric normativities against the monocentric normativity found in the actions of downscaled and extreme local contexts. Enregisterment is shown in the Hip Hop spaces to be driven by the construction of extreme locality. Further, the book reveals how different normative orders of multilingualism –​that is, different values, forms and combinations of languages that are afforded by the scaled nature of particular places –​are layered into and through different social personae and voices. In fact, it is the semiotic work in stylizing and entextualizing these voices, and in enregistering them, that helps to produce these differently scaled places. Hip Hop spaces are central political sites where a variety of everyday micro-​ and macro-​sociopolitical issues are dealt with. In Remix Multilingualism, the reader will find, among other issues dealt with, that ‘authenticity’ within the local Hip Hop context is a predominant issue, much like language and multilingualism are drawn on and paramount in (a)  positioning political interests (through personae and voices) and (b) in contesting and working through the normativities of the place in question. What Remix Multilingualism then reveals

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is the value of a concept of linguistic, which is here taken to refer to the agency constituted through non-​institutional means where language negotiations are transgressive and central to the creation of a normative order of local voices. What I hope the reader takes from this study is the insight it provides into the complexities of marginalized voices in the mobile, multilingual and scaled Hip Hop culture of Cape Town.

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Acknowledgements No book is produced in isolation, and this has certainly not been the case for the present one. On my journey of preparing this book for publication, I received much encouragement, support and help from colleagues, friends and loved ones. I’m thankful to Tommaso Milani for inviting me to submit a book proposal to this series and work on what would eventually become this book. Thanks, Tommaso, for your detailed and critical feedback on the first and subsequent drafts of this book. I am also extremely thankful to Scott Burnett for his sharp editorial work. I received lots of encouragement to finish this book at various stages of its production. In the academy of South Africa, I am forever grateful to the cultural theorist Adam Haupt for all the motivation, advice and support. Prof. Haupt’s pioneering research on South African Hip Hop has opened up many avenues for developing Hip Hop scholarship in the Global South. His early thesis on South African Hip Hop has had a great impact on my thinking and research of language and Hip Hop. To the homie H. Samy Alim, thank you for writing a dope Foreword for this book. Your belief in my work and support for my ideas on multilingualism and Hip Hop are greatly appreciated. Thanks also go to my colleagues in the Linguistics Department at the University of the Western Cape, but especially the staff at the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) at the same university. In particular, I thank Prof. Christopher Stroud for pushing me to finish this project and see it into production. Prof. Stroud has been an excellent supervisor and mentor to me, and I am forever grateful for the nuggets of wisdom he has dealt me as I chart my way through academia. Of course, this book would not have seen the light of day without the support of my research participants, the many Hip Hop heads and collaborators of Hip-​Hop:  I’m particularly grateful to MoB, Mseeq, Narc, M.D.K., Lil Holmes, Bracen Kayle, Baza Lo, Phoenix, Chuck, Jack De Novan, CC, deejay Earl Scratch, Cola, Bio.has.it., the comedy duo Joe Barber, the management of Club Stones (Kuilsriver) and many others active in the Kuilsriver Hip Hop Community and beyond.

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Also, thanks to the National Research Foundation (Project Number: 99241) and the VLIR-​UOS RIP (Project Number:  ZEIN2016RIP36) in the authoring of this work. Last, but not least, I thank my wife, Veronique Williams, for always supporting me as I sat up night and day completing this book. I am forever grateful to you for your love and encouragement.

Copyright Permissions I gratefully acknowledge permission from the University of the Western Cape for publishing content from my PhD dissertation. I and the publishers are thankful and gratefully acknowledge copyright permission to reproduce parts and sections from the following articles and book chapter:

Equinox: Williams, Q. E. 2016. Youth Multilingualism in South Africa’s Hip-Hop Culture: A Metapragmatic Analysis. Sociolinguistic Studies, vol. 10 (1): 109–133.

Routledge: Williams, Q. E. 2015. Emceeing Toughness, Toughing up the Emcee: Language and Masculine Ideology in Freestyle Rap Battles. In Milani, Tommaso (ed.), Language and Masculinities:  Performances, Intersections, Dislocations (pp.  77–​ 99). London: Routledge.

Taylor and Francis: Williams, Q. E. and Stroud, C. 2014. Multilingualism Remixed: Sampling Texts, Braggadocio and the Politics of Voice in Cape Town Hip Hop. African Studies, vol. 73 (1):1–​22. Williams, Q. E. 2012. The Enregisterment of English in Rap Braggadocio: A Study from English-​Afrikaans Bilingualism in Cape Town. English Today, vol. 28 (2), pp. 54–​59

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Stellenbosch University: Williams, Q. E and Stroud, C. 2013. Multilingualism Remixed: Sampling Texts, Braggadocio and the Politics of Voice in Cape Town Hip Hop. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, vol. 42, pp. 15–​36.

Ghent University: Williams, Q. E. and Stroud, C. 2010. Performing Rap Ciphas in Late-​Modern Cape Town: Extreme Locality and Multilingual Citizenship. Afrika Focus, vol. 23 (2), pp. 39–​59.

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Introduction: Remixing Multilingualism in a Globalized World

This book is an ethnographic study of multilingual remixing achieved by highly multilingual Coloured1 and Black male and female participants in the local Hip Hop culture of Cape Town. It illustrates how in globalized societies previously marginalized multilingual speakers are carving out new and innovative multilingual spaces to put on display their voices through the creative use of multilingualism. Remix Multilingualism shows how the global genre of Hip Hop is infused with local meaning and values by speakers who ‘remix’ language varieties such as African American English (AAE), South African Englishes, Kaaps (a variety of Afrikaans) and local registers such as Sabela and Tsotsitaal in order to navigate local physical spaces as well as Hip Hop activities and interactions. To remix, as I illustrate throughout the book, is to engage in the linguistic act of using, combining and manipulating multilingual forms and functions tied to histories, cultural acts and identities to create new ways of doing multilingualism. But to remix multilingualism is also to establish new forms of multilingual meaning-​making and to be involved in a process that invokes new linguistic possibilities –​that is, further processes by which cultural practices and symbols are mixed up and brought together to establish something new and fresh for an alternative future. To such an end, Remix Multilingualism demonstrates how young multilingual speakers, in their creative use of AAE and other types of global Englishes circulating around the world, draw on Hip Hop culture to (1) highlight the difficulties surrounding marginalized voices; (2) address the persistent problems of language, identity and culture originating in the apartheid past; (3) deal with the current difficulties of social transformation in South Africa; and (4) reach across national and other diasporic boundaries to express solidarity with other marginalized groups.

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This book is based on over a year of intensive ethnography investigating the establishment and representation of Hip Hop spaces in a Cape Town suburb. Hip Hop spaces, as I  define them in the South African context, are spatializations of Hip Hop cultural practices and languages that are today shaped by neoliberal economics, consumption practices, language biographies, styles, authenticities and normativities. The rationale behind selecting and investigating Hip Hop spaces had to do with an attempt to better understand the establishment and development of locally styled multilingual communication. More specifically, I sought to understand how Hip Hop spaces and places are designed as affordances for different practices and ideologies of language. In other words, I asked how young multilingual speakers attribute value to particular norms of multilingual practice inside and outside of Hip Hop spaces in their everyday interactional contexts, and how as multilingual contexts these spaces create the conditions for different types of remixing and the linguistic mediation of multilingual voice. Additionally, I  asked how young multilingual speakers who are apprenticed into Hip Hop culture, who are fans of Hip Hop culture, make everyday meaning. And, more importantly, I asked what happens when young multilingual speakers stage their multilingual voice, a voice that has historically fallen outside the institutionalization of legitimated voice. These questions emerge out of a society in flux, accelerated by dynamics of globalization, that have ushered in new practices of multilingualism and new conceptualizations of language. At a glance, globalization as a process has complicated the theoretical foundations of what it means to be a ‘community’. Previously bounded and territorially closed markets of homogeneous speakers are opening up to stratified, porous and heterogeneous multilingual communities on the move, redefining our basic ideas of the linguistics of contact. By considering the effects of globalization, I asked: what are the implications of this for the performance of marginalized voices? Given the movement of people and meanings across interlinked spaces, how is meaning made? In this book, I present research that seeks to contribute to the social approach to multilingualism while critiquing outmoded ideas of community, language and being in and out of place (following and building on Heller 2007a). I argue that we are increasingly unable to account for sociolinguistic dynamics where languages and speakers travel across community borders and interact through hybrid linguistic forms. In this vein, my argument echoes that of Blommaert (2010:  1), who suggests that sociolinguistic research has been caught in the morass of ‘static variation’ and ‘stratified language contact’ for several decades. Multilingualism has also been defined in much the same way (see Edwards 1994).

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For the past fifty years most mainstream research has conceived of multilingualism in structural-​functional terms as separate unitary and monoglot languages in contact, viewing it ‘from the perspective of an analysis of the ways in which different languages, or language varieties, might correspond to different social functions’ (Heller 2007a: 9). Founding figures of multilingualism as a field of inquiry, such as Mackey and Ornstein (1979), took language in contact to comprise separate linguistic systems alongside social constructs also in contact, such as community and identity. It is this approach to separate linguistic systems that has come to define bilingualism, and indeed multilingualism, as a phenomenon, treating languages ‘as whole, bounded systems, associated, moreover, with whole, bounded communities’ (Heller, 2007a: 11). Following on from these critiques, I will attempt to suggest ways to advance the social approach to multilingualism in how we approach languages in contact in order to more adequately deal with the types of contact phenomena and multilingual practices found in the globalized contexts of transcultural flows. These are contexts where the spatial distribution of macro-​and micro-​level multilingual practices encompass levels of hybridity that far exceed many modernist, contemporary structural-​functional frames of reference. To do so, however, we need to take stock of cultural creolization, linguistic hybridity, social structural anarchy and the political economies of consumption, all of which figure within the complex patterning of language in globalized time/​space frames. It is globalized time/​space frames that have come to characterize our world as ‘a world of flows’ (Appadurai 2000: 5). The research project on which this book is based considered an appropriate starting point the notion of a ‘linguistics of contact’, that is, a linguistics that deals with ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination –​like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today’ (Pratt 1992: 4). The linguistics of contact is a useful metaphor with which to start to prise open some of the linguistic and non-​linguistic features of Hip Hop spaces, particularly with respect to the remixing of multilingualism. It can also help us to understand how and why Hip Hop spaces have become an important nexus in globalization and transnational discourses of consumption, with language and multilingualism figuring centrally. What the reader will find in Remix Multilingualism is that Hip Hop spaces are characterized as sites for transgressive encounters and spectacle, and that they are defined by elements of performance and spectatorship, where the physical borders of place are porous, and where established performance representations

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including transgression, noise, styling, liminality and crossing are found. In Hip Hop spaces, languages converge, clash and intermingle to create resources of uptake and exclusion. As such, the notion of Hip Hop space cannot be defined in conventional sociolinguistic terms such as ‘domains’ (Fishman 1970; Boxer 2002) that restrict classically delimited roles already given and prescribed, and scripts on how to behave or perform. It bears instead the market characteristics of the carnival, forms of transgressive practices and carnivalesque communicative behaviours. In this book I argue that in order to understand the role of Hip Hop spaces in globalizing Cape Town, we need to take seriously the notion of space. Space, as Laurier (2005: 101) argues, partly determines the affordances of the semiotic and ethnographic manifestations of multilingualism, and may constrain and/​ or enable the performance of social categories such as race, gender and body (Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck 2005b; Markus and Cameron 2002). In order to understand the remixing of multilingualism in Hip Hop spaces, a focus on single and countable languages is often not enough to capture the multilingual repertoire of speakers. In fact, even focusing on multiple languages does not do justice to the complex semiotic webs within and across which speakers move, comprising not just languages as we know them but bits of language such as registers, accents, words and assemblages of form-​meaning elements, such as rap rhythms and embodied performances. Neither does a focus on space and place as unstructured and undifferentiated work for contexts of globalization. Instead, we need to explore how space is established, comes about and is organized by humans in globalized times. We also need to give specific attention to how globalization processes impact the establishment of translocal spaces, and how such spaces are given meaning by young multilingual speakers as they transgress monolingual spaces and enact their voice as part of their linguistic citizenship (Stroud 2009). In order to do so, we must pay attention to and document what semiotic and linguistic resources young multilingual speakers draw upon as they remix multilingualism and stage their voice in moments of contact and encounter. In Remix Multilingualism, I seek to offer a theoretical contribution to multilingualism research by applying the notions of stylization, performance, performativity, entextualization and enregisterment through a detailed analysis of interviews, performances and interactions. Through these investigation of linguistic encounters I illustrate how young multilingual speakers stage different personae and voices that are brought into being through the creative combination of various language varieties, and how these, in turn, are important

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for (a)  the framing of political interests, (b)  contestations of ways of being in place, and (c) the recognition of multilingual speakers’ attempt to bring historically marginalized voices into the mainstream. In the remainder of this chapter, I introduce the notion of globalization, and I chart the implications for a new linguistic dispensation (Aronin and Singleton 2008) in South Africa. I then review existing scholarship on multilingualism as a starting point from which to develop the notion of ‘remix multilingualism’. This is followed by a discussion of marginality and the politics of voice as tied to the perspective of linguistic citizenship, to which I will return in more detail in the conclusion of this book. After introducing these ideas, I provide a brief history of the spatial and linguistic constitution of Hip Hop culture in Cape Town.

1.1  Setting the Scene: Globalization Globalization refers to a ‘stretching process’ that reveals ‘[how] the modes of connection between different social contexts or regions become networked across the earth’s surface as a whole’ (Giddens 1990: 64). It is a phenomenon that is as much about the intensification of networks between various social groupings (Castells 2000) as it is about spaces and places moving metaphorically ‘closer’ to each other because of political, economic and infrastructural ties, including between ‘developing’ and ‘first world’ countries (see, for example, Hirst and Thompson 1999; Held and McGrew 2003, 2007; Appadurai 2000, 2008). According to Held et al. (1999: 414), the historical events that constitute globalization can be grouped into four episodes. The first episode is premodern globalization, which stretches from the beginning of history to the Renaissance period and is characterized by interregional encounters in Europe and Asia that included the formation of political and military empires, the origins and dispersions of the major world religions and the movement of peoples on a large scale. The second phase, early modern globalization, lasted from 1500 to 1850 and saw distinct ‘demographic flows’ in the West as well as the birth of the nation-​ state, and the fierce and lasting rivalry between the empires of Britain, Spain and Portugal. The third phase, modern globalization (1850–​1945), emerged from industrialization and the rise of the technological age. The foundations were laid in this phase for the fourth and final phase: contemporary globalization. By the present times, globalization has established an irrevocable structure through a variety of transnational institutions (for example, non-​governmental

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organizations, multinationals, regional political blocs etc.) that affect the organization of everyday life. In the globalization literature, there are many perspectives on the positive or negative changes such processes have brought. These have been grouped as transformationalists, globalists, sceptics and anti-​globalists. According to Held and McGrew (2003), transformationalists believe that dynamics that come with globalizing capitalism, expanding military networks, the speeding up of technology, ecological disasters, and so on are developing at unmanageable levels. They tend to view globalization as the defining blueprint for the rapid changes that are reorganizing languages, economies, polities and social life (see also Giddens 1991: 10). Globalists, on the other hand, see globalization as the dawn of a new era, economic, political or otherwise. Globalists argue that globalization is a change of multifaceted enormity at the levels of different economies, diverse political systems and even the reorganization of multilingualism. According to Kirkbride (2001: 18), theorists who self-​identify as globalists view globalization as a process that accounts for the overlap of tastes at various scales, combined with the concentration of manufacturing in specific places alongside globalized cultures and ontologies. For globalists, globalization is the messiah of modernity. It has arrived. It is here to stay. They understand that the arrival of globalization signals a new age: a new way of practising life, a new age of doing business and a new age of communicating and enacting language practices. Essentially, for globalists globalization means the ‘creation of a new “borderless world” and the end of the nation state’ (Kirkbride 2001: 27–​28). The sceptics are the third group, and they propose the antithesis to the globalist position: globalization, they argue, does not exist. This position is typically associated with the work of Hirst and Thompson (1999). The sceptics argue that it is not the case that we have entered a qualitatively different order, because the models used for projections are ahistorical and cannot provide adequate data on previous economic systems (Kirkbride 2001: 28–​29). Drawing on Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’, sceptics argue that globalization in all essentials is ‘the clash of regional blocs’ (Kirkbride 2001: 30). Globalization is basically just competition, and as a result there are ‘winners and losers in the global power balance’ (Kirkbride 2001: 31). Finally, for the anti-​globalists, the fourth group according to Kirkbride (2001: 32), globalization does exist, but as a dangerous new global economic system. For an anti-​globalist, the world system as conceived within a globalization

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frame negatively affects workers and communities who rely on labour because it is hegemonically controlled by transnational corporations. The idea that globalization has been and still is an ‘inevitable, naturally occurring phenomenon’ (Kirkbride 2001:  32)  is a fallacious one for anti-​globalists. Instead, they believe that globalization is the age of a new ‘hegemonic strategy pursued ideologically by a few small but powerful international bodies without transparency or democratic oversight’ (Kirkbride 2001: 32). These international institutions are the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and others. They are institutions that influence how voice is shaped in neocolonial settings (Apter 2007). Of these positions, mine is closest to the transformationalist perspective, which I believe helps us to move towards a new understanding of multilingualism in South Africa. Theoretically, such a stance enables me to pry open the possibilities that come from multilingual practices, analyse how voice is situated (performed) in spaces and unravel how young multilingual speakers go about their everyday lives. As a result of globalization, new discourses of citizenship are developing and taking hold in public spaces (Shaftoe 2008). In this book, I view citizenship more as a process and agency than status. I take it to be part of new forms of democratic processes such as inclusive forms of language activism (following Milani 2015). New forms of democratic processes such as direct democracy movements (Gaventa and Tandon 2010) have been accompanied in some nation-​ state policies and ideologies by a resistance to change, which has resulted in a significantly altered relationship between citizens and state (Crouch, Elder and Tambini 2001) and volatile new structures of consumerism. To a large extent, this is part and parcel of shifting discourses of capitalism, to the extent that globalization has influenced a sort of wholesale reimagining of citizenship in the context of the nation-​state in crisis (Magnette 2005; Chipkin 2007). Magnette argues that globalization reveals the unevenness of citizenship and the state and results in greater inequality where the state insists on a particular form of citizenship: ‘Citizenship confined to the nation-​state seems insufficient, or, to be more precise, out of focus with the real places of power’ (Magnette 2005:  168, italics mine). Here, ‘real places of power’ indicate subnational as well as supra-​regional locations, and they are places that pose innumerable challenges for historically marginalized multilingual speakers who find themselves between discourses of multiculturalism and those of ‘subject’ and ‘other’ (Kymlicka 1996; see specifically Makoni and Pennycook 2006; Stroud and Wee 2011; see also Stroud 2004).

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1.2  Multilingualism in a Globalized World Life under globalization is ushering in new conditions for the ‘maintenance and development of various kinds of multilingualism’ (Heller 2007b; compare Dor 2004), and processes of globalization are refiguring multilingualism as something completely different, forming ‘sets of languages, rather than single languages, [that] now perform the essential functions of communication, cognition and identity for individuals and the global community’ (Aronin and Singleton 2008: 4; see also Gardner and Martin-​Jones 2012). Unique configurations of multilingual resources are emerging as young multilingual speakers pursue global and local life trajectories that combine communication systems that comprise very diverse linguistic and semiotic resources. Multilingual communication is thus a part of the world of flows, and the way it is organized in globalization allows us to view how the distribution of linguistic resources is coupled with the scaling of multilingual spaces (Aronin and Singleton 2008: 7). In this book, the focus is on how globalization features significantly in establishing what makes the remixing of multilingualism glocal, that is, simultaneously local and global (see Robertson 1992). In this book, I do not draw on any specific typology of multilingualism to help address the problem and issues described here (Aronin and Singleton 2012). Nor do I subscribe to conventional, structural–​functional definitions of multilingualism (Edwards 1994). Rather, I  take issue with the very epistemological underpinnings of early ideas of multilingualism that understood the phenomenon essentially as the use of more than two languages in communication at the level of social groups, speech communities or communities of practice (Fishman 1978; Wenger 1999), within (and across) different nation-​state borders (Edwards 1994). At the sociopolitical level, ‘multilingualism’ referred to the emergence of principles of division and compartmentalization of language across territories established and regimented by nation-​states through the practice of monolingualism (cf. Khubchandani 1988; Laponce 1987; Auer and Wei 2007). This approach to multilingualism ‘embraces the study of the language systems in contact, the functions of the languages in society, the groups or communities in contact, and the speech of the individuals using more than one language [which must] not be seen in isolation from one another’ (Clyne 1997: 302; compare Williams 1992; Coupland, Sarangi and Candlin 2001; Weber and Horner 2012). What we also learn from previous approaches is that they demonstrated that ‘previous social arrangements typically required only a particular additional

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language, language-​related knowledge and/​or a number of specific language skills for sustaining economic, political and religious systems’ (Aronin and Singleton 2008:  9). These arrangements were illustrated already by the classic and seminal works of Ferguson (1971), where the notion of diglossia was developed to illustrate how dialects or languages used by a single community and individuals are characterized by one dialect or language variety being accorded a higher prestige, used, for instance, in schools and government, while the other is accorded a lower prestige, and used in fringe spaces. Thus, a body of thought on multilingualism was premised on the assumption that a particular people speak a particular language, and that the co-​presence of another language, or even multiple languages, was an aberration and did not define ‘peoplehood’ according to theoretical and territorial principles (Fasold 1984). Idealized views of singular languages proliferated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, creating a legacy where language, territory and culture were defined along monolithic, homogeneous and ultimately modernist lines. The typical understanding, then, of the phenomenon of multilingualism was that language spreads across various community borders, where one finds relatively small groupings of people in multilingual enclaves defined by limited boundaries and limited imaginings of identities (cf. Jacquemet 2005: 260–​261; for different arguments, see Kroskrity 2000). In this tradition, issues of language were at the heart of reimagining the relevance of the European and American nation-​state project, as well as the postcolonial world (Briggs and Bauman 2003). Fast forward to the late twentieth century, and multilingualism achieves greater prominence with the end of the Cold War, where the crumbling of the Communist bloc is associated with genocidal wars, increased mass mobility and immigration and porous nation-​state territories and borders (cf. Anderson 1983; Coulmas 1996, 2005, 2007). However, as Jacquemet (2005: 261) points out, since ‘the majority of scholars interested in language failed to investigate the linguistic mutations resulting from communicative practices happening in the multiple crevasses, open spaces, and networked ensembles of contact zones’, serious implications for the study of multilingualism alongside the rapid changes in globalization remained in the background, while monolingualism, despite all these developments, retained centre-​stage in discussions about language (see also Heller 2007a). In an attempt to contribute to the growing field of a social approach to multilingualism (some following Heller 2006; 2007a) a number of recent studies have critically analysed multilingualism in globalized societies, through such notions as polylanguaging, heteroglossia and metrolingualism (see Jørgenson

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2008; Fairclough 2006; de Swaan 2001; Pennycook 2010a; McLaughlin 2009; Blommaert 2010; Pennycook and Otsuji 2015). Theoretical differences notwithstanding, these studies reveal above all that the performance of multilingualism in the context of globalization not only allows speakers to be global but simultaneously enables them to be local (cf. Pennycook 2010a). It is also becoming increasingly clear how locality plays a role in forging local voices. Like space, place is important for capturing the transcultural flows (Appadurai 1996) of linguistic practices as well as the frictions (Tsing 2005) ensuing from such flows. It is also doubly important for demonstrating the performativity of locality, and how multilingual speakers figure their voices in the globalized contexts of contact and conviviality (Casey 1997). Stroud and Jegels (2014) postulate that places can be seen as mobile because they transform through gentrification and new types of architectural planning. Stroud (2009) argues, for instance, that multilingualism is the very semiotic resource used by young multilingual speakers for feeling ‘in place’ and for negotiating local political discourses in globalization. In this ‘feeling in place’ individual multilingual speakers’ move through local place, simultaneously constructing different and unique ways to narrate and thus construe such places through a variety of multilingual (and multisemiotic) practices. As such, one cannot understate the importance of place in offering conditions that constrain or facilitate particular multilingual expressions of local linguistic voice, and of multilingual speakers feeling in, and also, out of place. A particular sort of place of great importance in this regard are the public spaces of Hip Hop culture.

1.3  Remix Multilingualism: Marginality, Voice, Hip Hop Since its inception in America during the 1970s, Hip Hop has reached global and transnational heights most would not have expected. This popular culture has reached small and large places, rural and urban enclaves, and recently has experienced a research surge by academics interested in the transnational interconnectedness of Hip Hop culture, youth language and identity (see, for example, Nortier and Svendsen 2015). There is no doubt that today Hip Hop culture is a global cultural fact, and its cultural reach is evident in most localities across the world. From Nigeria, Tanzania and Mozambique to Brazil, Japan and India, global Hip Hop is currently shaping the way we understand and approach

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the politics of language and identity and the practice of multilingualism (Alim, Ibrahim and Pennycook 2009). Often mixing African-​American English (AAE), global Hip Hop is inserted in the localities mentioned and given new meaning and priorities. In those localities too young multilingual speakers use local language and in such practice they comment on and enact local authenticities of Hip Hop. Hip Hop culture is thus an important engine in the transcultural flow of linguistic practices around the world. As a predominant form of popular culture in times of globalization, Hip Hop is (in part) responsible for creating new linguistic forms that transform bounded and seemingly impervious monolingual ‘spaces’ into permeable multilingual ‘places’. Its role in globalization is important to understand if we are to grasp the complex emerging multilingual communication patterns of young multilingual speakers today. Recent studies show that multilingualism, in the context of transcultural flows and global English (Pennycook 2007a), is used by Hip Hop culture creators to construct, contextualize and reconstruct local multilingual spaces and local multilingual realities. Pennycook’s recent work on the effects of transcultural flows and English as a global language in an age of globalization sheds light on the practice of multilingualism in the context of global Hip Hop. With his colleague Tony Mitchell in Australia, a well-​known Hip Hop culture scholar, Pennycook has not only mounted a systematic critique of the structural-​functional models of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics but also pushed arguments to understand the plurality of identities of multilingual speakers in Hip Hop spaces. H. Samy Alim’s (2004; 2006; 2009a; 2009b) work on language, rap music, and HipHopography (an ethnographic method of studying Hip Hop culture), together with Pennycook (2007a), has provided the tools/​framework for conducting research on Hip Hop I deploy in my research. Given the important role of Hip Hop culture on the African continent specifically (Simone 2006; Dolby 2003) for the production of marginalized voice, the question arises as to how discourses of voice, as linguistic citizenship, circulate in and across Hip Hop spaces, and also how it is performed and practised by youth who participate in such spaces. To understand what I mean by marginalized voice, however, particularly within the context of Hip Hop culture, we need to first discuss the notion of marginality, to which I will now turn. Marginality as a concept in the humanities and social sciences has been defined variously to capture the social, economic and political exclusion, particularly through racialization, of individuals, groups and people. Countless studies have shown how marginalization works socio-​economically, spatially

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and symbolically as a form of practice, ideology and discourse (see, for example, Wacquant 2008). Take for instance this quote by Clifford Geertz on the modernization of the Third World and the manufacturing of marginality: When the third world . . . begins to modernize . . . a very old phenomenon, as old as the displacement of the American Indians, the Australian Aborigines, the Bushmen, the Bedouins, the Lapps, the Gypsies, gets a new lease on life. Those people who lack or who are denied the means of participating in such modernization, or who simply lack or who are denied the means of participating in such modernization, or who simply reject the terms on which it is offered, become marginal, and this leads to the creation of encapsulated societies, societies viewed by the majority population in the countries in which they live as “backward,” “traditional,” “archaic”, “static,” or “primitive”. (Geertz 1994: 3)

Here Geertz laments how in the formation of the Third World –​its modernization –​marginality emerges as a necessary by-​product of the process. Social hierarchies are deepened, and the privileged few establish a centre that excludes the many. Modernization meant, and still means, that marginalized peoples are left behind, not planned for or just left out because they do not fit an established frame of social reference. Writing more specifically about language, Kuipers’s (1998) study of the transformation of ritual speech on the Island of Sumba (Indonesia) illustrates how marginality emerged because of a number of contingencies based on shifts in ideology ‘in which highly valued verbal resources are reinterpreted, drawing on a spatial idiom, from whole to partial, from trunk to tip, from “total” to “local”:  i.e. from centre to margin’ (Kuipers 1998:  4). A significant aspect of the reinterpretation of verbal resources has also to do with a sense of place and space: those competent in the art of ritual speech had long held the centre of life for the Weyewa people, but with modernization, the imposition of Christianity and nation-​state bureaucracy, marginality emerged and with it a new ‘modality through which the contradictions and disruptions of change are normalized, naturalized, and neutralized: ideologized’ (Kuipers 1998: 4). The marginalization of language is contingent on shifts in ideology, discourse and practice. In the practice and performance of multilingualism, marginality can be identified diachronically by the ways in which what multilingual speakers say and do in a particular language and language variety becomes ‘constructed as the voice of marginality’ (Kuipers 1998: 7). In other words, the creation of marginalized voices is the result of processes that establish social

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hierarchies and distinctions that favour the few and devalue or even erase the many (Bourdieu 1987). At the same time, marginality as a discourse also challenges notions of ‘completeness’ and ‘wholeness’. The completeness or wholeness of a perceivably powerful language has always been given legitimacy over marginal, less-​powerful languages, through structural description, codification and standardization, feeding into the formulation of unequal language policies (see, for example, Kuipers 1998: 7). As such, some multilingual speakers of certain languages that are considered weak –​as argots or creoles at the bottom of the linguistic hierarchy –​are almost always caught between linguistic, political, cultural and economic discourses of marginality, partiality and dependency. Thus, what we learn from Kuipers’s ethnography is that the enactment and the emergence of marginality and indeed marginalized people forms part of a complicated ideological and semiotic process mediated by space, place and time. Although Kuipers had not explicitly formulated marginality as conceptually bound to time, his ethnography implicitly reveals it. In this book, the reader will witness the performance of marginalized voices by young multilingual speakers who have allied their cultural mobility to Hip Hop culture as a means to escape their own marginality. I will demonstrate how performance, on the one hand, is key to staging linguistic marginality (compare early studies such as Tsitsipis 1989 on Greece, and Dorian 1982 on Scottish fisherfolk), and I will also demonstrate, on the other hand, how performance reveals identity stylization, discourses of authenticity and the politics of the body. In no other context has marginality as a discourse, practice, ideology and historical force been held up as more problematic, and more problematically, than in Hip Hop culture (see, for example, Lindhold 2014). From its beginnings, Hip Hop culture, driven by the tenets of a liberating consciousness, has critiqued the marginalization of racialized multilingual speakers. Much ink has been spilled informing readers of the manifold ways Hip Hop heads2 go about speaking back to hegemony and power (see in particular Rose 1994; Pardue 2008; Haupt 1995). Pardue’s excellent study, Ideologies of Marginality in Brazilian Hip Hop (2008), opens up the debate around how Hip Hop heads, bound into the socio-​symbolic conditions that they rap about, engage in graffiti art wars across walls, the precarious spaces and places they breakdance in, and hone their deejaying skills. Hip Hop in Brazil, through participation, political discourse and the staging of bodies and language, reveals the social limits of marginality as the participants create something that is nothing but which is intended to emerge in interaction and performance as something poetic (Ariefdien and Abrahams 2006: 262; also cited in Pardue 2008).

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Marginality, as Pardue theorizes, has to do with the ways in which ‘hip hoppers seek to change in their belief in and performance of hip hop’ (Pardue 2008: 2). This crucial observation points to the foundational characteristic of participation in Hip Hop culture: to know yourself and to teach others in the performance of the culture. Indeed, as Pardue describes, Hip Hop heads in Brazil are overly aware of the extent of their marginality: that is why they see Hip Hop not only as a tool for arguing against established, fraudulent social categories but also as a way to ‘use the material and discourse of marginality to save themselves from further negativity and by extension transform the periphery into a place and concept more akin to empowerment than marginality’ (Pardue 2008: 5). Although the author distinguishes between ‘positive’ and ‘marginal’ Hip Hop in Brazil, he demonstrates lucidly throughout that Hip Hop culture while ‘a “marginal” culture made by and for marginalized populations for the most part’ (Pardue 2008: 25) nevertheless provides for its participants –​those multilingual speakers of the favelas and beyond –​the linguistic and semiotic means to use their marginality to create new centres and ways of enacting what I will call linguistic citizenship. The notion of linguistic citizenship is derived from a perspective on language and politics that seeks to account for ‘the manifold challenges posed by late-​ modern contexts of migration and multilingualism for democracy and voice, and that takes as a central point of departure the desirability of constructing agency and maintaining voice across media, modalities and contexts’ (Stroud 2009: 208; see also Stroud and Heugh 2004). In transnational multilingual contexts, linguistic citizenship becomes a form of citizenship different from that of cultural citizenship (Canclini 2001), political citizenship (Mamdani 1996 or economic citizenship (Stiglitz 2002), which can be ‘both a facilitative and constraining factor in the exercise of democratic citizenship and voice’ (Stroud 2009:  208). By combining the tenets or practices of cosmopolitan citizenship and deliberative democracy, Stroud argues that linguistic citizenship sensitizes us to an understanding of language that could help prise open those modalities and contexts where agency and voice is contested, and where language and multilingualism is used as a political resource. Linguistic Citizenship (LC) is a notion suggested by Christopher Stroud as a way to address, spotlight and recuperate the lost semiotics of historically marginalized linguistic agency and voices in societies under transformation. It is a lens that highlights the language politics that accompany citizenship and challenges sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologist, in particular, to reconceptualize citizenship via language from the perspective of linguistics.

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LC’s genesis, its very conceptualization, comes out of Christopher Stroud’s experience of working as an academic and conducting research on mother tongue and bilingual education in the geopolitical South during the 1990s. He observed then a fundamental challenge between how such education was organized and managed, compared to what the theory of such type of education held and what actually happened in practice. Specifically, he observed that NGOs and government departments tasked with planning for mother tongue and bilingual education, but for some reason they did not reach their stated goals. Stroud’s study of these goals and investing provisions led him and others to conclude that key failure of the programs designed and implemented by NGOs and government departments from the North had to do with the full involvement of the community and the consent of community members as to whether the ways in which their vernacular/​local languages were managed held any use for them in terms of how they themselves manage the language politics as linked to their work situations, where they live and receive education and healthcare. The long-​term initiative of mother tongue and bilingual programs was brought into question, particularly with respect to what role the community played in the design and implementation of such programs. Stroud’s research concludes that in order for the latter programs to be successful, it cannot do without the engagement of the community, since doing so erases the agency of the community, particularly since it is the community that has the need to see mother-​tongue and bilingual education succeed, rather than adopt a top-​down, hierarchical idea wholesale from NGOs and aid organizations from the North. It is then in this context that the notion of Linguistic Citizenship takes shape: to bring back speakers and communities from the margins to the centre; that is, to recognize their agency, particularly in contexts of rapid social transformation. But LC at the time also joined in on the critique of a dominant and hegemonic idea of the political philosophy of language:  linguistic human rights (LHR). According to Stroud and others, LHR was selected in promoting particular types of agency; the framework ignored much of the material and economic constraints that historically marginalized multilingual speakers had to deal with, particularly in the implementation of rights, and reinforced standard notions of language that reproduced the lower values and standing of non-​standard, non-​recognized languages (Stroud 2001; Stroud and Heugh 2004). Perhaps above all, and this is Stroud’s strongest critique, LHR replicates the dynamics of colonial linguistics since it is subjected to the power of the state and technologies of language description.

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Linguistic citizenship, then, is concerned with notions of agency and voice in marginal multilingual contexts such as popular cultural spaces. Linguistic citizenship draws attention to precisely those features and practices of language that facilitate speaker agency in non-​institutionalized and relational networks of association. The notion of linguistic citizenship is needed to counteract much writing on language, democracy and citizenship built on the assumption that only certain forms of language or linguistic practice are politically legitimate for purposes of rational, deliberative discourses in institutionalized public politics, while the highly variable ways in which speakers attempt to attain voice are ignored or deemphasized. In fact, the exercise of agency, voice and participation comprises modes of speaking that cannot always be accounted for in terms of conventional and fixed linguistic structures, but in practices and textualities that are effervescent, momentary and fleeting (Stroud 2009). Linguistic citizenship traces the emergence of agency and voice at local points of production in a variety of semiotic forms, and the material affordances for this, as well as the insertion of meaning across chains of artefacts and spaces of circulation. Its emphasis on features of multilingual choices and uses on the margins opens up the potential for understanding the rhetorical foundations of radically different types of speaker agency that go ‘against the grain’ (of a conventional politics of language). The very idea of linguistic citizenship argues that an approach to everyday politics that is attuned to the complex semiotic world of styles, stances and identities around which people play out their lives is necessary for language policy theory. Furthermore, Stroud argues that instead of fixating on a linguistics of localization, we should focus rather on multilingual mobility to deconstruct the multiple encodings of discourse (genres, texts, repertoires and registers) that transfigure the relationship between the multilingual speaker, language and individual’s spatial context (cf. Heller 2011). Taking the above into consideration, the challenge for multilingual studies at present is to offer new and creative ways of documenting the way speakers in times of globalization are opening up vistas and possibilities for new practices of multilingualism. Recent studies on languaging and polylingualism (Pietikäinen et  al. 2008) have demonstrated how such speakers use the functional and emblematic resources of a variety of languages to enact heritage forms of identities and negotiate new citizenship discourses in public spheres. The increasing importance of citizenship discourses in rapidly changing public spheres, and the complexity of linguistic resources available for voice in a variety of both institutionalized and informal contexts, have complicated the

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very idea of what it means to be a citizen today. New ways of being a citizen are outpacing our theoretical perspectives on citizenship. Formal, conventional political (public) spheres (Habermas 1989) are in many ways being superceded by public and popular convivial spheres. In this book, I seek to explore the role and importance of different forms of multilingual practice for how individuals navigate Hip Hop space as a popular convivial space, and ultimately as places of voice. I describe and discuss here the scaling and spatio-​temporal arrangement of Hip Hop spaces that create affordances for qualitatively quite different multilingual practices. In researching the remixing of multilingualism in Hip Hop spaces for this book, questions of voice, particularly marginalized voice, took centre-​stage. Voice here will be understood as the capacity of young multilingual speakers to ‘stage and cause an uptake close enough to one’s desired contextualisation’ (Blommaert 2005:  45). Voice is also understood as the linguistic or indexical orders set in motion by social and cultural actors (Silverstein 2003), which emerge in the performance and practice of regimes of multilingual diversity and interaction. The young multilingual speakers in this book effortlessly not only stage their marginalized voices but also ‘remix’ (Alim 2009a) languages, styles and registers in their multilingual repertoires. Remixing is a process in which the production of new forms of speech, register, and styles in local context serve to showcase speakers’ identities, cultural authenticities, and voice (cf. Pennycook 2007a; Alim 2009a; Lessig 2008; see also Knobel and Lankshear 2008; Gainer and Lapp 2010: 19). According to Lessig (2008: 76), to remix is to create a ‘collage’ by ‘combining elements’ of cultural resources in order to build something new. In Knobel and Lankshears’ (2008, in Maher 2010: 581) words, ‘[to] remix means to take cultural artefacts and combine and manipulate them into new kinds of creative blends’. In the process of remixing, semiotic forms previously not read, seen or heard are either deliberately, strategically or serendipitously brought together in unexpected ways, and made part of the mainstream politics of identity. It is not only the case that remixing ‘presents us with important questions about the supposed one-​to-​one relationship between language and identity,’ it also helps us to highlight the ‘complex, multilayered uses of language [.  . .] that give a more central role to linguistic agency on the part of youth’ (Alim 2009b: 117). Multilingual remixing is thus central to understanding the voice of young, multilingual speakers.

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1.4  Cape Town Hip Hop: Remixing Hip Hop, Multilingualism, and Voice The remixing of global Hip Hop and language in Cape Town started in an era defined by apartheid state violence and censorship, an oppression experienced by a few emcees who articulate their suffering, and the suffering of others, through translocally mixed lyrics (cf. Haupt 1995, 2008; Nkonyeni 2007; Warner 2007; Watkins 2000). Hip Hop heads in South Africa found in the global Hip Hop nation a ‘connective marginalisation’ (Osumare 2007) which served as a common frame of reference for young Black and Coloured multilingual speakers in township spaces, bringing solace and comfort in shared circumstances of poverty and discrimination. By 1982, a fledgling Cape Town Hip Hop community had formed and begun to apprentice followers into the ‘style community’ (following Alim 2009a) that came to define Hip Hop across the peninsula (Nkonyeni 2007:  156–​157). With the emergence of sub-​genres of rap such as Spaza and Zef Rap, Cape Town Hip Hop grew its style community into one that is currently realizing its transformative potential by lifting marginalized voices into the spotlight through the mainstreaming of previously marginalized languages. Since its inception, Hip Hop in Cape Town has always had an interesting non-​hegemonic relationship with transnational whiteness. From the heady days of the 1980s, Coloured Hip Hop heads developed this relationship by cultivating a form of Hip Hop authenticity that drew heavily on the anti-​racism and anti-​hegemonic transnational Hip Hop nation established in the United States rearticulating in local lyrics the ‘conscious’ philosophies of Public Enemy and KRS-​One, amongst others, and the ‘each-​one-​teach-​one’ philosophy that became part of the anti-​racist movement, Zulu Nation. In one sense (because not all Hip hop heads agree on this point), Cape Town Hip Hop became the site where the recontextualization of a global struggle consciousness was inserted into local struggles against apartheid, and the symbolic refiguring of local whiteness (Warner 2007). This took place at the same time as notions of ‘Colouredness’ were undergoing refiguration (Haupt 1995. Almost twenty years after the first democratic government branded the unifying idea of multiracialism in the metaphor of the ‘rainbow nation’ (Alexander 2013), new forms of performance genre, such as Spaza Rap (pioneered by Black Xhosa Hip Hop heads) and Zef Rap (pioneered by White Afrikaans Hip Hop heads), are showing that the rainbow nation seems to be, quite disconcertingly, ‘an optical illusion’ (Alexander 2013). In particular, Zef culture has become a

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form of release for White Afrikaner youth amidst an assumed crisis of power, masculinity and sexuality (Kreuger 2012). According to Marx and Milton (2011), Zef culture is reconfiguring Afrikaans whiteness, mediated through ‘Zef ’ cultural artefacts and performances, in a deliberate attempt to speak ‘to the perceived sense of marginal and liminal experience of White Afrikaans youth in post-​apartheid South Africa’ (cf. Marx and Milton 2011: 723). Spaza Rap, a mixture of isiXhosa, Afrikaans and Tsotsitaal, was ‘invented in Cape Town and is a clear example of the different paths South African Hip hop has taken in diverging from the American model’ (Pritchard 2009: 54). In an interview published on the blog entitled ‘The UnderGround Angle’, Rattex, one of the leading pioneers of the Spaza Rap genre, reports that when they created it ‘Spaza was small back in the day –​it was all about English raps . . . English rappers used to call us Kwaito MCs’. Becker (2008:  10)  notes that Spaza rappers ‘have creatively appropriated Hip Hop in their quest for alternative, fluid, consciously “African” identities in contemporary South Africa’ and that music, clothing and embodiment among young isiXhosa-​speaking Hip Hop artists in a Cape Town township ‘did not necessarily entail the confirmation of old, or the construction of new (ethnicised/​racialized) boundaries’ (Becker 2008:  11; Becker and Dastille 2008). The rap and Hip Hop performances studied in this book were located across physical (offline) and online Hip Hop spaces: in a club, and in people’s homes, located in the northern suburbs of Cape Town, as well as on social media. I report here on the multilingual rap performances of a rap group, Suburban Menace, who rented the space of a popular night club to regularly host a Hip Hop show from 2008 to 2009. A young group at that time, their main purpose was to gain experience performing in front of an audience in a club. Emcees of Suburban Menace were my main informants and means of entry to the Hip Hop spaces detailed throughout this book (see specifically Chapters 3 to 8). It is through the story of Suburban Menace, as told against the backdrop of the history of Hip Hop in Cape Town above, that we will see how young multilingual speakers active in the local Hip Hop culture remix linguistic resources in the practice and performance of multilingualism in Hip Hop spaces.

1.5  Organization of This Book In the next chapter, I briefly review studies that have brought about the ‘spatial turn’ in multilingualism research. I define and describe the notions of space, place

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and scale and I postulate that space is not a mere emptiness, but is transmodally constituted by discourses, languages and transcultural flows such as Hip Hop. I also introduce the core analytical notions of ‘performance’, ‘stylization’, ‘entextualization’ and ‘enregisterment’ that further contribute to the development of a mobile concept of language, and the remixing of multilingualism. Of interest here is how the core analytical notions together provide insights into what features of discourses and texts are lifted out of these other contexts and used in specific performances in Hip Hop spaces (how they are entextualized), and how forms of language may subsequently take on properties and social indexicalities linked to more stable and recognized registers or forms of talk, thereby becoming available for use in specific expressions of voice. In Chapter  3, I  briefly outline the methodology of the book. I  designed a multi-​sited ethnography of multilingualism giving due consideration to the reflexivity and positionality of the Hip Hop researcher. In an effort to understand the performance and practice of multilingualism, this chapter describes how Hip Hop spaces are prime ethnographic sites to study how multilingual remixing is staged through different genres, styles and language varieties. With its spatially sensitive and flexible modus operandi, the study is built around the collection of a variety of different types of data: interviews, on-​stage rap performances, the collection of Hip Hop related documents and fieldwork notes. In this chapter, I also briefly introduce the subjects who participated in the study and explain how the data was analysed. I also describe some important characteristics of Hip Hop spaces that motivated their inclusion in this study and that account for why the paradigm of multi-​sited ethnographic research was the most appropriate one. In Chapter 4, I set the scene for a more detailed analysis of multilingual remixing in the context of voice in Chapters 5, 6 and 7 with respect to Hip Hop. I do this by sketching the ethnographic context of a popular night club, and other Hip Hop related spaces, in terms of the practices and processes that make the club, and other spaces, into local and downscaled places that provide particular types of normativities and affordances for how multiple languages, registers and styles are performed and remixed. I discuss these assemblages of practices and processes with respect to the Hip Hop spaces as locally constructed, downscaled places that shape, and are shaped by, constructions of identity, locality and forms of authenticity that are set in motion and appropriated within local Hip Hop culture in Cape Town. I also introduce the research participants I followed, interviewed, video and audio recorded and wrote about during the fieldwork phase of the research project.

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Chapter 5 is an analysis of the intertextuality of the rap braggadocio genre performed by emcees. The aim here is to analyse how those emcees entextualize the genre of braggadocio and link local varieties of language and registers to an intertextual gap (hiatus) with the aim of ‘keeping it real’. In this chapter, I highlight how young Coloured and Black multilingual speakers active in the local Hip Hop community attempt to mainstream their historically marginalized voices by drawing on African-​American English, local varieties of South African English, and other registers to perform both real-​life and fictional personae. The stylization of personae, the taking on of personae and talking through or about them, I  argue, are political acts. Thus, the examples in this chapter are about how different rap personae are voiced through the entextualized performance of stylized language, and are offered as instances of the politics of the everyday. In Chapter  6, I  demonstrate and analyse the processes of entextualization with respect to how Coloured male emcees perform freestyle rap battles in a specific area of the club where they congregate, as well as how young multilingual speakers talk about freestyle rap battles in an online space. A salient feature of the discourse I analyse is how aspects of space, both local-​spatial coordinates as well as non-​local spatial elements, are entextualized in the actual performance of a freestyle rap between two Coloured emcees on stage, and in a natural language situation defined by freestyle rap battle performing. Core features of local space bind participants together around a common understanding of the local bric-​à-​brac of language, together with aspects of audience presence and transmodal features of the interaction (such as an ongoing TV program), which are variously referenced multilingually and incorporated into the performance. Both these facets of the freestyle rap battle are essential to the co-​construction of locality. Moreover, I analyse how in the freestyle rap, the battles between protagonists are in fact nothing less than competitive bids, whereby elements and forms from different languages and different entextualization(s) are offered up by the protagonists as candidates indexical of the register of rap. Furthermore, I focus on how locality emerges in freestyle rap battles by means of verbal cueing that represents place, by the disrespecting (dissing) of (deictic) reference to local coordinates, by transposing or recontextualizing transidiomatic phrases and by incorporating local proxemics and audience reactions through commentary and response. Chapter 7 takes a novel turn in considering the call by language and masculinity researchers to question the conditions that enable the production of heterosexual masculinities. It focuses on how young emcees articulate masculine ideology in freestyle rap performances. It demonstrates how Coloured male

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emcees draw upon language and masculine ideologies in the performance of freestyle rap lyrics, and how a particular form of masculine ideology –​toughness –​dominates Hip Hop spaces because of the way discursive and textual strategies are prioritized by emcees in their performances of masculinity. In Chapter 8, we look at the embodiment of femininity and performance in local Hip Hop culture. It builds on recent calls by Hip Hop sociolinguists for studies that investigate language and the construction of gender in Hip Hop culture around the world. By focusing on the participation of multilingual Black and Coloured women and how they specifically remix the multilingual space through their participation in local Hip Hop, the chapter brings into sharp focus, and by contrast to the previous chapter, the issues of marginality surrounding the absence of and the sexualization of Black and Coloured female bodies in the local Hip Hop context of Cape Town. In this chapter, in particular, I argue that the absence of women’s voices in local Hip Hop culture is not necessarily the result of a lack of female emcees, or female participants active in the culture, but rather of the dominance of male participants. I argue that the discourse and politics of identity does not adequately enable women to contest in local Hip Hop spaces, or achieve the mainstreaming of their voices. Rather, what is experienced, as I demonstrate in the chapter, is the lack of women’s voices, the relative unimportance of their language and the difficulty of navigating a culture that frequently marginalizes their own remixing practices, multilingual performances and their bodies in favour of men’s practices and ideologies. The final chapter in this book brings together the different threads that run through the analysis of multilingual remixing by summarizing the key points in the preceding chapters. I bring out the parallels between the performances of the different rap genres –​braggadocio, freestyle rap and rap identity performances –​with respect to the stylization, entextualization and enregisterment of multilingualism remixed in the context of transmodal semiotics, and the affordances this view provides on multilingual repertoires. I also briefly discuss research on marginalized voices with respect to the notion of linguistic citizenship, as a way of broadening the remit of research on multilingualism and voice in multilingual contexts. I then proceed to a discussion of how future research on linguistic citizenship could benefit from being framed with reference to globalized consumption. In this context, I touch briefly on how notions of authenticity and the body –​salient dimensions in consumption –​could aid in the analysis of marginalized voices, and I discuss how these notions feature as significant organizing tropes in the transcultural and transidiomatic practices of Hip Hop, especially with respect to multilingualism.

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Designing Hip Hop Sociolinguistics Research on Multilingualism

More than three decades of Hip Hop studies have charted the relationship between Hip Hop culture and young multilingual speakers who use its discursive and semiotic ingredients to initiate novel linguistic trajectories in their various spaces and places around the world (Alim 2004). A central concern of this book is to demonstrate exactly how highly multilingual Coloured and Black participants in the Hip Hop culture of Cape Town proceed to engage in the linguistic acts of using, combining and manipulating multilingual forms and functions tied to complicated histories, cultural acts and identities. I will argue and illustrate throughout this book that if multilingual remixing is about the creative ways young multilingual speakers do multilingualism, it is also about how young speakers find new ways to deconstruct, repurpose and innovate the non-​ authoritative and marginal discourses circulating in the local Hip Hop spaces that they and others take up, link to dialects, varieties of languages and their historically marginalized voices in global Cape Town. A number of sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropology scholars have already attempted to rethink the role and creative use of multilingualism in globalized societies, particularly in urban city spaces (Blommaert 2010; Pennycook and Otsuji 2015; Williams and Stroud 2015). These scholars seek to break away from modernist ideologies of language and multilingualism, the structural-​functional legacy I  mentioned in the previous chapter, and move instead towards documenting, illustrating and understanding the circulation and flow of multilingual practices, in other words, linguistic mobility (Pennycook 2012). Further, and more recently, sociolinguists in the global South have also begun to highlight the importance of the mobility of multilingual forms and practices as they relate to the spaces, be they popular or institutional, that linguistic forms traverse (Milani 2014; Stroud and Jegels 2014).

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In today’s context of globalization, and the proliferation of new forms of marginality, scholars have come to recognize the importance of considering the politics and practice of space in understanding multilingualism, whether in urban city spaces or rural hinterlands, and many recent important books and articles explore this imperative as part of what can be considered a spatial turn in multilingualism research and study (see, for example, Blommaert 2010; Pennycook 2012). Of course, the concern with place and space is not, strictly speaking, new in sociolinguistics or in linguistic anthropology. An earlier engagement with space, place and scale among variationist sociolinguists, for example, was concerned with space, even if many of the concepts were not used in the way that has recently been innovated, being limited to references to places, such as cities, neighbourhoods, countries or states. The studies discussed in this chapter provide the conceptual anchor for the analysis of multilingual remixing in the Hip Hop spaces that are the focus of this book. Here I will discuss the ‘spatial turn’ in multilingualism. In the next section, I define and describe the notions of space, place and scale. Following Lefebvre (1991), I argue that space should not be taken as a mere emptiness, but should be understood as constituted by discourses, languages and transcultural flows such as those that take place in conjunction with the practice of Hip Hop. Following on this, I  introduce the core analytical notions:  performance, performativity, stylization, entextualization and enregisterment that further contribute to the development of the idea of multilingual remixing. In order to answer the research questions I posed in the introductory chapter, each of these notions will be used to analyse how globalization offers up new conditions for the remixing of multilingualism across the interlinked spaces studied here, and each notion will help reveal what young multilingual speakers do with language varieties and local registers for identity stylization (following Pennycook 2009) as they navigate Hip Hop spaces. I show that what young multilingual speakers do with multilingualism in Hip Hop spaces has much to do with the appropriation and remixing of the formal properties of language varieties and registers of other speakers and from other spaces both local and global as they brand and stylize their selves (following Nuttall 2009). In the chapters that follow, particularly Chapters 5 through 8, I will demonstrate how the core analytical notions together provide insights into what features of discourse and texts are lifted out of one Hip Hop space and used in specific performances in a new or different Hip Hop space; in other words, how as a result of linguistic remixing a process of entextualization is undertaken. I will also discuss how forms of language varieties and registers may

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subsequently take on properties and social indexicalities that become associated with more stable and recognized forms of talk –​that is to say, become enregistered –​and as a consequence become available to be used for specific expressions of voice. However, in order to understand the processes behind the contextualization of Hip Hop spaces, we first turn to a discussion of the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities more generally, and how it has been developed in scholarship on multilingualism.

2.1  On the Origins and Development of the ‘Spatial Turn’ Around the turn of the twenty-​first century, scholars devoted much attention to the spatial contours of human social and linguistic life. In anthropology, history, archaeology, and even disciplines such as accounting, it became obvious that the exploration of space challenged classic understandings of society (Soja 1989). This new orientation to the notion of space in various disciplines was dubbed the ‘spatial turn’ by one of its leading theorists, Edward Soja (1989). The beginnings of the spatial turn, according to Soja, occurred with ‘transdisciplinary diffusion’ from geography to history that arose from an intellectual struggle in the late nineteenth century. For much of the twentieth century, ‘epistemological and intellectual privileging of history had become almost taken for granted’, because it was ‘assumed that everything that exists or ever has existed has a significant historical dimension and that whatever happens or has happened can be best understood, first of all, through a critical historical perspective’ (Soja 2004: xi–​ xii). However, as Soja reports, studies in geography began to engage critically with history, and new perspectives were developed to account for emerging social organizations and processes. Increasingly social life was understood not as aspatial, or impeded by how we understood space and places emerged throughout history. The works of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre feature prominently here in the rethinking of space, in the establishment and development of critical approaches to space and spatialization in social, historical, and everyday life, signifying an important shift away from the privileging of historical materialism and aspatial epistemologies (see De Certeau 1984; Soja 1996). On the one hand, Michel Foucault, well known for his genealogical studies, posed simple questions as to why and how ‘space’ had been conceived in Northern, western historical epistemologies (Elden 2001). He questioned the way in which space was theorized as ‘the dead, the fixed, the immobile, the undialectical’ (Foucault 1980:  70). By developing tableaux of different means

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of interrogation, Foucault posed these questions to initiate critical conversations with French architects on space (see Of Other Spaces), previously developed implicitly in a number of his seminal studies (see particularly The Birth of the Clinic, Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish) (Crampton and Elden 2007; see also importantly Goffman 1984). Elden (2001:  119)  explains that Foucault’s conception of space regards the unpacking of ‘both physical and mental conceptions of space . . . [as well as] . . . parts of the greater whole, [that is] abstractions from the more fundamental level of the lived experience’. In an interview with Paul Rabinow (1984), to clarify some of the assertions made in the text of Of Other Spaces, Foucault stated emphatically that ‘space is fundamental in any form of communal life’ (see also Soja 1989: 19). On the other hand, Henri Lefebvre, responsible for developing a singularly critical perspective that convinced spatial theorists and scholars about spatiality in history, social theory and geography, had a lasting impact with respect to the utility of space. Soja observes that Lefebvre was one of ‘very few scholars who would be willing and able to open up their critical historico-​social perspective to the equivalent powers of critical spatial thinking and the possibility that society and spatiality, history and geography, were mutually constructed, with no a priori privileging whatsoever’ (Soja 2004: xiii). Lefebvre’s theorization of space and place led to a transdisciplinary revolution, resulting in a growing body of research on space in social theory, philosophy and other disciplines and subdisciplines in the humanities, including, more recently, multilingualism.

2.1.1  The Spatial Turn in Multilingualism Since the nineteenth century, geography had influenced studies of dialectology and variationist sociolinguistics more broadly. Sociolinguists specializing in dialectology found a way to map the distribution and diffusion of dialects in a given geographical area. They charted dialects and their cross-​border linguistic pollination across boundaries, over hills and behind mountains, tracing their use in various media of communication (Mansour 1993). From this they generated dialectal maps illustrating the distribution of a lexico-​grammatical feature of a dialect by assigning a named value to that feature, and collecting them in isoglosses. According to Baynham (2012: 115), the pressing concern for dialectologists was to demonstrate how dialects are distributed across spaces as a direct result of people’s movements and mobilities, and as a consequence of the effective force of temporal and/​or historical factors. Baynham points out that dialectologists were

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at pains to demonstrate the specifically temporal and historical dimensions of the formation of languages, an aspect of investigation that figured as an integral part of other nineteenth-​century scholarship. A more detailed focus on the spatiality of language was the hallmark of variationist sociolinguistics. Linguists, concerned with unpacking the spatial dimensions of language ‘in place’, documented and mapped how language changed and was influenced by space and place, how it was structured and its order in particular spaces such as department stores (Labov 1972). The focus was on how the internal linguistic practice of languages, the spread of language, code-​switching practices and functionality of languages were matched by or defined by geographical and physical borders (Cameron 1997). Sociolinguistic studies, documenting language in this sense, recognized and took on the developments of spatial theory from the field of quantitative human geography (Williams 1992). According to Johnstone (2004), the most influential spatial theory in sociolinguistics has been location theory, developed by geographer Torsten Hägerstrand. Johnstone describes a method that identifies patterns by locating language through spatial simulation and modelling processes of social and linguistic change, a procedure well illustrated in Trudgill’s (1974) research on language change in Norway (see also Johnstone 2010). The use of location theory allowed variationists and other sociolinguists to document how the frequency, distribution and co-​constitution of patterns of speech change were influenced by socioeconomic status and other factors (Johnstone 2011a). Beyond what dialectologists could teach us about language variation in large and small spaces and places, it was really the city that became the object of study, largely due to the fact that the industrial revolution was the most salient formative dynamic behind much of the spatial turn in sociolinguistics (Baynham 2012). The disciplines of dialectology and variationist sociolinguistics owe much to the discursive and methodological turns made by geography and pioneering sociologists who mapped social deprivation and poverty (see Cavan 1983). Especially for the variationists, surveys conducted by the Chicago School of Sociology helped develop ‘large-​scale survey methodology with ethnographic neighbourhood studies’ (Baynham 2012:  16)  that could then be mapped out. Presently, the challenge for these methodologies is to account for the trajectory and speed at which multilingual practices are being emplaced, scaled and positioned as a consequence of globalization. In recent years, studies in multilingualism from the perspective of discourse analysis and pragmatics have slowly been developing a more ethnographic approach to understanding the practice of multilingualism in space and place

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(Johnstone 2004; Modan 2007; McLaughlin 2009; Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck 2005a). Vigouroux (2005), for example, is an exemplary exponent of this development. She shows how the language practices and identity constructions of Francophone immigrants are ‘territorialized’ in Cape Town. Space and territoriality, for her, are both physical and symbolic constructs which are essential considerations when grasping how Francophone immigrants conduct their daily language practices and construct their identities. The manner in which Vigouroux’s Francophone African migrants navigate multilingual variation and contact in Cape Town provides evidence of the importance of community networks, neighbourhoods, and the spatialization of territories across and through places in influencing language change (see also Vigouroux 2008a). As they maintain complex economic, political and social networks, spatial shifts occur in their (re)connection with homelands, borderlands and lost tongues, and they begin to broaden their linguistic repertoires, which imply the creation of new and meaningful ways of communicating in the local (Vigouroux and Mufwene 2008). Thus, to understand migrants’ multilingualism, Vigouroux frames her study in detailed ethnographies, and a semiotics of space and place. On the whole, understandings of space have become more sophisticated for those conducting research in the context of the sociolinguistics of globalization. Blommaert et  al. (2005a) point out, for example, how space, rather than just being a ‘container’ for semiosis, actually ‘actively’ organizes ‘regimes of language’ in small and large places and because of this, ‘being multilingual’ today quite possibly means that it is less a question of proficiency than it is a question of whether a particular space provides the affordance for ‘our capacity to deploy linguistic resources and skills’ (Blommaert et al. 2005a: 198). This is an important observation advanced by scholars of the sociolinguistics of globalization. In a similar way to Vigouroux, Juffermans (2015), for example, has produced complex ethnographies of space that informed the research for this book as I attempted to document, understand and unpack the remixing of multilingualism, and the performance of marginalized voices in Cape Town’s Hip Hop spaces.

2.1.2  Space and Place In order to define the notions space and place, and in order to frame Hip Hop cultural spaces and places, I learned that to study Hip Hop culture is one thing, but to ethnographically document, describe and analyse how it is spatialized is a completely different challenge (see, for instance, Forman 2002). Throughout the

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research for this book, I read widely and deeply about the notion of space and place, particularly the work of Lefebvre (1991). According to Lefebvre (1976: 31), the notion, design and setting of space is squarely influenced by ideologies and political commitments. In fact, spaces can be defined as political and represented to include citizens or exclude them. For space to be found as welcoming and accommodating, Lefebvre argues, it already signifies an occupation, of something in use, of which one can trace the history (see in Soja 1989: 80). Space is not, according to Soja (2004:  x), ‘immutable or naturally given’. It continuously changes according to social organization and structure. In today’s highly mobile world, space is subject to the formative dynamics of globalization, reterritorialization and localization (Mignolo 2000). And understanding space is an important first step in understanding how globalization shapes multilingual, social and cultural interaction in places because ‘we are surrounded by emptiness, but it is an emptiness filled with signs’ (Lefebvre 1971: 135). In contrast to the challenge of defining what space is, defining place has not been a difficult task. To Giddens (1990: 18), ‘[p]‌lace is best conceptualised by means of the idea of locale, which refers to the physical settings of social activity as situated geographically’. The dynamics of globalized social interaction fosters a different way of understanding place as ‘thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from’ each other (Giddens 1990: 18). Thus, place is space with meaning constituted, among other ways, through the built environment, and is most commonly understood as representing the physical structure which structures and sequences spaces (see particularly Markus and Cameron 2002; compare, for example, Erikson 2003: 12). Places like student cafeterias, restaurants and entertainment places like Hip Hop clubs are established through the meaningful and significant social practices that constitute them (compare Keating 2000: 235). Thus, places are the settings for an array of events and activities that could define a culture, a people’s way of living, or influence ways of using language.

2.1.3  Scale Like space and place, the notion of scale used is useful in order to illustrate how young multilingual speakers attach value to Hip Hop spaces and places, and of course language and multilingual practices. According to Blommaert (2007:  3), scale is an appropriate concept for sociolinguists studying ‘the layered . . . nature of sociolinguistic phenomena’ and could very well improve

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‘the social-​theoretical foundations of sociolinguistic analysis’. Scaling research defines the concept broadly as how space becomes culturally, politically and linguistically value-​laden, and how this may over time be subject to downscaling, upscaling and rescaling, that is globalized, regionalized and localized, on a vertical axis (see Blommaert 2010). The idea of different scales was theorized in the work of World Systems scholarship where it is understood that the notion accounts for social activity on a continuum of layered scales with two extremes: the local on the one end and the global on the other, meshing in various intermediary scales. The manner in which cultural and language practices occur in times of globalization happen on different scale levels, and by extension various scales interact with each other. According to Blommaert (2007: 4), scale is ‘a metaphor that suggests that we have to imagine things that are of a different order, that are hierarchically ranked, stratified’. For example, if we think about scales, we invoke spatial metaphors and images of a vertical design rather than horizontally, define not only by power but also space and time. In this sense, scale offers sociolinguists an additional lense ‘to see sociolinguistic phenomena as nonunified in relation to a stratified, non-​unified image of social structure’ (Blommaert 2007: 4) (compare Blommaert, Westinen and Leppänen 2015 to Carr and Lempert 2016). In the chapters that follow, we will get a sense of how the young multilingual speakers who participated in this study carve out and deem important Hip Hop spaces in Cape Town (compare Forman 2002: 201). Here, I include myself, as we will see in Chapter 3 that I situate and reflect on my own multilingualism as a way to conceptualize multilingual remixing as a non-​linear or unidirectional activity, but also a situated and co-​constructed practice, that allows young multilingual speakers to build meaning within Hip Hop space. In order to account for how young and marginalized multilingual speakers are carving out new and innovative multilingual spaces to put on display their voices in the local and global mis-​en-​scene of Hip Hop practices, I anchor my analysis of multilingual remixing in the global and local systems of meaning-​ making that give shape to space, place and scale. These notions also serve as the anchor point for the ethnography of Hip Hop spaces in this study. I draw on these notions to embark on a journey of understanding what is global and what is local about the making of Hip Hop spaces, and in so doing I hope to offer some valuable insights into how young multilingual speakers in Cape Town create a shared sense of localness –​in particular, how their remixing of

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linguistic practices teach us how the global genre of Hip Hop is infused with local meanings and values. Given this background discussion, I  will now discuss the core analytical notions that will be used to describe and analyse multilingual remixing and the performance of marginalized voices in Hip Hop spaces, that is to say, the design features of the Hip Hop sociolinguistics research of this book.

2.2  ‘All World’s a Stage . . .’/​‘To Say or Do Is to Be’: The Performance and Performativity of Multilingual Remixing Bell and Gibson (2011) recently re-​introduced sociolinguists to the richness of performance as an analytical tool for studying linguistic practices in different contexts. They build the argument that languages that are staged are linguistically stylized, and as such can produce novel forms of language, potentially opening analytical windows onto the processes of language change. Richard Bauman (2011) has commented on the relevance of Dell Hymes’s stance on performance to critiques of variationist sociolinguists, most notable among them William Labov (1966, 1972). By introducing performance as a focus of analysis within variationist sociolinguistics, Bauman contests that the paradigm suffers from a series of methodological limitations. Variationism, as he puts it, ‘became more routinized and restricted in its aims and methods’, and, as a consequence, ‘performance –​in which the reflexive focus is the formal organization of the entextualized act of expression rather than the word or sentence –​was tainted by its own order of reflexive attention to speech and drawn off the board’ (Bauman 2011: 709). This is despite Labov’s own early work on genre, as Bauman points out. Bauman’s expansion of the notion of performance as an analytical focus in the context of ‘verbal art’ (Bauman and Sherzer 1991) is influenced by Hymes’s work on folklore studies and ‘build[s]‌on the reconceptualization of the competence-​ performance dyad within the ethnography of speaking’ (Bauman 2011:  710), drawing principally on the work of Erving Goffman. It is Goffman’s suggestion that ‘all the world’s a stage’ in his book Frame Analysis that leads Bauman to point out that the specific approach to performance developed in the ethnography of speaking and linguistic anthropology studies adopted the notions of frame (contemporaneously known as stance in Jaffe 2009), key and footing from Goffman. The reason: it was understood that ‘specific inventories of communicative means

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that may serve as keys to performance in a given community are to be discovered ethnographically, not assumed a priori’ (Bauman 2011:  711)  (italics in original). Thus it was with Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to performance –​life as theatre –​that a final departure from the transformational-​generative linguistics’ dyad was possible, which in turn led to a burgeoning of performance research in linguistic anthropology (Duranti 2004 and interactional sociolinguistics Gumperz 1982). In recent studies on the sociolinguistics of performance a number of different macro-​and micro-​linguistic dimensions are highlighted as important foci (Bell and Gibson 2011: 561–​567, and other articles in the special issue). These are: the performance of identity through language; how speakers perform language about language; how language is performed for an audience; the type of authenticity framed for the audience through performance; the genre being performed and the performance of non-​performance elements such as music; and the set, appearance, movement and gesture, which all figure as part of the macro-​ linguistic dimensions of performance. In contrast, micro-​ linguistic dimensions of performance refer to sociophonetic aspects, such as how accents are parodied and how certain voices are quoted characterologically in reported speech, among other linguistic characteristics (see Agha 2003). In this book, we will look at multilingual performances where young multilingual speakers active in the Hip Hop community attend to the finer details of linguistic form and meaning in order to put forth different personae, and to create a shared sense of space on the margins of an urban sphere in rapid transformation. My research participants, the young multilingual Hip Hop heads, perform their multilingual raps by using not only local languages such as Kaaps (a variety of Afrikaans) but also varieties of English, such as African-​American English (AAE). For example, in the extract that follows, the multilingual lyrical exchange between Emcees Chuck and Miserable insert into the local Hip Hop space all types of linguistic forms and meanings that play to and help each performer set up their respective personae: Extract 2.2.1 Emcee Chuck:     1. Vannie Kuila   From Kuilsriver 2. Hier maak ons jou voel onveilig   We make you feel unsafe 3. Skangagga by my [up in his opponent’s face]   Come at me

Audience Members:

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Hip Hop Multilingual Research 4. Ek bring die stuila   I bring my style 5. Watte fok!   What the fuck! 6. Waarvan? (turns to face audience)   Where you from? 7. Kraafonteine   Kraaifontein 8. Ek sal laat jy my kry   You’ll get me 9. Tot jou gevriet verdwyn hoo’   Until your face disappears . . . 10.                          Oh! 11. Van die stage af   . . . from the stage 12. Want dis myne   Because it’s mine 13. Wiet djy wat   You know what 14. Vir my ryme lug hulle duime   They give me thumbs-​up for my rhymes 15.                        Oh! 16. Djy sal jou siel sien soes wat   You’ll see your soul 17. Dan raak ek jou siel   Then I’ll touch your soul 18. Soes ek wegraak soes die duine   As I disappear like the dunes 19.                        Whoa! 20. Hah   Nah 21. Die’s die Kuila die   This is Kuilsriver here 22. En wiet djy wat?   And you know what? 23. Hie’ sal djy jou stuil moet gie’   You’ll have to bring your style 24.                        Yoh! 25. En wiet djy wat?   And you know what?

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Remix Multilingualism 26. Hie’ sal djy jou rym moet kick    You’ll have to kick good rhymes

Extract 2.2.2 Emcee Miserable:    Audience Members: 1. (Audio cuts out for several lines) 2. Toe met my Come at me 3. Net op die daad Just in the act 4.                         Awe                         Cool 5. Ek is hier met n jam   I’m here with a jam 6. Dis waarom my broe   That’s why my brother 7. Djy kry nul out of ten   You’ll get zero out of ten 8.                         Oh! 9. Ek is da ill   I’m the illest 10. Lyrically 11. Nigga you ain’t got no skill 12.                       Oh!? 13. (Camera cuts out)

The general theme of the lyrical bout between Chuck and Miserable in these extracts is the staging and performing of affiliations to place, with an emphasis on how language and lyrical style are connected with it. What is said in the performance, and how it is said by the emcee, is a performance of identification that not only defines each emcee on stage but also frames the meaning that the freestyle rap battle seeks to convey to its audience. No doubt, as we see above, the audience figure out an important role in the spatiotemporal and linguistic setup of the freestyle rap battle the two emcees are locked in. For example, Emcee Chuck uses words not commonly found in Kaaps in the lyrics he performs, such as ‘skangagga’ (from the secret language of the Numbers prison gangs, and not easily translated into English); while Emcee Miserable throws in the word ‘nigga’ and the double negative ‘ain’t got no skill’, characteristic of African-​ American English, into the freestyle battle space, which elicits from the audience

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a disappointed ‘Oh?’ Also, and very importantly, Emcee Chuck spotlights Emcee Miserable’s representation of place and Hip Hop style community (for more on this, see Chapter 4; compare also Alim 2009a) by suggesting that even though he is from the ‘Kraaifontein’ Hip Hop community, when he moves across space and place to the ‘Kuila’ (Kuilsriver) Hip Hop community, he has to bring his style and his rhymes to win. These examples are all evidence of not only performing but performativity (Austin 1962; Derrida 1988; Butler 1993, 1997). Let me briefly clarify this point before we move on to the next section. To perform is to display, to say or do, in front of an audience. Performativity, on the other hand, has to do with what we do with language and how it defines and remakes us. According to Butler (1999: 125), a performative is ‘not merely an act used by a pregiven subject, but is one of the powerful and insidious ways in which subjects are called into social being, inaugurated into sociality by a variety of diffuse and powerful interpellations’. This definition has its origins in the critique of Austin’s performativity theory by Derrida (1988) and others. Performative utterances not only bring into being a particular state of affairs –​ they are also iterable ‘citations’ whose repetition partially constitutes their meaningfulness (see also Harissi, Otsuji and Pennycook 2012: 5). Performativity as defined by Butler complicates the fixity that Austin originally assigned to performatives, such as the requirement of the right a speaker has to utter a performative, saying it in the right context and enacting it the right time for it to be successful. Butler states that ‘performativity is neither free play nor theatrical self-​presentation; nor can it simply be equated with performance’ (Butler 1993: 95). Ahearn explains it most clearly: ‘Butler takes Austin’s insight that to say is to do and transforms it into a claim that to say or do is to be’ (Ahearn 2012: 170, italics in original). Thus performativity is ‘the way in which we constitute identity as an ongoing series of social and cultural practices rather than as the expression of prior identity’ (Harissi, Otsuji and Pennycook 2012: 16; compare Pennycook 2003: 528). And it is the analyst’s job to try and understand performativity as ‘an ongoing process of doing rather than a static process of being’ (Ahearn 2012: 170, italics in original). Taking this into account, performativity deployed in the Butlerian, poststructuralist sense in this book will aid in understanding how young multilingual Hip Hop heads engage in citation, exploiting the iterability of their utterances as an everyday act of remixing their multilingualism as they oscillate between identities, choosing from an array of linguistic resources that is nevertheless anchored in the inter-​and cross-​cultural character of voice. I will demonstrate that multilingual emcees like Chuck and Miserable not only perform

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multilingualism through their Hip Hop but are engaged in the performativity of multilingual remixing and Hip Hop culture. I will also demonstrate that emcees like them are actually staging technologies of the self (see Foucault 1988; compare Roth-​Gordon 2012), their own senses of self and mapping out their modus operandi for what happens when they remix multilingualism as a way to draw attention to their distinctively local semiotics of voice.

2.3  To Localize Multilingual Voices: On the Stylization of Multilingualism In order to understand the idea of stylization, we need first to grasp it in distinction to the notion of style:  ‘a social semiosis of distinctiveness’ that ‘crosscuts . . . communicative and behavioral modalities and integrates them thematically’ (Hebdige 1979, cited in Stroud and Wee 2012: 65). In first-​wave variationist sociolinguistics, different styles of speaking were typically associated with the study of dialects (‘social styles of yesteryear’; Coupland 2007:  2)  in particular geographical locations that could be statistically mapped and analysed to yield generalizations about the frequency and distribution of variable linguistic forms (to take it back to Labov 1966; Chambers and Trudgill 1999). In such analysis, the physical place figured as an important aspect in the distribution of a linguistic variable or style. For these sociolinguists, the city and its enclaves offered the ingredients necessary to ‘tease out the complexities of language variation’ (Coupland 2007:  2)  and the social indexicalities associated with particular neighbourhoods or city blocks. Perhaps more importantly, dialects offered the style resources that could be charted quantitatively for the purpose of differentiating between, say, Received Pronunciation and African-​American Vernacular English. Whatever the case may have been, the notion of style became one of the prime variables to which variationist sociolinguists turned to account for stable patterns of hierarchical individual and group variation. In the Labovian tradition, style was a concept that denoted the quantitative distribution of speech forms along a continuum of formality and monitored speech production (‘stylistic variation’; Rickford and Eckert 2001) such as casual speech, sociolinguistic interviews, reading of word lists, but also speech in other contact situations designed to ‘elicit as wide a range of a speaker’s style as possible, from the most careful to the most casual speech’ (Rickford and Eckert 2001: 3). Labov demonstrated how individual speakers of distinct socioeconomic

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status constructed meaning by drawing on distinctive stylistic repertoires. For example, in Labov (1966), the traditional definition of style is used to differentiate between individuals and speech community practices based on socioeconomic markers in the use of prestige varieties (American English spoken in Manhattan) against less prestigious speech forms such as African-​American Vernacular English. Charting such variation along a stylistic continuum, displayed speech styles such as stylistic activities told the variationist something about the place where a speaker came from and the socioeconomic status that could be linked to that particular way of speaking. By stating the latter, I do not mean to minimize the importance of Labov’s work, nor of any other disciple of his; far from it. But it is important to note that Labov’s notion of style did not escape criticism, as it served to limit what could be studied, such as ‘the styling of meaning in social interaction’ (Coupland 2007: 7), or curtailed insights into how forms of social styles could possibly shape other speech styles, or be shaped by other styles. Rickford and Eckert (2001: 2) state that the way in which style as a phenomenon was limited through analysis and methodology in varationist sociolinguistics meant under-​analysing ‘any intra-​ speaker variation that is not directly attributable to performance factors (in the strict sense) or to factors within the linguistic system’. This is an important observation. Nonetheless, and considering this limitation on the notion of style, the concept of ‘stylization’ has been suggested by Ben Rampton (and others) as a way to capture a type of performance where speakers animate the speech characteristics of another speaker (Rampton 2006), by moving from one style of a language to another, or across languages to perform ‘an artistic image of another’s language’ (Bakhtin 1981: 362). Stylization accounts for how speakers in interaction tend to ‘embellish performances’ with accents, registers and varieties of language, that they identify with other voices and subjectivities embedded in conditions of power, structures and spaces (Bakhtin 1986), and in ‘bounded moments when others’ voices are, in a somewhat literal sense, displayed and framed for local, creative, sociolinguistic effect’ (Coupland 2004: 249). Stylization is commonly associated with the notion of ‘double voicing’ put forward by Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), and can be understood as the ‘intensification or exaggeration of a particular way of speaking for symbolic or rhetorical effect’ (Rampton 2001: 85). It is a type of performance in which speakers reflect on their choice of languages, dialects and styles not their own necessarily but those chosen for pure exaggeration (Rampton 2009: 149). But stylization is also about the representation or ‘voicedness’ of others through semiotized forms

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or expression tied to identities, trajectories and aspirations (see, for instance, Hebdige 1979; Durand 2002). In other words, stylization can also be observed in how multilingual speaker performances are ‘filled with others’ words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of “our-​own-​ness”, varying degrees of awareness and detachment’ (Bakhtin 1986: 89). Stylization is characterized by shifting between languages, codes and varieties and by ‘discursive constructions’ (Coupland 2001: 346). In the process of interaction, shifting between languages is used strategically to frame interaction. This is found in the various ways of using accents and certain stock phrases of an individual speaker who is thought by proxy to represent his or her community practice(s). For example, Rampton demonstrates how acts of stylization, the mimicking of ‘Posh’ and Cockney language and accents, reveal the organization of linguistic interaction characteristic of late-​modern communication and the reproduction of larger social categories such as race, ethnicity and class (Rampton 2006: 27). In relation to this, Coupland states that stylization offers the linguistic and semiotic ingredients that make the idea of who exactly owns voice more complex (Coupland 2007: 183). These practices can also be understood as ways of transgressing a convergence toward monologism, to assert playfulness or superior attitudes in performance and interaction (Kotthoff 2007:  470). In this way, the analysis of multilingual stylization may offer important signposts to how exactly social and cultural communities align with certain linguistic forms, meanings and ideologies (Coupland 2007: 184). Rampton’s analysis of stylization reveals information about the deep and widening consequences of migration, class, race and ethnicity on young speakers within the urban contexts of late-​modern Britain. Other studies of stylization have laid bare similar linguistic practices in other sociolinguistically diverse contact situations that also figure, reproduce and contest identities (see, for instance, Eckert 2000; Auer 2007; De Fina 2007; Jaspers 2006). For De Fina, stylization is about how speakers in contact situations draw on interactional resources to stage their identities through a complex process of negotiation and discoursing to achieve sociality (De Fina 2007: 57). The stylization of language operates as a contextualization cue, and given the use of accents, varieties, dialects and registers (resources for multilingual remixing), multilingual speakers often discriminate between the uses of any of the given linguistic phenomena to stylize identity (compare Jaspers 2006: 134). The stylization of multilingualism can be identified by a number of cues offered by the speaker and the audience. Within a larger system of semiotic features, stylized performance is marked by socio-​phonetic, grammatical and

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lexical markers, verbal cues, reported speech and shifts in rhythm, as well as sound and delivery of voice (Rampton 2006: 262). Moreover, the audience plays an important role in the identification of stylization as a performance phenomenon, as they ratify and co-​influence the rapidity of delivery, the continuity of stylization and the abrupt or gradual shift of stylization committed by a speaker. Stylization is thus an important notion that promises to shed light on how the young multilingual speakers in this book adopt, emulate and perform different voices tied to different social categories in order to ‘extend’ their own voice and to build meaning into Hip Hop spaces and places as local or global. One of the research foci in this book is precisely to explore how stylization contributes to multilingual Hip Hop performances in differently scaled places. With the collapse of the apartheid regime, young multilingual speakers in South Africa are now exposed to an array of forms of multilingualism and have access to a ‘world of voices’ which allow them to stylize their own languages and incorporate new language forms, varieties and speech styles into their multilingual repertoires and biographies in unprecedented ways. Fundamental to such stylization processes are relatively more favourable opportunities for economic, social and geographical mobility, as well as access to a variety of transcultural and differently scaled practices of Hip Hop culture. The notion of stylization is thus a useful tool to describe how multilingual remixing is accomplished in Hip Hop spaces and incorporated into different forms of multilingual interaction that contribute to the discursive and contestable terrains where young multilingual speakers live.

2.4  Contextualizing Genres on the Move: Performance as Entextualization Entextualization is a concept used in linguistic anthropology and performance studies to account for how discourses are turned into texts. The notion was first used as a heuristic to map how original discourses (or previously contextualized discourses) are recontextualized and imbued with metadiscursive qualities –​ preferred readings –​in the processes of becoming texts. Once discourses are lifted out of one context, Bauman and Briggs (1990) argue, and used in another, they often become endowed with new qualities that mould them into texts and that contribute to the making of a new context (although one still resembling its historical antecedent). As such, it could be that a whole text (a genre) or a fragment of a text is recontextualized to shape a new context. According to Silverstein and Urban (1996: 1), texts form part of social interaction, and may

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be extracted from one context and embedded in another, demarcated with new structure and meaning. Texts are synchronic and diachronic in nature because the discursive properties that are sampled in conversation or performance have unique social, cultural, and historical intertextual relations and features that are co-​usable across contexts (Appert 2011). This has several implications for the form and function of language, and for practices of multilingualism, to the extent that such practices are further shaped by discursive practices and become transformed in the entextualization of discourse, in particular when speakers chart new meanings with original pieces of discourses in various contexts (Silverstein and Urban 1996). In the processes of entextualization, texts (and text types) are contextualized for specific purposes to shape contexts. In interactional contexts, for example, much can be revealed about the metapragmatics of multilingualism as speakers reflect on or talk about the values of language and registers linked to texts (Briggs and Bauman 1992). As Bauman and Briggs (1990:  69)  point out, the process of contextualization of texts is important for acts of entextualization as participants in social interaction negotiate and look back on discourse and what aspects of its ‘structure and significance’ to insert in speech practices. In the contextualization of discourse as text –​entextualization –​multilingual speakers frame parts or whole stretches of speech to highlight what of the discourse should evidently be transformed into a text, and hence further transmitted and replicated in the new context. The replication of texts in context is indicative of the process of entextualization because it produces new forms of representation. Following Bauman and Briggs (1990:  73), stylized performance is understood here as a contextually situated activity that is recontextualized discursive practice transformed into text. Entextualization can be defined as ‘the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production in a unit –​a text –​that can be lifted out of its interactional setting’ (Bauman and Briggs 1990: 73) and given new local meanings for local contexts and spaces, acknowledging the history and location from whence the text and genre have travelled. The entextualization of stylized performances reveals how discourses and linguistic forms and functions are taken up and used to convey information about stylizations of identity and languages in multilingual cultural spaces. It also reveals how multilingual speakers decontextualize discourse in textual performances that are mediated and remediated in scaled settings through

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different varieties of language and registers for the negotiation of linguistic voice (compare Kuipers 1990 with Duranti 1997). Furthermore, entextualization is an analytical entry point into how contact between different local multilingual communities cultivates rich discursive activities that are removed from one site of contextualization to create either new inequalities or forms of domination (Bauman 2009). More importantly, it can reveal how linguistic inequality is negotiated through linking intertextual relations of texts in competition and contestations. In the article Cité, Tetreault (2009), for instance, analyses how young working-​class French teens perform language using the radio microphone of the researcher and parodying TV host voices. The author demonstrates how teenagers use the words of others to convey quoted speech in direct speech, frame others through stylized speech, and cross into other languages and registers. Particularly, they imitate voice as an instance of entextualization. Tetreault also demonstrates how the framing of utterances with the TV host register reveals that teens engage in quoting speech and further stylize speech as a way to mock the show’s ‘guests’ (Tetreault 2009: 201). We shall see in Chapters 5, 6 and 7 how in the performative scaling of Hip Hop spaces, young multilingual speakers mediate and strategically entextualize various aspects of discourse in order to draw attention to, and negotiate, inequality and marginalization in global Cape Town. The notion of entextualization is a useful notion here to capture and chart how multilingual speakers in Hip Hop spaces deploy forms of talk that contribute to voice in scaled places, and, in so doing, provides a ‘linguistic grounding’ for the development of new dialects and varieties. Coming from the vantage point of entextualization allows us to ask questions about how young multilingual speakers negotiate genres and textualities that already exhibit their marginality and inequality, while allowing space to identify which texts specifically achieve this purpose. For example, how do young multilingual speakers in Hip Hop spaces perform discourses of marginality and linguistic inequality in such a way that they become entextualized? How are genres taken up and decontextualized in Hip Hop spaces for the mutual display of multilingual voice? What aspects of language are used for the stylization of identity? What types of linguistic forms are used to convey features of identification with non-​authoritative and marginalized discourses and tied to practices of multilingualism? The notion of entextualization helps us understand how young multilingual speakers in Hip Hop spaces on the margins of global Cape Town insert, exclude, adapt and frame a number of discourses into texts and genres for the

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enactment of new forms of voice. Given the history of South Africa, the legacy of apartheid, and the deposited sediment of political and economic discourses that still haunt us to this day, exploring the possibilities afforded by the circulation and appropriation of alternative discourses across Hip Hop spaces inhabited by young multilinguals might hold the promise of understanding how everyday interactions can provide an escape out of apartheid’s enduring fault lines and into a more convivial and mainstream public sphere where marginalization can be negotiated. Thus, I am particularly interested here in answering the following questions: what aspects of the cultural discourses of local Hip Hop are entextualized and forged into the creation of a new or better shared sense of space and/​or locality? And what parts of language varieties and registers become conventionalized and shared for the bidding and negotiating of multilingual voice?

2.5  Sounding Familiar and Performing Multilingual Remixing as Enregisterment Another key concept that will be used in the analyses of remixing multilingualism and performances in Hip Hop spaces is enregisterment. According to Agha (2007:  18), the notion refers to ‘processes and practices whereby performable signs become recognized (and regrouped) as belonging to distinct, differentially valorized semiotic registers by a population’ (cf. Johnstone 2011b). A register ‘is a linguistic repertoire that is associated, culture internally, with particular social practices and with persons who engage in such practices’ (Agha 1999: 216). It is often used in particular spaces and places that define a cultural group, community practices and talk between individuals or within a social group. The use of a register relevant to a social or cultural occasion reveals that interlocutors accept and agree to the terms of the speech event (Hymes 1976), and likewise when a speaker switches registers it will often ‘itself reconfigure the sense of occasion’ (Agha 2000: 216). Registers consist of repertoires of language (i.e. words, phrases and sentences) used in the communicative practices of multilingual speakers who have more than one register that comprises more often than not more than one repertoire. But register also refers to non-​linguistic features of performance. When a multilingual speaker performs a registers, they draw on a large store of repertoires that are associated with, or linked to, diverse social practices. Registers are distributed unequally among speakers, spaces and places, and across languages. This is so because not all registers are known by everybody (Agha 2000: 216).

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This results in the unequal appropriation of the formal and informal properties of repertoires and registers. There are three aspects of the definition of (linguistic) register of importance to the study of linguistic remixing in this book: (1) it is a system made up of linguistic forms; (2) it is historically formed by social groups that are always linked to some type of social space; and (3)  when registers are performed, they inform us about a social and cultural event. A register is formed when ‘a number of indexical relationships begin to be seen as related’ (Johnstone 2011b: 660), and when a particular word, phrase or sentence of a register (the formal properties) is incorporated or used in a register, it becomes enregistered. Agha (2007) characterizes enregisterment as a process whereby linguistic forms come to indexically represent particular social values, which is the result of the circulation and uptake of linguistic forms across various modalities and media. A number of recent studies that have used enregisterment as an analytical concept to understand the stylization of performance provide evidence of its reliability. Roth-​Gordon (2009) demonstrates the effects of enregistering slang in negotiating stigmatized agency, voice and affirmative citizenship amidst increasing sociopolitical dynamics such as crime, drugs and gratuitous violence in favelas (shantytowns). The use of slang outside the favela of Rio de Janeiro denotes anguish and shame. It marks the speaker as a less-​than-​middle-​class Brazilian citizen. While this is often a disadvantage, there are advantages when it is used. Roth-​Gordon argues that in the context of Rio de Janeiro, slang usage not only demarcates those living in the physical space(s) of the favela, but that the enregisterment of slang produces new dichotomies of citizenship that challenge the more established notions of citizenship in the larger political context of the modern Brazilian nation-​state. Roth-​Gordon demonstrates how middle-​class families insert slang into their Portuguese to enforce their privileged status in that society. This partly constructs ‘the exclusionary nature of citizenship’ (Roth-​ Gordon 2009) in Brazil. The entextualization of voice, as reported by Roth-​Gordon, forms part of the enregisterment of dialects in performances, which in turn carries implications for how symbolic power and the legitimation of cultural capital is received and perceived (cf. Bourdieu 1991). Certainly in the context of Brazil, a country that has historically had a large marginalized population, the unequal distribution of linguistic and symbolic resources provides the space not only to enforce but also challenge authoritative forms of power and citizenship.

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In her study of the processes involved in a dialect or variety as a register attaining higher status, Dong (2010) demonstrates how the enregisterment of Putonghua in China, a ‘common speech’ practice, evolved through ‘stereotypical indexical attributes’ in metadiscursive practices (cf. Dong 2011). Drawing on examples of metapragmatic activities, Dong demonstrates with reference to a newspaper article how typical metasigns of Putonghua utterances are associated with ‘register-​based images of persons’ that reproduce stereotypical images of inequality and the legitimating of the language (Dong 2010: 274). In contrast, Newell (2009) has traced the processes of the enregisterment of modernity in Côte d’Ivoire taking place in two languages, French and Nouchi (an urban patois), and how this process produces and reproduces Ivorian national identity. The Ivorian government has branded Nouchi ‘the crass and corrupted speech of criminal youth’ (Newell 2009: 157). However, and according to Newell, this speech form has ‘migrated from a language of “marginal” and “delinquents” ’ (Newell 2009: 157) to popular discourses where it has gained new meaning as a transgressive sign in the fight to redefine what it means to enact Ivorian citizenship –​‘a struggle that has unfortunately metastasized into a civil crisis, delegitimizing the state, transforming the postcolonial relationship with France, and throwing the very definition of citizenship into question’ (Newell 2009: 158–​159). The recent work of Zane Goebel (2009; 2011) in the multilingual setting of Indonesia demonstrates how the enregisterment of language in the contexts of language education and television is serving to reproduce the relationship between language and ethnicity in Indonesia. The author illustrates poignantly how domains such as the education system and media capitalize indexical links between language and ethnicity in order to establish a new order of identity construction. Moreover, linking language to performable social personae is often plugged into the system of a semiotic register that enregisters both an enforced reality of standard competence for an imagined citizenship, and at the same time leads to contestations of linguistic agency. As Goebel (2008: 56) argues, ‘semiotic registers’ are emergent linguistic phenomena that fluctuate, never staying the same, because what they signify changes at the same time. The notion of enregisterment is a useful analytical tool for this book to the extent that it offers insights into the interactions between young multilingual speakers on different social and cultural occasions that take place in and around Hip Hop spaces and give rise to multilingual remixing as register formations. I draw on this notion to reveal the constituting possibilities of such spaces. In the

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analyses of entextualized genres and ways of being multilingual through stylized performances in the chapters to follow, I will demonstrate how in the end the permanency created by the enregisterment of linguistic forms, varieties, and dialects in Hip Hop spaces provides a form of legitimacy to multilingual remixing and the performance of marginalized voices.

2.6  Conclusion I have already stated that one of the aims in this book is to work with a set of poststructuralist concepts that highlight the global and local interfaces of multilingualism and Hip Hop in the postcolonial context of South Africa, specifically the urban context of Cape Town. In the following chapters, we will meet the young multilingual speakers who participated in my ethnography, and we will see how they deal with the social and sociolinguistic remains of apartheid, through Hip Hop. I will illustrate how they rely on Hip Hop culture to demonstrate how their multilingual practices are fraught with issues of race and gender, and that when they perform local Hip Hop they attempt to address such issues by remixing multilingualism for the express purpose of articulating alternative futures, whether through language such as African-​American English, South African English or a local isiXhosa or Afrikaans variety. This chapter has laid the theoretical groundwork for the chapters to come. The core analytical notions discussed before will help me demonstrate how young multilingual speakers in the Hip Hop spaces in the ethnographic study contribute to the coming into existence of Hip Hop places. At the same time, these notions will help illustrate how young multilingual speakers perform and stylize their specific, local identities in these Hip Hop places. In the process, I hope to show how these speakers negotiate authoritative and marginal discourses which seek to subjugate them, from these places, but also how they easily set traps for the marginalization of racial, ethnic and gender ‘Others’ (Pennycook 2006), and themselves, on their way to having their voices legitimized. I suggest throughout this book that the very processes of staging voice by young multilingual speakers in Hip Hop spaces and places are representations of everyday multilingual experiences of coming into contact with language varieties and registers that circulate and are taken up in the wider urban settings in global Cape Town, beyond Hip Hop spaces. Indeed, focusing on this thread in the book should allow us to view young multilingual speakers active in Hip Hop culture and beyond as languagers, to borrow Lytra and Jørgensen’s (2008: 5) term

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for global language practitioners. That is to say, we should begin to understand young multilingual speakers as languagers because they are busy finding new, creative and politically transgressive ways to combine a variety of language forms and meanings (Pietikäinen et al. 2008; Juffermans 2015), and in so doing, redefine the very notion of language and multilingual communication so that we may as sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists understand and think differently about their social trajectories, mobilities, and voices (cf. Blommaert 2005: 78). In the next chapter, I briefly outline the methodology of the project on which this book is based. I  designed a multi-​sited ethnography of multilingualism giving due consideration to the reflexivity and positionality of the Hip Hop researcher.

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The Hip Hop Sociolinguist and Multi-​sited Ethnography: Collecting Multilingual Remix Data

How does one collect multilingual remixing data? What is the sociolinguist’s role in the documentation of Hip Hop multilingual practices? In the previous chapter, I  discussed aspects of my research design, outlining the spatial turn in sociolinguistic study. I  also provided a detailed description of the conceptual notions that anchor the analysis of multilingual remixing in the chapters to follow. In this chapter, I build on these discussions to explain why I chose to conduct an ethnographic study of multilingual remixing following the principles and methods of the multi-​sited ethnography (see, for example, Blackledge and Creese 2010). I also consider the implications of my role as a sociolinguist in the collection of multilingual Hip Hop data. These reflections give due consideration to my particular social location as a cis-​gendered man, my status as an academic, my own language biography and other aspects of my positionality that become salient when conducting fieldwork. One of the most fundamental challenges facing a Hip Hop sociolinguist conducting ethnographic research on Hip Hop spaces in localities such as Cape Town is for them to make the connections and associations that research participants (Hip Hop heads) make on a daily basis. They have to adjust their vision, while at the same time, scrutinizing their own actions as a researcher, make the ‘mundane exotic, and the exotic mundane’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 82). I point this out since multilingual Hip Hop heads move across Hip Hop spaces very rapidly, and it is incumbent on the Hip Hop sociolinguist to be prepared and to anticipate, with ethnographic tools in hand, the unpredictable variation that accompanies multilingual remixing. Thus, in my own effort to understand the performances and practices of multilingual remixing, and to trace the enregisterment of languages, I chose to focus

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Figure 3.1  Lil Holmes and Quentin Williams (Photo Credit: Suburban Menace)

on interconnected Hip Hop sites that organized multilingualism in different ways. I chose the multi-​sited ethnographic approach precisely because it allows the Hip Hop sociolinguist to attune their own rhythms to that of the research participants, as the researcher becomes sensitive to the constitution of Hip Hop spaces, but also because that ethnographic approach follows a flexible modus operandi which allows the collection and triangulation of a variety of different types of data. In what follows, I describe why I chose particular Hip Hop spaces and not others; I also discuss how I went about collecting the data and, particularly, why I settled on multi-​sited ethnography as the most appropriate research methodology. While I acknowledge the important work done by sociolinguists in demonstrating the relevance of ethnographic fieldwork –​which indicates the impact of an ethnographic turn –​it will be clear that I draw much on the last two decades of research on multi-​sited ethnography (Marcus 1995, 1998; Hannerz 1996, 2003; Burawoy et al. 2000). The key advantage of such an approach is that the Hip Hop sociolinguist as analyst, and as objectificator who collects multilingual remixing data, is able to ‘follow’ their research participants to the Hip Hop spaces and other field sites

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that they frequent. They can study the connections between those spaces, and specifically what linguistic and semiotic associations their participants make through communicative relationships, as they see (or don’t see) Hip Hop spaces as milieus defined by, for example, a carnivalesque spirit. In other words, the multi-​sited ethnographer of Hip Hop spaces can make those connections and search for the patterns that emerge. This chapter thus pays particular attention to the connections between the various Hip Hop spaces my research participants and I move through. I contrast the sites to each other and discuss how the various semiotic and linguistic resources drawn upon by multilingual Hip Hop artists as they travel across Hip Hop spaces are key to the performance, stylization, entextualization and enregisterment of multilingual remixing. The connections and associations my research participants make, as will become clear in the following chapters, are significant not only to demonstrate how they remix multilingualism but also to show how my own identity as a researcher and language user is wrapped up in such interpretive acts. I  also provide preliminary examples to demonstrate how semiotic resources –​key ingredients for multilingual remixing –​transmute and are adapted as my research participants localize Hip Hop genres, and as we travel across Hip Hop spaces, literally moving from one site to another.

3.1  Multi-​sited Ethnography as Paradigm In order to understand the pedigree and utility of a multi-​sited ethnographic approach, it is important to state upfront that ethnography is both a form of knowledge and a way of gathering knowledge. Clifford Geertz (1986) expressed this point succinctly when he argued that ethnography is an ontology, an epistemology and a methodology. As an epistemology, ethnography expects to advance knowledge of sociocultural linguistic practices, rituals, kinship relations and language perceptions and symbolism by people. As an ontology, it posits a world made up of practices and semiotics. As a methodology, ethnography is typically, but not exclusively, seen as involving ‘field techniques’ such as note-​taking, audio-​visual recording, interviews and observations that together result in the collection of a variety of information. Ethnographic fieldwork typically included participant observation of random selected and mundane social and cultural activities (Gupta and Ferguson 1997), and ethnographic researchers were expected to advance from the familiar to the unfamiliar, for longer periods of time. This requirement meant that the researcher typically had to spend

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months or years in their chosen research site, usually in the world of the ‘Other’, ‘the alter ego the West constructed for itself ’ (Trouillot 1991: 28; cited in Stacey 1991: 688). Once the researcher was in place, the village, the institution or the ‘desert island’ became a ‘field site’ construed as a particular social regime to be carefully packaged and scrutinized. In a now classic study defining ethnography, Geertz (1975) provided poignant directions for how to approach the Other’s world. In essence, what the ethnographer does is to offer the reader ‘thick description’ of a world probably unknown to them (Geertz 1975: 6). Thrust into the fray of others’ cultural and traditional assortment, the ethnographer gradually coheres but never faithfully synchronizes what they and the other share (Fabian 1983), but at best ‘attune[s]‌ themselves to the horizons and rhythms of their subjects’ existence’ (Burawoy et al. 2000: 40). The world has moved on since the beginnings of ethnography, and the idea of how to study people and their societies has moved with it. As a result of globalization, which entails rapid and extensive transportation, as well as the migration and other movement of people, traditional ethnography has perforce developed alternative approaches to documenting social and linguistic contact phenomena on the move. Increasingly, multilingual communication within and between speech communities is subject to various global processes and practices, such as transnational migration, the expansion and diffusion of various types of media, the growth of telecommunication that allows speakers to participate as dispersed selves in multiple spaces simultaneously, and, of course, the integration of economies of different scales and the availability of cheap travel (Pennycook 2010a). As Burawoy et al. (2000) put it, today’s ethnographer finds themselves in multiple contexts that are always influenced by global processes (Wittel 2000). As such, an ethnographer who seeks to canvas the spatial production of human linguistic activity in a single ethnographic project recognizes that to understand cultural formations and linguistic practices within a changing world order from a single site is wholly inadequate. To focus on a single site or space would mean missing out on the connections and associations between sites and space. What is needed instead is a focus on and around ‘chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations’ (Marcus 1998: 90). What is thus a significant feature of the multi-​sited ethnographer’s approach to their cultural, linguistic and semiotic object is that if they refuse to acknowledge how it links to and becomes part of other related sites or spaces, then they must recognize that this entails a refusal to understand that this object forms part of a whole and universal world-​system (Marcus 1995; cf. Wallerstein 2004). What this means is that the

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ethnographer studies multiple sites in order appropriately to make connections and find patterns that emerge from such sites. I chose the Kuilsriver Hip Hop community –​a satellite of the larger Cape Town Hip Hop community –​as my larger ethnographic site. Once I had made connections with Hip Hop heads there, as I  describe in Sections 3.3 and 3.4 here, I  followed my research participants and observed the connections that they made with respect to the practice of multilingualism, the associations they outlined in the exchange of Hip Hop music and the relationships that they made and cultivated across various Hip Hop spaces. Fundamental to my multi-​sited ethnographic fieldwork was to stay true to the idea of ‘following’ (Marcus 1998) my research participants and to study the patterns that emerged as they enacted multilingual remixing. I took seriously the spaces where they gathered to talk about a variety of topics and perform multilingualism in varied ways. But I was also non-​intrusive and non-​disruptive to the way they conducted their social, linguistic and Hip Hop cultural activities in spaces that are ‘non-​contiguous’, or outside Hip Hop spaces. Those spaces, such as where business meetings or informal gatherings were held, are not strictly speaking Hip Hop spaces, but were very much connected to Hip Hop spaces, and are fully indexed with global activities. Global activities form an important part of the local as people make translocal connectivities possible (Ma 2002) and demonstrate at which scale meaning making –​an important ingredient for multilingual remixing –​operates. After the fieldwork, I constructed multi-​sited ethnographic narratives that, according to Marcus (1998), allow researchers to illustrate the intricate ways the locally constructed world of participants forms part of a larger order or system. I kept in mind, during my fieldwork, that global processes play out differently in different localities, and that I had to be present in order to be able to analyse the actions of multilingual Hip Hop artists, and those who invest in and practice multilingual remixing in Hip Hop spaces. A few preliminary examples suffice, though, to illustrate the points I mention above. Take for example the following three extracts that are snippets of interactions that involve my research participants and me. I recorded the three extracts myself, and in only one am I fully interpellated (I will discuss this in detail in Section 3.5). The reason for this is that the first extract is an audio recording I made at the beginning of my fieldwork, and at the time I did not feel I could involve myself fully in conversations with my research participants and other members of the Hip Hop community. It occurred outside a popular nightclub. The second extract is from a video recording I made (with permission) of a business meeting that occurred much later during my fieldwork between my main

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research participants (members of Suburban Menace), at their communal home, ‘Menace Mansion’, which doubles as a studio. I did not participate in this interaction given the serious nature of the meeting. By this point in my fieldwork, I had become a full participant in conversations and interactions with my participants, while attempting not to intrude or impact in instances where I knew I was not invited to (such as in the meeting). In the third extract, I recorded an interaction with Suburban Menace at a different recording studio, where they met up with the comedy duo Joe Barber to record audio skits for their album Sub-​Conscious. In that interaction, I am referred to as the ‘PhD candidate’ and interpellated as ‘professory’ in an endearing way. These extracts point to the way language and meaning is constructed in various Hip Hop-​related spaces. They point to how Hip Hop spaces such as the Club, the Studio and the Menace Mansion are interconnected, as they are important interactional spaces for my research participants. Moreover, they are important revelations for how the Hip Hop sociolinguist can and should establish relationships with their research participants in Hip Hop spaces. Extract 3.1.1: Being there . . . (outside the club) 1. Mseeq: Ek sal mense aflaai, ek sal mense aflaai, maar ek gaan nie meer ouense optel nie. Want, ek kan nie jou help en jou career opbou nie. Alles kom nie.   I will drop people, I will drop people, but I won’t pick up guys anymore. Because I can’t help you and also build your career. Everything doesn’t come. 2. MoB: Uh, djy kan nie alles doen nie. Sien djy Earl Scratch. Wie kan vir ons ‘n R100,000 kry om die mixing te doen nie?   Yes, you can’t do everything. You see Earl Scratch. Who will give us R100,000 to mix an album? 3. Mseeq: Dan wie sit met die 100,000 wat djy nie eens meer kan slaap nie. Gisteraand ek kan nie slaap nie.   Then who sits with the 100,000 burden that you can’t even go to sleep. Last night I couldn’t sleep. 4. MoB: Dai’s die we’k. Otherwise we never gonna get that money. En dai’s maar net vi’ twee wieke se werk. Hoeveel is dai? Sestien ure.   That’s the work. Otherwise we never going to get that money. And that’s only two weeks of work. How much is that? Sixteen hours. 5. DRC Member: Dai’s ag ure.         That’s eight hours. 6. MoB: Nai, dai’s tien ure se we’k dai.     Nah, that’s ten hours of work.

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Hip Hop Multi-sited Ethnography 7. Mseeq: Dai’s ‘n duisend rand dai. Ek wiet nog steeds nie wat hulle gaan maak nie.   That’s a thousand rand. I still don’t know what they are going to do. Extract 3.1.2: . . . and there . . . (inside Menace Mansion) 1. Mseeq: Wanne laas het os ‘n meeting gehad? Twie maane geliede. Obvious het da nou baie dinge gebee innie twie mane. Wat’s die eeste punt op die agenda? Eeste punt op die agenda.   When last did we have a meeting? Two months ago. Obviously a lot has happened in two months. What’s the first point on the agenda? First point on the agenda. 2. MoB: En os moet met julle drie manne begin met julle vrou mense.     And we have to begin with you three men, regarding your women. 3. Narc: Look who’s talking this kak.     Look who’s talking this shit. 4. MoB: Ok, well . . . uuhhmmm 5. Mseeq: Begin ee’ste by M.D.K. M.D.K. het sy we’k gelos.     Let’s start with M.D.K. M.D.K. left his job. 6. MoB:  Ok ja.     Ok, yes. 7. Mseeq: (Name of M.D.K.’s former girlfriend) het hy opgebriek. Os moet dai issue discuss omdat hy sy we’k gelosit.   He dumped (Name of M.D.K.’s former girlfriend). We have to discuss the issue since he left his job. 8. M.D.K.: What’s there to discuss my broe, it’s mos my decision.      What’s there to discuss my brother, surely it’s my decision. 9. Mseeq: No, no its not about that you leaving your job, its about obviously because, the group at the moment, the group is running on a heavy heavy loss. I don’t even wanna go into it. O’s staan maklik naby tien duisend rand in skuld in. (We are easily ten thousand rand in debt). And now what happens is like, since the last meeting we had, nothing changed. We still have the same problem. It’s the certain same people that buy groceries the same people who do their duties. Now, we don’t even . . . en vir Lil Holmes oek, os wil wiet of djy nog hie bly Lil Holmes? (And Lil Holmes as well we want to know if you’re still staying with us, Lil Holmes?). 10. Lil Holmes: Hoe bedoel djy of ek hie bly?        What do you mean if I still stay here?

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11. Mseeq: Os wil wiet of djy nog hie bly, of voel ekke . . . of is ek al een wat soe voel?   We want to know if you’re still living with us, or do I . . . or am I the only one that feels this way? 12. MoB: Do you think he still stays here? Will know the feeling. 13. Narc: You don’t sleep here. 14. Lil Holmes: So!? Extract 3.1.3: . . . and there! (inside Studio 2) 1. MoB: (pointing to camera) Quentin Williams, PhD candidate. Ek sê, we’re in the presence of greatness (pointing into camera). I told you people. We got Joe Barber here. We got the PhD candidate here. 2. M.D.K.: Professory 3. MoB: Jullie wietie wat gaan aan nie.     You don’t know what’s going on. 4. Quentin: Professor?! 5. Oscar (member of Joe Barber): Uh, en hier kom djy met n coke! (looking at M.D.K.)   Yeah, and here you bring a Coke! (looking at M.D.K.) 6. (Everybody laughs) 7. Mseeq: Ok, ouense. (walks past)      Ok, guys. 8. Narc: What are you laughing at? Djy! (Pointing to researcher)     What are you laughing. You! (Pointing to researcher) 9. Quentin: You. Laughing. Bringing ‘n Coke. 10. Narc: En ‘n juice.     And a juice. 11. M.D.K.: I’m updating my status here, ‘M.D.K. is chilling with Joe Barber.’ 12. (Everybody laughs) 13. Narc: No one’s gonna believe it though.

The overarching connections between the three extracts are that all of them involve either some or all my research participants as well as myself. The extracts represent interactions in Hip Hop spaces that are connected by language, the downscaling of global Hip Hop, and the talk about and practice of Hip Hop in the local Hip Hop contexts of Cape Town. For example, in the first extract, two of the research participants, Mseeq and MoB, are lamenting about

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the heavy costs of transporting Hip Hop heads from one location to another. They make reference to improving or professionalizing Hip Hop careers (line 1, Extract 3.1.1), the high cost of mixing an album and how much time is spent producing one. A fair amount of code-​switching between English and Kaaps is achieved. The second extract is taken from a meeting between my research participants regarding the high personal and economic costs that came with choosing a career in Hip Hop. This interaction is also achieved through code-​ switching between English and Kaaps. The third extract takes place at a different location –​inside a second studio not owned by my research participants –​and is a discussion with comedy duo Joe Barber about the recording of skits on my research participants’ debut album. Here too there is code-​switching between English and Kaaps. In my initial exploration of how the above extracts are translocally connected, I attempted to describe the production and circulation of multilingual performances across Hip Hop spaces by taking issues of scaling and the constitutive force of global Hip Hop into consideration. However, I recognized early on that a focus on a single ethnographic site to understand the totality and systematicity of multilingual remixing in those local Hip Hop spaces would be unreasonably limiting. Thus, multi-​sited ethnographic fieldwork is a suitable approach to illustrate not only the interconnectivity of Hip Hop spaces, in its scaling and performance, but also how Hip Hop-​related practices, talk about Hip Hop, and the movement of Hip Hop-​related material objects are wrapped up in the ebbs and flows of global Hip Hop. Significantly, following a multi-​sited ethnographic approach to the collection of multilingual remixed data required that I make provisions for investigating how localized and globalized linguistic practices of my research participants and I ‘travel’ across different socially produced spaces (or remain inert); how those spaces and the Hip Hop-​related interactions they host incorporate and structure forms and functions of language adopted from elsewhere (such as transcultural registers of Hip Hop); the circulation of registers; the scaling of Hip Hop spaces, and ultimately the negotiation of multilingual remixing in different places. Moreover, it allows us to see how the non-​contiguous spaces of Hip Hop are part of one and the same system of translocalism. In the start-​up to my ethnographic fieldwork, I  recognized that Hip Hop spaces are ephemeral, and connections to language and Hip Hop cultures are always evolving. This also means that what the multi-​sited ethnographer observes and documents –​their linguistic and semiotic object –​is always in motion, always in flux, and cannot easily be pinned down to one particular

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space. What is clear from the extracts above is that in order to account for my participants’ linguistic and semiotic practices, and also my own, I  needed to be and become one (so to speak) with how my participants use language on a daily basis. I had to deploy participant observation to such a degree that I understood the reasons and linguistic choices my participants made to communicate their affiliations to place, identities and Hip Hop authenticities. However, I also needed to reflexively experience with the research participants their understanding and practice of their multilingual worlds and Hip Hop spaces. To do full justice to such a description, I made sure to follow my research participants where I  was allowed. I  mapped their practices and performances of language using video and audio recording, paying specific attention to their use of registers, varieties, styles and emerging linguistic forms and features that all form part of the practice of multilingual remixing in Hip Hop spaces. During that process I  sought to understand and present the link from ‘linguistic form to linguistic practice in a number of sites’ (Heller 2008: 252), and reflected on the circulation of non-​authoritative and marginalized discourses within Hip Hop spaces, particularly how language became enregistered in the performativity of scale and space (Kaiser and Nikiforova 2008). In the process of such an understanding I  also recognized that space does not precede human activity, but is rather produced by human activity. In the next sections, I present the reasons why I chose to focus on specific Hip Hop spaces as primary field sites, and not others.

3.2  Rationale for Exploring Multilingual Remixing in Multi-​sited Ethnographic Research In this study, I chose to focus on a few Hip Hop spaces, such as a nightclub where a Hip Hop show was staged, a home that became a hive of Hip Hop activity, and a Facebook page, because of their distinctness in terms of scale, and the fact that they support the view that multilingualism is far from a unitary or singular phenomenon. The spaces I  chose were inhabited by my participants in ways linked to different modalities, themselves predisposed to different forms of linguistic organization, and privileging different Hip Hop genres and registers of language, stylizations of language, and entextualizations. I also discovered that multilingual messages were subject to chains and processes of enregisterment as multilingual speakers transport them across modalities and contexts.

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I was often reminded that place offers specific affordances for social life, and does so as an assemblage. As Urry reminds us, ‘people do not encounter a set of objective things in the environment, but different surfaces and different objects relative to a human organism provide an affordance’ and ‘given that humans are corporeal, sensuous, technologically extended and mobile beings, the ‘objects’ afford possibilities and resistances’ (Urry 2007: 51). On the notion of assemblage, he states, ‘different forms of ability (e.g. physical, virtual) create assemblages that make and contingently maintain social connectivities across varied social distances’ (Urry 2007: 51). Reasoning along similar lines, Blommaert, Slembrouck and Collins (2005a) talk of space as an affordance for different types of language use. Such an agentive role for space in linguistic practices is illustrated by Stroud and Mpendukana (2009)’s study of Khayelitsha, where they show how different types of space –​what they term ‘spaces of luxury’ and ‘spaces of necessity’  –​ produce very different forms of multilingual mixing. Their study demonstrates how the material landscape of Khayelitsha is saturated with bottom-​up and top-​ down signs that provide insight into the materials and resources producers of signs draw on to create signs. In the globalizing context of Cape Town, what is especially characteristic of local Hip Hop spaces is the way in which they are organized or assembled according to specific practices of neo-​liberal consumption. Hip Hop spaces are commercial spaces produced at different scale levels and as a result reproduce linguistic and non-​linguistic resources differently. For example, the use of a local language variety may be used in a Hip Hop performance, in a Hip Hop space, to tie local Hip Hop authenticity to global Hip Hop practices and thus to reflect the different syncretisms of local and translocal/​global features and processes in Hip Hop. In my year-​long research conducted at Club Stones, the Hip Hop space that became my central focus, and the other Hip Hop spaces mentioned above, I came to understand that my own mobility co-​articulated with that of my research participants, and reflected how those settings afforded, assembled and spatialized the practice of multilingual remixing. In Club Stones, my research participants downscaled global Hip Hop and made it local, and in this process also produced, reproduced and reinforced in on-​stage and offstage performances a local version of Cape Town Hip Hop. Hip Hop spaces are continuously shaped into a brimming mix of multiple and co-​occurring sounds and music, or soundscapes, that I  suspected could hold significant implications for the description and analysis of the stylization, entextualization and enregisterment of multilingual remixing. In Club Stones,

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music figures centrally in how young multilingual speakers come together to enjoy and consume the local Hip Hop performances put on display. In my observation of such coming together, I  observed that on Wednesday nights young people would interact with emcees in the performance of rap music, such as the ‘call and response’ performance that requires the audience to vocally acknowledge the on-​stage rhyming. The circulation of multisemiotic materialities in Hip Hop spaces provided another rationale for designing a multi-​sited ethnography of Hip Hop spaces similar to the design and linguistic framing of Stroud and Mpendukana (2009). In those spaces, I initially observed that a number of signboards were inscribed in various forms of (global) English and local African languages. This is indicative of the multilingual landscape in which Club Stones is situated. Documenting the multilingual signage in those settings allowed me to explore yet another dimension of how the different sites were predominantly locally oriented or translocally presented. Signage and other public semiotic artefacts, especially commercial signage, structure desire for consumption and aspiration for life-​styles around the production of particular types of identity and social categorization (Alexander, Dawson and Ichharam 2006). One would expect these identities, aspirations and desires to be mediated in different ways in variable multilingual practices. Despite attempting to choose Hip Hop sites that stood out as predominantly local or translocal, I demonstrate below that Hip Hop spaces are not only completely local or reterritorialized as only global, but that the erratic nature of individual and societal multilingual practices assemble scales that are both multiple and co-​occurring. What this means is that a performance can be both local and global at the same time –​glocal (Robertson 1992). Unpacking the value invested in the scaling of the Hip Hop spaces by multilingual speakers, it became important to document times and instances when they were scaled as predominantly global or local, or in-​between (glocal), and the implications this had for the performance and practice of remixing multilingualism. For example, Club Stones hosted ‘Stepping Stones to Hip Hop’ show every Wednesday night, and there I witnessed the scaling of a truly global culture become localized through different varieties, speech forms and registers. This show featured multilingual Hip Hop performances in both local varieties of English, isiXhosa and Afrikaans and accented-​African-​American English performances. I  therefore thought it important to document the show thoroughly during my fieldwork. Recent research on the sociolinguistics of mobility (Collins, Slembrouck and Baynham 2010; Dong 2011) suggests that fragments of language, discourses and identities travel with whole dialects that are used to navigate the semiotic

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interstices of migrant and commercial spaces in the enregistering of processes of globalization, such as consumption practices, new media and new modes of travelling. In a multi-​sited approach to Hip Hop spaces, the links between language and social categories at various scales can be investigated. In this sense, Hip Hop spaces are a mix of mainstream and non-​dominant languages, varieties and registers linked to fraught social categories (race, ethnicity and gender relations). Looking across sites at how young people talked about gender relations, entanglements with different ethnic groups and differences between racial groups (cf. Bucholtz 2011; Morgan and Warren 2011; Alim, Lee and Mason 2011), I expected to reveal how multilingual practices negotiate similar and/​or different tensions with respect to contested social categories. I expected to find evidence of such practices across stylized multilingual practices at the level of crossing of codes and forms. Thence, in order to understand how issues of race, gender and ethnicity fed into affiliations or representations of place discourses, and the form of linguistic practices, I was ultimately persuaded that multi-​sited ethnography would offer the best route to trace and demonstrate this. By designing this study as a multi-​sited ethnographic project about multilingual remixing in Hip Hop spaces, I thus hoped that scaled spaces and language would come together in ways that ultimately could speak to the mainstreaming of multilingual voices, not only of my research participants but more generally of the young multilingual speakers active in the Hip Hop community of Cape Town and beyond.

3.3  Collecting Multilingual Hip Hop Data and the Role of the Hip Hop Sociolinguist In conducting this multi-​sited ethnographic project, I drew on a range of methods (participant observation, observation notes, interviews, video and audio recordings, photographic records of linguistic landscapes) to construct written accounts of multilingualism and build an archive of behavioral repertoires (Hymes 1981: 84) and interactional frames (Goffman 1974) in Hip Hop spaces. Conducting participant observation in Hip Hop spaces for me has not only been a visual experience but also very much a soundscape one. As a researcher engaged in participant observation, I not only built an archive of ‘the droppings of talk’ (Moerman 1988: 8) but also observed with others and experienced and engaged in multilingual communication in Hip Hop spaces. In this section, I provide an overview of the nature of my fieldwork in Club Stones, presenting

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the different methods utilized to collect the data, a description of the data organization and analysis that followed, and in the next section I provide some reflections on reflexivity and my position as a researcher in the field. My fieldwork consisted of more than nine months of participant observation in Hip Hop spaces. I was initially introduced to my research participants, and their fellow Hip Hop heads, through a poster advertising a Hip Hop event they were part of in my university’s cafeteria. I phoned one of the leaders, MoB, of the rap group Suburban Menace, and requested a meeting with him and his peers. They agreed. At our meeting, I introduced myself, my research and my tastes in rap music. I told them I grew up listening to the rap music of Tupac Shakur and Jay-​Z. Unexpectedly, my research participants were pleasantly surprised at this admission, since they too are fans of the mentioned artists. Because of this I was invited to start my fieldwork proper with them at Club Stones –​before, during and after the performances. Initially, I gauged the general atmosphere of the sites, conducting preliminary observations. Later, I used a video camera to capture interactions, and introduced an audio recorder with a powerful microphone to conduct interviews with patrons. After extensive time out in the field, I  decided to interview some research participants to clarify themes and probe deeper into the events and happenings in my research sites. In Club Stones, the level of noise, and music, also played a decisive role in conducting effective interviews. As such, I had to follow people and request that they sit down with me at their convenience for a more structured interview. At times this happened during the Hip Hop show on the balcony of Stones, but more often we conducted them during the day, with some taking place at the Menace Mansion, and others in greater Bellville, which is 20 kilometres from the centre of Cape Town, but only 5 kilometres from Kuilsriver, where my main research participants live. Every Wednesday night, from 2008 to 2009, I attended the Suburban Menace Hip Hop show, ‘Stepping Stones to Hip-​Hip’ and during that time I talked to patrons, emcees, break-​boys, break-​girls, turntablists, graffiti artists, Hip Hop fans, entertainment journalists and curious onlookers who were coming to the club for the first time. I  conducted and audio-​recorded interviews with fans, rappers and the management of Club Stones, while also collecting promotional posters, mix-​tape CDs and photographs of the show. Even impromptu Hip Hop performances and practices in the Menace Mansion were recorded and squirreled away as data. I found it relatively easily to situate myself as a researcher in a variety of Hip Hop spaces (for an elaboration, see Section 3.4).

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Video footage and photographs allowed me to reflect and confirm the bordering of Hip Hop spaces. The video footage of performance enabled better recall during the participant observation process. Out of the recordings an archive of ‘raw’ data was created, which served as input and support to the analysis and interpretation phases. In preparing the data for analysis, I first organized the archive according to the timeline of collecting video and audio material. I then catalogued the various multilingual performances in each Hip Hop space by type of performance, followed by interactions between my main research participants and their multilingual peers. I then made a number of decisions with respect to the study of the data, following transcription conventions. For the Hip Hop performances, transcriptions were compiled highlighting features such as relations between lines and groups of lines based on the lyrical and rhyme-​poetic equivalences. This involved unpacking divisions of stress, tone, pitch, accent, mono-​, bi-​and multisyllable rendition, alliteration and other sorts of equivalence. The renditions of such performances were mainly represented using the conventions suggested by discourse theorists (Ochs 1979) and sociolinguists (Vigouroux 2007) to construct my own codes and keys to navigate the reader through the analyses. I faced a particularly difficult task of transcribing multilingual performances because the languages that I  can competently write down, listen to and understand are English and Afrikaans. However, I  employed secondary transcribers and translators who were familiar with languages such as isiXhosa and registers such as Sabela and Tsotsitaal. Throughout the transcription of performances I  was confronted with the question of what to transcribe. Do I transcribe every activity? Or do I transcribe only the rap performances in club Stones? With time, it became clear that every verbal and non-​verbal aspect that was video recorded needed to be written down to reflect on spatial and place interactions. In essence, this was every element that potentially could be thought to influence performances. I transcribed what was said by individuals and groups in conversation, and attempted to get clarity on what was said through multiple, retrospective conversations with relevant participants. In one instance I found myself with a group of Suburban Menace fans and emcees after the Hip Hop show, at the Menace Mansion. When I arrived at the Mansion, groups were formed with overlapping conversations in one corner of the Mansion’s living room, opposite a freestyle battle session, in another corner of the living room. Here is a short extract of the beginning of

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the freestyle rap battle session, though you have to imagine this with ongoing talk in the background: Extract 3.2.1 1. MoB: Oh shit! 2. Ronelda: Go Cole! [Clap hands] Come on, go Phoenix, go Phoenix = = 3. Cole:              = = [Pointing to Phoenix] Drop daai, drop daai acapella van Hip Hop Tekken! Hoo’ die shit, die is fokken siek shit!                         Drop that, drop that acapella of Hip Hop Tekken! Listen to his shit, this is fucking sick shit! 4. Ronelda: Go Phoenix, Go Phoenix! 5. M.D.K.: Wil djy ‘n beat hê? [M.D.K. starts to beat box]       Do you want a beat? 6. Phoenix: Hosh ja, tjek dit uit = =      Yes, yes, check it out = = 7. Cole:            = = Hie’ kom, hie’ kom = =                 = = Here it comes, here it comes = = 8. Phoenix:                = = Phoenix ruk die ding = =                       Phoenix rocks it

In this extract, the audience in the freestyle rap battle space readies to hear emcee Cole perform a few lyrics, but instead he points to emcee Phoenix to drop his Hip Hop Tekken lyrics (line 3). (A Hip Hop Tekken lyric imitates the game and anime movie Tekken.) Egged on by Ronelda (line 4), Phoenix obliges and begins to rap over the beatbox introduced by emcee M.D.K. This multiply layered interaction also had to be transcribed. In cases where the volume of data of performance and interviewing became overwhelming, I employed a secondary professional transcriber to assist in writing down the performances with my assistance. After sifting through ethnographic notes, other field notes, asides, commentaries and the video, photograph and audio archives I  collated, I  attempted to construct the social, cultural and linguistic world of the Hip Hop show in club Stones. In other words, I created ethnographies of multilingual remixing in Hip Hop spaces. As such, the process I followed to analyse the data can be described as follows. The first step was to study and understand the performances in Club Stones and other connected spaces, such as the Menace Mansion and the Suburban Menace Facebook page, and then exhaustively listen to or watch the recordings while transcribing, and then do so many times over in order to correct or confirm the transcriptions, and to carefully study the Facebook posts. I made sure every

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transcription key was comprehensive enough to confirm what the video and audio recordings were reflecting. I  then grouped the video recordings of the performances in one data set, apart from the audio recordings (a different data set) and photographs, and created a digital file to store screenshots of the Facebook posts. My analysis was done along the lines of micro interactional frames which reflect the macro-​spatial orders of Hip Hop spaces. In Club Stones there were beer-​drinking competitions, freestyle rap performances, other rap music performances and deejay performances, which were followed by extended activities at the Menace Mansion, in turn followed up by meta-​reflections on the Suburban Menace Facebook page. I then searched the audio archive by unpacking the interview transcripts and sampling the audio interactional transcripts in order to get at the motivations behind the choices in multilingual practices among my informants.

3.4  Reflexivity, Position and Privilege One of the main preoccupations of much ethnography, whether single-​or multiple-​sited, has been the advancement of reflexive narrations by the researcher. Reflexivity (Geertz 1984), which is the practice of admitting to ‘self-​perceptions, methodological setback, and mental states . . . that result from asymmetrical power distributions’ (Heath and Street 2008: 123), is an important principle in my work. Writing social and cultural worlds into being, the multi-​sited ethnographer becomes aware of the unavoidable presence of themselves in their study of the practices of others. Writing about educational contexts in Sweden, Haglund (2005:  30–​31) argues that in light of the subjective process of ethnographic research, ‘[e]‌thnographers must therefore recognize the implications of their own presence in the process and include their own practice, their social and historical basis and themselves in their analyses of the situations they study’. I have made this mode of reflexivity part of my broader project by providing details during our first contact and interview of my own sociolinguistic and socioeconomic biography (my upbringing, language use, taste in Hip Hop music and acknowledgement of the local Hip Hop culture) to my participants, and by detailing how race, place, space and/​or language led to a constant negotiation with research participants (of similar and different racial backgrounds) during my fieldwork. In the processes of collecting data, organizing it and then analysing it, I  continuously consulted my field notes and transcripts of performances and talk. Among these activities, I  constantly questioned reflexively my role as a researcher in the field and in the interpretation of my data. In this section of the chapter, I will devote some space to the concerns of my role as a sociolinguist

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conducting an ethnography of multilingual practices in Hip Hop spaces. Because I  approached my field sites with class, race, gender and sexuality biases, as a relatively inexperienced ethnographer, I will discuss the decisions I made in the participant observation process in Club Stones and other connected spaces. To understand the bias, we will briefly detour into my social, class, gender identity and racial background in order to explicate how I negotiated entry into my field sites with my research participants. The role of reflexivity is an aspect of ethnography that allows the reader to follow the subjective decisions and encounters of the researcher’s identity (Hannerz 2003). It reveals the difference between recording objective observations and subjective encounters to such an extent that some warn ethnographers ‘not to surrender’ to the ethnography (see Wacquant 2010). In the participant observation process of research I was thoroughly scrutinized as an outsider and insider (Ramanathan 2005). When I  observed others, I  was also being observed. In addition, during the last stages of my ethnography I was always expected to conform, adjust to and literally act out expected behaviour in the respective Hip Hop spaces. My main research participants required this of me. I had to adjust to the comings and goings of my main research participants, and I often had to make concessions to negotiate situations that turned precarious because of linguistic and Hip Hop cultural misunderstanding. As an ethnographer, and an outsider, my social, linguistic, class and racial background either validated me or pushed me to the margins of just observing social and linguistic interaction. While traditional ethnography was perhaps often about conducting fieldwork outside familiar surroundings, much recent ethnography has turned its sights precisely on the familiar. In my case, working with Hip Hop meant working in the township environments where I grew up and only recently moved out of. Townships in South Africa are at the coalface of poverty and violence (Dlamini 2009), and recent research suggests that in the post-​apartheid political, social and economic climate, relatively little has changed for their inhabitants since 1994 (Ross 2009; Bray, Gooskens, Moses, Kahn and Seekings 2010). The generation of South Africans born after 1994 (called the ‘Born Frees’) still experience the debilitating effects of racial discrimination and structural marginalization. I grew up in a Coloured township on the Cape Flats of Cape Town (Adhikari 2005, 2009; Erasmus 2001), called Bishop Lavis. The area is named after a white Anglican bishop, Sydney Warren Lavis, who campaigned vociferously to alleviate the plight of township dwellers. Initially, Bishop Lavis was a homogenous community built by funding channelled to a housing committee chaired by Lavis (Smith 1994; Blau 1982). By the time I conducted my fieldwork for this

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study, the township had changed significantly due to in-​migration by foreign nationals, mainly from other African countries (such as Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria) and mostly Coloured and Black South Africans seeking better employment in urban areas. Today, Bishop Lavis is a diverse and heterogeneous community, but everyday life is still defined by poverty, gender discrimination, drugs, gangsterism, violence and racial prejudice. That is of course not the whole picture. Vibrant expressions of popular culture, diverse religious practices and ethnic tolerance also characterize the area. Growing up in a diverse neighbourhood and a working-​class family home, I was exposed to the growing diversification of ‘Lavis’ and to tough social and cultural interactions, often based on violence and discrimination, which have influenced the way I see the world, and to some extent shaped my habitus (Bourdieu 1980) as a young Coloured man living in a Coloured township. This social upbringing undoubtedly influences the questions I pose, the interpretations I make and the analysis at which I arrive. I am implicated in every step of the participant observation process. For example, I prepared myself to be sensitive to matters of racialization in the Hip Hop spaces defined predominantly by Coloured men who use historically marginalized linguistic varieties. I shared locations and histories of marginalization with those men and, as such, interpreted the way they use language, and practice multilingualism, as stemming from a place of linguistic marginality, a place where they were trying to figure out their multilingual voices. I was also often complicit in reproducing unequal gender relations between men and women in Hip Hop spaces. Since I shared gender stereotypes with my male participants, I often missed at the first pass of the analysis the effects that a predominantly male Hip Hop space would have on the multilingual communicative practices of Coloured women. Being a Coloured researcher, part of a fraught national group identity, and coming from Bishop Lavis provided me with symbolic currency to exchange in the Hip Hop and linguistic market respected by my main research participants. I am still considered to be Coloured in the new South African sociolinguistic landscape, although the racial label, unlike its use for classification in apartheid, is now deployed for legal racial redress. For example, the label ‘Coloured’ is still used to redress economic (in the workplace, in promotions to management positions) and institutional (such as in universities and colleges) inequality. But it is also a label misused by White liberal academics that argue that Coloureds (like Blacks) have come far enough and that racial labels such as those should not matter in a non-​racial South Africa (see Mangcu 2015). However, as Alexander (2013) recently argued, non-​racialism merely perpetuates the myth of a unified

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South African rainbow nation that is, if one ventures to look more closely, nothing more than ‘an optical illusion’. Nevertheless, I, like my research participants, was born on the Cape Flats, far from the centre of Cape Town and its leafy Southern Suburbs. We are often forced to repeat the experiences of spatial discrimination and marginalization of our parents, and often have to confront barriers of a racial nature when crossing the hurdles of social class and interacting with other language communities. For example, in the apartheid past, our parents were prohibited from buying houses in places legally defined as white spaces, enjoying beaches defined as whites-​only, or from attending institutions of higher learning other than those designed at the outset for Coloureds and Blacks. Today, my research participants and I  experience similar exclusionary effects, remnants of the apartheid past, though they are no longer entrenched in the law, but rather in racialized language stereotypes, and the continued essentialization of our identities as tied to space and place –​tied to the very townships we come from. I also entered these Hip Hop spaces as a Coloured man knowing full well that Hip Hop culture, whether local or global, is a male-​dominated culture. I knew how to perform masculinity, including toughness in the face of confrontations in the Club, the Suburban Menace Mansion and in other spaces where my participants met and gathered to interact, and as such could navigate my way around these spaces successfully (see Chapter 7 for an analysis of toughness). I embodied my masculinity by wearing Hip Hop attire (a Hip Hop cap, baggy jeans and a Hip Hop t-​shirt). However, I was not a real Hip Hop head, and I still therefore had to engage in some form of negotiation as I made my way through Hip Hop spaces. Initially, I tried to adjust fully to my field sites by emulating the behavioural essence of a Hip Hop head in Club Stones and the Menace Mansion. I tried to demonstrate my knowledge of local Hip Hop culture in conversations and interactions, and also almost always talked about the importance of the Hip Hop culture with respect to understanding language. I failed, however, to do so convincingly. The youth in club Stones and at the Menace Mansion framed me for quite some time as an outsider looking in. They avoided my requests for interviews, spoke of me as the researcher from the university and also chided me for working only with Suburban Menace. What I did, and what I said, always influenced the way the conversation or topic went, how it got adjusted or recycled, and in what language it took place. In Club Stones, there were very few outsiders but many people with video cameras. And even though Suburban Menace (my main Hip Hop research participants) did not divulge my researcher role on stage during the platform event, I came to learn at a later stage that almost everybody on the floor knew that I was conducting a PhD on language and Hip Hop in the club.

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I was acutely aware of my position as a researcher and the privilege that is attached to doing research in the sites that I chose. I approached my research participants as a PhD student from the university, who could access resources my research participants could not. In that sense alone, I was privileged (compare Ramanathan 2005: 292). I was, as McCorkel and Myers (2003: 226) would say, both working and reworking my own identity as a privileged researcher in relation to my research participants. Though my race and gender eased access to the space, my professional identity as a researcher from the University of the Western Cape did not. When it became known to the wider Hip Hop community in Club Stones, my name was frequently mentioned in freestyle rap performances, and I  was emotionally denigrated by emcees through clever rhymes and lyrics, though not by members of the MobCoW rap group. I was also frequently referred to in face-​to-​face conversations as ‘that PhD guy’. My professional identity carried with it symbolic capital that directly opposed what the emcees and Hip Hop heads were striving for. However, after a couple of months, I learned that I achieved a level of acceptance by Suburban Menace, who talked about me with a certain fondness. I was even referred to as ‘our PhD candidate’. Suburban Menace thus took me on as one of their own, to be put on display against rival emcees. I was ‘adopted’ as a Hip Hop pet PhD, as is clear from the following interaction with some of them at the Menace Mansion: Extract 3.4.1 1. Narc: Five weeks! 2. M.D.K.: There’s seven days in a week. Thirty days. 3. Narc: (to MoB) You’re supposed to be the cleverest guy in MobCoW. He makes a month into a = = 4. MoB:       =  =  I’m sorry! Ok. Sorry. (pointing into the camera) Now I got it. It wasn’t twenty-​nine weeks, it’s supposed to be twenty-​nine days. Twenty-​nine days, five weeks, twenty-​nine days . . . umm . . . we gonna work on have a party . . . it’s a new track for the album and we gonna brainstorm around the dialogue for = = 5. Quentin: = = not Bruinstormers (Brainstormers)? 6. MoB: Ja (Yes), not Bruinstormers. Brainstorm people. (looking into camera). You know that when you sit and think when all good minds come together. For Joe Barber script. They coming through to us on Wednesday. To do our umm . . . into and our album skits and hopefully the outro. So we need to give them some sort of draft, what they want obviously. That’s how you do it, you don’t expect them to come and to, you know, just listen the music cause the album’s not done. So, we got Quentin here obviously doctoral student, thesis, PhD candidate. That’s mos how he it says on the email signature, it says PhD candidate.

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Remix Multilingualism 7. (Everybody laughs) 8. MoB: Shit and a long ass shit, Department of Linguistics and all this stuff my bra (my brother). 9. Narc: Professional hairdresser! 10. (Everybody laughs hysterically) 11. Quentin: Take me on will you, take me on a stroll. (Laughs) 12. MoB: So, ja, Quentin is here doing some footage = = 13. Researcher:              = = Yes we are = = 14. M  oB:                    = = He’ll be following us for the next couple of days to Joe Barber. Saturday we’ll be out in Wolseley. Wiet julle waar’s Wolseley? (pointing into the camera) Wiet julle waar? (Do you know where’s Wolseley? Do you know where?).

What also counted in my favour in entering and staying in Hip Hop spaces was that as a bilingual male who spoke the local-​variety Kaaps as a first language, I resembled the everydayness of bilingual communication one frequently encounters among Coloured people on the Cape Flats. I was easily accepted because I was a Coloured man who spoke Kaaps and English well, and even though I  never probed it, I believed there was always an implicit acceptance of me in part because I  spoke these two languages and was racially similar to my subjects. While my bilingualism, defined along these lines, provided a fair state of linguistic security, I was also recognized as one of the ouens (one of the streetmart guys –​see Salo 2004 because I could perform a limited version of the prison register, Sabela).

3.5  Conclusion As ethnographers, we are considered ‘invaders’ of space and place (Heath and Street 2008). We move among strangers and befriend them. What we do and say, and the information we collect, have ethical implications not only for the researcher but for their participants also. In this study, I attempted to collect data about multilingualism in Club Stones and other Hip Hop connected spaces, while at the same time respecting their integrity. Therefore, any information that may identify my informants has been removed to protect their identities. In the chapters that follow, I go on to demonstrate, analyse and discuss how young multilingual speakers’ perform and practise multilingual remixing in Hip Hop spaces.

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Multilingual Emcees up in the Club and Other Spaces

In Chapter 1, I made reference to the complex history of South African Hip Hop. I mentioned that the way Hip Hop heads deal with language in place and space is to not only use it to comment on marginality in general but also to creatively stage various Hip Hop or rap genres for the continued vitality of the culture. As I also mentioned in the previous chapter, my entry point into this culture was a poster of the Hip Hop show hosted by Suburban Menace. I then moved into the space of the club, where I engaged with Hip Hop heads as research participants; only later was I invited to record their linguistic and semiotic activities in other Hip Hop related spaces, such as their recording studio and their living space in the ‘Menace Mansion’, and on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. In order to access these spaces, I had to use the languages in my linguistic repertoire, and my working-​class background, in order to connect with the everyday marginality (Osumare 2007) of Hip Hop performers and to understand what it means to be and become a Hip Hop artist in Cape Town’s larger Hip Hop community. After several weeks of just hangin’ (Alim 2004) with Suburban Menace and MobCoW emcees (the extended rap group that includes Suburban Menace), I began to feel accepted, and could then start recording interviews, interactions and staged performances in the club, outside the club and in other spaces. A journalist heard about my ethnographic study at Club Stones and decided to write a story about my participants, entitling it ‘Hip Hoppers become subjects of UWC linguistic thesis’. Leading up to an interview, the journalist asked to meet the MobCoW emcees, including Suburban Menace. Here’s how it went down. The journalist could have chosen any place and time for the interview, but chose a Wednesday night at Club Stones. Wednesday nights at Club Stones are packed to the rafters with Hip Hop heads, their fans and regular patrons. I had scheduled with Suburban Menace and MobCoW emcees beforehand that we would meet the journalist on the balcony of the club. We chose the balcony to

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minimize the influence of the noise levels from inside the club, so that everybody could hear and answer the journalist’s questions as clearly as possible. Each member, seated on the balcony, and with their distinct language and rap styles, answered the questions posed by the journalist as she asked them in what way their brand of Hip Hop was different from that in the United States. Some faltered in their answers, but eventually a coherent and very authoritative projection of their thoughts about language use and local voice in local Hip Hop culture emerged. They explained the various rap styles each member had, and the social themes such as poverty, education, money and politics that inform their rap lyrics. In response to the journalist’s opening question, ‘What makes South African Hip Hop different from US Hip Hop?’, CC, the only woman in the group at that time, said that although Hip Hop is owned [by] the USA . . . our aim in South Africa and I think what makes us different is that we’re making it our own. We’re not emulating . . . we’re creating our own culture in South Africa, our own style of Hip Hop, and we want to explode, we want it to go big. And I think that’s why we different. Like we said we bring our own different personalities. (Interview at Club Stones)

MC Cole, the 2009 African Hip Hop Indaba Freestyle Battle champion, jumped right in after CC, stating in Kaaps that Ons try, ons try net original te wies man. Dai’s die ding. Sien djy, ons try nie met an’er mense koppel nie. Dis hoekom is dit so moeilik om deur te briek. Dis hoekom is dit nie dieselfde soes in dai kant nie. Is, basically, is Kaap style man. Is ja. (We try, we try to be original man. That’s the thing. You see, we don’t try to imitate other people. That is why it’s so difficult to break through. That’s why it’s not the same here as overseas. This, basically, is Cape Style. Definitely.) (Interview at Club Stones)

Here we have the first two distinctions offered by CC and MC Cole: CC emphasizes the uniqueness of local Hip Hop while focusing on a particular style; MC Cole on the other hand suggests that they are trying to rap, but in a Cape style. His contrasting here to there (overseas, United States, Hip Hop in the States) is a succinct yet subtle argument for the uniqueness of local Cape Town Hip Hop. For him the struggle for authenticity is the reinvention of the local, of local place that uniquely accommodates the practices of Cape Town Hip Hop –​that is, conforming to a particular ideal and style that is indelibly linked to Cape style Hip Hop.

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Authenticity for MC Cole and CC is also coupled to the diversity of MoBCoW as a racially mixed group. Further into the interview CC talks about Baza Lo, the only member who speaks and raps in African languages (e.g. isiXhosa), as an example of the way in which Club Stones has broadened out into a truly multilingual space. As she talks about Baza Lo, who is seated next to her, CC makes reference to localness as an extreme idea that Baza has changed with the local Hip Hop context. Baza Lo then piggybacks on CC’s final remark putting it to the journalist as follows: ‘Look here, I’m Baza. I’m just bringing the ghetto style back, you see. Just bringing the ghetto style in the group, you see.’ This provoked the journalist to challenge Baza on the use of ‘ghetto’: ‘Ghetto is popular in America. What makes your ghetto different?’ Baza then responds: ‘Hayi, the South African ghetto. You see, South African ghetto. I’m bringing the South African ghetto. This is not USA. This is South Africa.’ Baza Lo’s use of the place reference ghetto challenged the journalist to prompt him further about the meaning of the word in the local context of South Africa. While his answer is far from eloquent and elaborate, he has a distinct sense of Hip Hop practice and place as organized into ghettos where performing local rap music is part of ‘embodied being-​in-​place . . . localized caring for place’ (Morris 1999: 42, following Casey 1997). The emcee’s use of the place reference ghetto is also used here in the interview as a semiotic marker (Hanks 1989) that serves for Baza as a meta-​reflection on the structural and functional inequalities many multilingual emcees, and other young multilingual speakers, living in township spaces in and around Cape Town, have to deal with. In essence, he is trying to reframe the question of marginality in township space through Hip Hop language. To the journalist who listened intently to Baza Lo, place and space became a central theme of the discussion with the group, as they further explained that local Hip Hop practices are embodied art and genre forms mediated through language and accents. I interpreted such a perspective from Baza Lo as based on linguistic and semiotic schemes that are durable, transposable and appropriated across various Hip Hop spaces (and of course beyond). The journalist found this to be an attractive perspective on local Hip Hop and she prompted Baza Lo to unpack further why he would refer to the township as a ghetto. I later discovered that she pushed the ghetto question in order to understand the evolution of the local Hip Hop culture, and how Baza Lo saw the location and departures of Hip Hop authenticity as tied to global Hip Hop language, genres and place.

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At the end of the interview, many of the emcees around the table affirmed that the reason they do Hip Hop, and perform rap music, is to work towards a better understanding of where they live, to practice the genres of rap through the best language they know and to choose the best registers to reach their audience. One of the other participants, Bracen Kayle, put it this way:  ‘English rappers on this side, we don’t sound the way that they do. So . . .’ The journalist interjected: ‘Wait, wait, then why don’t they sound the way that you do? You’re talking about the accents now?’ Bracen responded: ‘Because I, I never grew up there. You know, the slang doesn’t appeal to me. Not that the slang doesn’t appeal to me. It’s just that is not what I was raised with. It’s . . . we’re just telling our stories the way that we know best. That’s, that’s it and I feel this because they supporting us. It’s being yourself.’ To this CC added: ‘We got . . . we more diverse in SA than anywhere else in the world. We’ve got 11 different languages, we’ve got different cultures, we’ve got . . . Baza, we’ve got. I think we’ve got a lot of diversity in South Africa and that’s what makes us different.’ Here, CC reaffirms the linguistic diversity of the country. The questions posed by the journalist to the MobCoW and Suburban Menace emcees, and their responses, go to the heart of multilingual remixing in local Hip Hop culture. They are asked in the context of a Hip Hop space, Club Stones, that enables their avowedly local practice. The meta-​commentaries on multilingualism offer a preliminary snapshot of the local complexity of language, but also of the performance of rap genres as they are set up to convey information about place and space, and about identities, about the overall discourse of Hip Hop in local Cape Town, and most importantly also about what is understood as authentic rap, and inauthentic rap. This chapter gives a more in-​depth description of the Hip Hop spaces I selected to focus on for this book. In this chapter, I bring the reader with me to the primary scene, the principle Hip Hop site that became central to the ethnographic fieldwork. I first set the scene here for the more detailed analysis in Chapters 5 to 8 of multilingual remixing in Hip Hop spaces. I do this first by sketching the ethnographic context of Club Stones in terms of the practices and processes that make this site a local, downscaled place that provides particular types of normativities and affordances for how multiple languages, registers and styles are remixed. This is followed by a brief description of the other Hip Hop spaces I was allowed into to observe and participate. In Chapter  2, we noted that place can be understood as space with meaning and significance, semiotically constructed through specific interactional

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routines, uses of language, the design and unfolding of linguistic landscapes, and infrastructures in the forms of buildings, furnishings and spatial designs. Here, I discuss these assemblages of practices and processes with respect to Club Stones and other spaces (such as the Menace Mansion, and social media) as locally construed, downscaled places that shape, and are shaped by, constructions of identity, locality and forms of authenticity that are set in motion and appropriated within the local Hip Hop culture in Cape Town. In what is to follow, I give a brief topographic description of Club Stones as an important spatial vector for understanding the context in which the local downscaling of Hip Hop occurs and is given meaning, and the sorts of multilingual remixing practices and performances which emerge in that place, including how, for example, multilingual rap biographies are carefully hewn into appropriate local repertoires. This is followed by a concise discussion of my participants’ recording studio and living space –​The Menace Mansion –​and the online social media spaces (that is to say, the other Hip Hop related spaces I studied). These spaces, I argue, are interlinked to each other because they index local Hip Hop practices, the remixing of multilingualism, and the performance of marginalized voices.

4.1  The Commercialization of Local Multilingual Hip Hop in Local Place The primary venue for the Hip Hop and rap performances studied in this book is Club Stones, which has a rich history of hosting Hip Hop and rap performance events in Cape Town. While rap was initially practiced in non-​formal private and public spaces, such as public parks, malls, backyards and street corners, its movement into clubs –​places like Club Stones in Kuilsriver –​offered more regular staging opportunities and a new kind of environment. Driving out along Voortrekker Road through the middle and working class, as well as multiracial, northern suburbs of Cape Town, towards Van Riebeeck Road, one arrives at Club Stones (see Figure  4.1) below, pocketed away from the main road between a busy row of food shops and takeaway restaurants. Just before the main parking area, a fast-​food place that is famous for its burgers is situated at a busy intersection. Proceeding past this junction is the turn off into the parking area of the club, and its other commercial neighbours. The club is located in an L-​shaped building that envelops its central parking lot. In the lot at various times of the day you will find club patrons, shoppers, performers and

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Figure 4.1  Club Stones (picture taken by Quentin Williams)

vagrants. As people park they may notice Club Stones in the far left corner, next door to a small grocery store that sells basic consumable goods. There is also a hardware store, a liquor store, a pizza place and the burger store. They are mostly open from nine in the morning to around six in the evening. Club Stones, however, only opens its doors from at night, and stays open until two in the morning of the next day. Club Stones is a commercial venture that generates revenue out of entertainment events, including birthdays, deejaying competitions and Hip Hop events. It follows a particular commercial philosophy, and this is stated explicitly on its main website (www.stones.co.za), which is worth quoting in full: Welcome to Stones A Stones venue is everything that urban nightlife should be –​each store offers dynamic DJs and dance floors balanced with a sexy and elegant lounge life

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and slick, friendly service. Stones regularly hosts top DJs, bands, comedians, and entertainers from across the county and abroad. We also aim to add fabulous value to your nights out through our weekly promotions, theme nights, ladies’ nights, student nights and giveaways. Our extensive schedule of events has something for everyone. Because of the relaxed quality and enjoyable environment, many of our regular patrons use Stones for their parties and corporate functions. The stores can be booked for any occasion, including product launches, team building endeavours, seminars and movie premiere nights. Our friendly staff are happy to co-​ordinate your event, our bars offer huge variety of beverages, premium whiskeys, cocktail mixers and a delightful shooter menu, and our big screens and projector facilities accommodate any presentation and video screening needs. All of this makes us the perfect venue for special events.’ The goal of a Stones is to generate revenue, for the advancement of the company.

The layout of Club Stones Kuilsriver is simple. There is one entrance. As one approaches the venue from the parking bay area, one is greeted by a narrow doorway. Contiguous to this entrance is a booth, where the cashier can be found seated during events. At this point, the club security personnel physically search patrons and revellers for any threatening or harmful objects, which, if found, are left in the booth with the cashier. Patrons’ coats and jackets are also stored away there, although this is generally not encouraged by management for fear of theft. The average cover charge is only about R30, and after having been paid, the cash is placed by the cashier in a red metal box. Then, after being frisked by security personnel, one walks up a narrow staircase that leads into the Club proper. Once there, you are met by a series of well laid-​out pool tables, and to the right, a door that leads onto the balcony overlooking the parking bay. Before every event the balcony door is usually kept closed in order to force patrons to fill up the available space. The pool table area surrounds the main bar. This is the centre of the first part of the upper deck of the club. Located in this section of the club is a stage for performances, toilets for men and women and an administration office. A wooden arch divides the central area from the back area of the club. The latter area is made up of five sections that manage the flow of patrons. Through the arch, on the right-​hand side, a VIP space is cordoned off by a security rope, carefully monitored by staff and security personnel before and during shows. Across from the VIP space, on the other side of the dance floor, a second but smaller bar can be found. Towards the end of that bar, there is a deejay box and

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a second (main) stage. At the very back of the club is a small storage room where various products, equipment and furniture are kept. This physical set-​up is primed for language contact between patrons. As Stroud and Wee suggest, globalizing situations of language contact offer up the conditions for linguistic and visual consumption where ‘a variety of actors and modes of acquisition determine what comprises multilingual resources and their meanings, with an emerging polycentricity and heterogeneity in the multilingual landscapes’ (Stroud and Wee 2011: 206). In Club Stones, we are able to read off from the physical and semiotic environment a significant amount of information about which languages are ‘afforded’ by the venue and how these are linked to the local businesses and shops trading around the club (consider for instance how tourist brochures, tourist websites and cottage industries promote and sell their businesses). In many ways, Club Stones produces and commodifies ‘locality’. Apart from Hip Hop, a key local product as we shall see below, there are a variety of other events that contribute to the production of locality. For example, there is the tradition of Kuilsriver residents young and old hosting birthday parties at the club, where you can throw a celebration, spoil your friends with drinks and choose your own playlist. Club Stones makes a conscious, strategic effort to tap into the rich cultural and linguistic networks of young people by hosting local Hip Hop, house music and karaoke competitions that are set off against each other in terms of the amount of revenue they can generate. In its physical design, Club Stones is a building that ‘enunciates’ a particular language of commercialism. Markus and Cameron´s (2002:  7)  description of building fits here well when they state that buildings, it seems, do not explain themselves. While something like the contrast between light and dark in a Gothic cathedral may be apprehended directly, the significance of that contrast is not apprehended directly. Rather it is apprehended with the assistance of language, in the primary and literal sense of that term. (Italics in original).

The significant local-​cum-​commercial ethos of the club is evident in most of the posters and material signage in the club itself –​that is to say, the semiotic artefacts found near the pool table areas, the bars and stage areas. These predominantly comprise framed pictures of fans enjoying themselves at Club Stones. In Figure 4.2, one can see such an example, where in the upper-​right-​hand corner of the photograph a neatly arranged collage of patrons suggests, thanks to the racially charged nature of South African society, that those frequenting Club

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Figure 4.2  Signs in Club Stones (picture taken by Quentin Williams)

Stones are predominantly local, and probably everyday speakers of Kaaps. The collage also encourages us to speculate on the typical types of social and historical trajectories of the patrons, mediated by the interactional regimes of boisterous enjoyment, partying and gossip that are frozen in the photographs and that frame their language practices. In the physical spaces of the building, English dominates both official and unofficial signage. For example, below the exit sign in the upper-​left-​hand corner of the photograph are two signs: one displaying Club Stones’ operations and patronage policies, and a Castle Beer logo. The policy is in English, and details the dos and don’ts to patrons, who, as we might suspect, do not bother to read it (compare, for example, Blommaert 2010, on our inattention to reading Internet policy). The Castle Beer sign is also in English. The effect of such a sign, in terms of Stroud and Wee’s (2006, 2012) notion of sociolinguistic consumption, is that the position of English as a global commercial language has more value in this local place than other local languages. The paucity of English signage generally, the collapsing of the genres of official protocol and commercial drink signage, and the placement of English in the corridors and marginal areas of movement and flow of patrons, such as doorways and corridors, drives home its peripheral

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and temporary status as a ‘visiting’ sign from the world at large. In this venue, multilingual repertoires are construed around the locality of different varieties of Afrikaans and other African languages. The local flavour of the club becomes especially noticeable if one examines the particular communities from which the club has hired its staff. The club’s staff are predominantly Coloured, and male, which is not unusual for bars across Cape Town (see Figure 4.3). Stones generally employs bartenders, bouncers and cleaners from the local community of Kuilsriver. Some, if not all, of them have lived all their life in the community, and exhibit a particular profile of multilingual repertoires, in terms of a ‘compartmentalized’ and distinct repertoire, of (some variety of) English and Afrikaans, which could also be interpreted as multiple monolingualisms. Among the club’s patrons, a mixture of English and Kaaps is used in dealing with requests for drinks and food. The people who come top Hip Hop shows usually use either Kaaps or English. Whereas most of the employees live in the historically Coloured area cordoned off by the then Groups Area Act under apartheid, the audience members that frequent the Hip Hop show on a Wednesday night come from as far afield as Mitchell’s Plain, Bellville, central

Figure 4.3  Staff of Club Stones (picture taken by Quentin Williams)

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Cape Town and even Johannesburg. Most of them have Afrikaans as one of the dominant features of their repertoires, which may include two or three other African languages such as isiXhosa and isiZulu. The cultivation of commercial and local patronage is also a feature of the website. For instance, an official photographer attends Club Stones events, and asks groups of partying friends, if they want to have a group photo taken. The photographer then sells the picture to the group for a fee. People who are interested can visit the website, view the pictures and download them. Stroud and Wee (2006, 2012) coined the notion of sociolinguistic consumption, the commercialization of languages, language varieties and speech practices, to account for various types of language repertoires. Similar to the notion of ‘repertoire’ (see Blommaert and Backus 2011), sociolinguistic consumption recognizes how different tactics and trajectories of linguistic commercialization underlie a complex matrix of different forms of linguistic mastery consumed by multilingual speakers. Club Stones is in all respects –​linguistic landscape, interactional regimes, and so forth –​a space that affords an incidental status to English, and values more highly the mastery of varieties of Afrikaans, emerging out of the insertion of commercial forms and functions in already existing multilingual repertoires (following Blommaert and Backus 2011).

4.2  Commercial Multilingual Repertoires in the Club As we have seen, the organizing principle behind the layout of physical space as well as its semiotics is that of commercialization on the one hand and the promotion of local linguistic and interactional regimes on the other. The commercial and the local have exerted a formative influence on the multilingual repertoires of the artists themselves. Clubs such as Stones have always been a mainstay for Hip Hop and rap shows. However, like many clubs, Stones needs to generate money and make a profit. The deejays and emcees I interviewed recognize this fact. As the months of my fieldwork for this book passed, a number of them became vocal about the superficial commercial relationship between Suburban Menace (my main informants) and Club Stones. The relationship started in 2008 when Mseeq, co-​founder of Suburban Menace, floated the idea of the group’s needing a platform to perform in front of an audience. A number of venues were thoroughly scrutinized and eventually it was decided to approach Club Stones management. Mseeq said that the initial motivation to perform in front of an audience was inspired by the idea of converting their Hip Hop and rap talent into financial reward:

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Remix Multilingualism We went not because of our rapping abilities. We did go to the Stones owners and say, ‘listen to this ad can we have a platform?’ We used business skills, business skills, human skills, how to communicate with human beings, and that created a platform for those Emcees to come. (Interview at Menace Mansion)

In this section, we shall briefly review how the pressure of commercialization of Hip Hop, combined with the predominant linguistic and interactional regimes of locality and Kaaps on the local market, shaped a Hip Hop show. We also consider the pressures from artists who felt that Club Stones and Suburban Menace sold out to commercialism, which led to the gradual and conscious cultivation of local multilingual repertoires, and the descaling of the genre of Hip Hop performances over time. The relationship between Club Stones and Suburban Menace was constructed on the foundation of a commercial contract. As a result of a business meeting, Club Stones agreed to provide Suburban Menace with the necessary space to promote and profit from staging a Hip Hop show, while, on the other hand, Suburban Menace had to reciprocate by pulling in the desired audience for Stones Kuilsriver every Wednesday night –​that is, people who would spend money. If they failed to do so, they would forego their part of the night’s profit, either from bar sales or sales at the door. This deal proved beneficial for all involved:  Suburban Menace and the club. On the surface, the relationship between Club Stones and Suburban Menace was about the promotion of Hip Hop (although a certain type of Hip Hop) and rap music on a Wednesday night. However, at base the relationship established between the two parties was principally a commercial one. Suburban Menace also used Club Stones to market their lyrical ingenuity to their fans through mix-​tape CDs and clothing branded with their record label’s logo, such as caps and T-​shirts. Within weeks of confirming the business deal with Club Stones, the group had firmly established their Hip Hop show (Figure 4.4), creating a small fan base, as well as attracting rap artists from all over the Cape Flats to participate in live performances. By selling their own merchandise during the show, Suburban Menace at Club Stones quickly became a popular brand. The group as a whole grasped the opportunity to turn their Hip Hop and rap talent (their cultural capital) into something more tangible: financial benefit. It wasn’t just about having a stage in a club to perform rap music, or about having quality microphones and sound. It was because Club Stones was ‘a bit more mainstream’ than other venues around Cape Town’s clubbing scene, as Mseeq put it to me:

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Figure 4.4  Promotion Poster (Produced by Suburban Menace) Stones want to make money, man. And that’s what we provide them with. We told them that, we went to them, we would like to get a night for one show. This was not supposed to be a weekly event, we just wanted to have a concert. Suburban Menace needed the space to display their music to the people and Stones was saying their Saturdays were good, Friday nights are good, their Sunday nights are good, Thursday nights okay, Wednesday nights we say, ‘fuck!’ it doesn’t matter to us, any night, can be a Monday night, we can make it happen

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Remix Multilingualism and that’s what we did. And we proved it. So… when we started making more money for them on a Wednesday night, then on a Thursday night, even some Friday nights we beat them, we told them: ‘Do you guys even realize that you can’t take a House deejay to become deejay on a Wednesday night and he will make this happen for you like this, do you even realize that?’ . . . Hip Hop is again on the outside, so Hip Hop is not a Friday and a Saturday night [when] the main party is on, it’s on a Wednesday night and yet it stands strong: That’s the strength of hip hop. (Interview at Menace Mansion)

But amidst all the fanfare over the show, conflict began to emerge in the local northern suburbs Hip Hop community. Emcee Kriprip (a pseudonym), for example, who regularly attended the show and entered freestyle rap battles, was of the opinion that the majority of the patrons and fans who attended the show were not ‘real’ Hip Hop heads, and that Stones management and Suburban Menace pushed for the entertainment value of rap music, and not the discourse of upliftment and apprenticeship of others through the everyday cultural practice of Hip Hop. In my interview with Kriprip, he suggested that Suburban Menace needed to be reproved for pushing commercial aspects of global Hip Hop culture in the local, because even though Stones is a good venue . . . the people controlling this functions is not educated enough to involve hip hop’s total upliftment because exactly what they do, what they seen on TV and hacked just like that to bring it and make their business work, that’s what I believe man. And I have seen that I’ve been exploited, bra. I have been battling for nothing, I have won battles and lost knowing I’ve won it, I mean like what is that? So I think there is no real heads there’s that just crowds that like to party and you put up a show for it basically, entertainment. Hip Hop can be entertainment but then again it’s missing . . . missing the roots of Hip Hop. Hip Hop itself man it’s just not entertainment, it is a social upliftment bra, that’s what Hip Hop is, okay? No one can judge each other and say you have to rap like that and you emcee like that, give this poetically whatever. How I feel you have to be equal in hip hop man as event organizers or anything you have to be equal. You can never state you may be physically or psychologically to get exploitation done you can’t do that man. You have to balance Stones. Stones is a place for battles, no doubt . . . Stones is a place for battles but no they also need real Hip Hop heads that know about battles and because now you see emcees on different levels of knowledge they have to accommodate the crowd so if the crowd loves explicit, hardcore swearing that’s what you have to give to win man, you see? So I think Stones’ venue is good but it’s not the ultimate place to have Hip Hop practiced. (Interview at McDonalds, Voortrekker Road, Bellville)

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Yet, while Suburban Menace and their relationship with Club Stones enraged many artists, nobody could turn down the opportunity presented by the rap group for excellent local exposure of their music in front of an appreciative audience. Emcees’ participation in the Hip Hop show was crucial to the success of creating a local show, despite dissenting voices, who accused Suburban Menace of not pushing and developing the Hip Hop culture further than Stones, or greater Cape Town. Questions were being asked if clubs like Stones were the ‘right’ and ‘proper’ locality for such an endeavour. Late into the fieldwork for this book, I noticed tensions were brought to boiling point and manifested on stage, and trouble was brewing between Suburban Menace and other rap groups (see Chapter 5 for on-​stage responses by MobCoW emcees to their critics). These issues had a significant impact on the local scaling of the Hip Hop show. At first English was used to convey the localness of the show, but some of the emcees were upset because they felt linguistically marginalized. Those excluded recognized that the linguistic challenge introduced into the place was a type of multilingualism based on commercial discourses, values and investments, where language became commodified for a profit in the practice of linguistic remixing (following from ideas on language commodification in Wee 2008; Heller 2007a). Drawing on some thoughts by Wee (2002: 1118), I understood that groups like Suburban Menace, in ways almost similar to nation states, were ‘motivated by the recognition that the “right” linguistic repertoire can serve as an important economic resource’. As such, what my informants had done and tried to do was to create a niche market (following Duchêne and Heller 2012) that accommodates linguistic remixing to blur the lines between pride in languages and the symbolic and material profits and values of multilingualism. In this way, they challenged the non-​native English performer on the margins to centre their voice as they emphasized a type of vertical multilingualism in practice (Mansour 1993) that did not deny the incursion, negotiation or imposition (cf. Dor 2004) of heritage (horizontal) types of multilingualisms, such as Khoi and San rap performances, which has yet to find a space in other niche markets. Nevertheless, it was not that Suburban Menace was oblivious to the linguistic and Hip Hop cultural backlash they were provoking. The group quickly remediated this anxiety by introducing many of the events of the show in local languages such as Afrikaans, and its local variety, Kaaps, and through such a bottom-​up informed language policy, allowed for the entry of very marginalized registers such as Sabela and stylects such as Tsotsitaal (see Hurst 2008). This move toward the inclusion of local languages was also expressed on Facebook pages, by designing a fan page where supporters of Suburban Menace could

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stylize their fan-​ship and engage in debates often initiated by the group in different languages (see Section 4.3.2). Most significantly, the decision to form a group of emcees named MobCoW was based on the idea of promoting multilingual rap groups, and to include mostly local emcees who performed their lyrics in local language varieties, was never really at the expense of excluding local English varieties, which remained in good stead (linguistically and symbolically). Thus, when Suburban Menace performed in Club Stones, they sought to perform a downscaling of global Hip Hop. They did this through inviting local emcees to the stage and introducing new talent to local audiences. Central to this was the valuation of multilingualism and local indexicalities embedded in counter-​discourse, but a counter-​ discourse that was itself scripted by consumerism.

4.3  Multilingual Repertoires and Biographies Each emcee in Suburban Menace and MobCoW had widening multilingual repertoires and linguistic biographies that are influenced not only by what type of Hip Hop music they listen to but also by which type of language, voice and accent they decide to use, imitate or mock in order to perform a remixing of their rap lyrics and genres. Drawing upon ideas from Busch (2015) and Blommaert and Backus (2011), I want to highlight some of the specific trajectories that the multilingual repertoires of individual emcees took, and underline the nature of each emcees’ social and historical trajectory and enculturation into local Hip Hop spaces. I do this to demonstrate ‘that mobility affects both the form and the function of the mobile objects’ (Blommaert 2014: 136) and carries significant implications for how each emcee remixes their multilingualism on stage and performs the type of marginalized voice that they do on stage. The linguistic biography of each emcee described below reveals the trajectory and management of multilingual repertoires prepared in their socially mobile lives for transmodal interaction in the popular space of Hip Hop. Thus far, I have suggested that multilingualism means very different things when inflected by different spatial affordances and performed at different times. At the level of the individual emcee, a complementary understanding of multilingual repertoires, those ‘indexical biographies’ (Blommaert and Backus 2011) will help us to further unpack how a focus on repertoires ‘amounts to analysing the social and cultural itineraries followed by people, how they manoeuvred and navigated them,

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and how they placed themselves into the various social arenas they inhabited or visited in their lives’ (Blommaert and Backus 2012: 28). What is particularly interesting here is that the very arrangement of repertoires, the chronology of their make-​up and the indexical values and significant events associated with the participating languages is subject to reorganization and re-​indexicalization in the narrating event itself. In other words, what we find here is how the very interaction of talking about repertoires against the current backdrop of local and commercial Club Stones shows how the individual emcees have come to perceive and interpret their repertoires in such terms, increasing over time. Emcees’ multilingual repertoires are hybrid, translingual and plural, and are the main form of capital they have access to that allows them to successfully participate in stylizing and performatively staging a distinct local and commercial self. Emcees affiliated with MobCoW benefitted from the insertion of non-​standard language varieties, accents and stereotypes into the discourses of commercialism that emerged from the agreement between Club Stones and Suburban Menace. This allowed them to make global Hip Hop local and enregister fully local personae during the Hip Hop show as if to demonstrate to the audience and to themselves that they have ‘deeply internalized the regularities of a [local commercial] game’ (Bourdieu 1998: 98). But let’s take a step back into the formation of Suburban Menace and MobCoW. In 2008, Suburban Menace consisted of four members, plus Mseeq, their producer. In 2009, the group decided to create an all-​male multilingual crew named MobCoW. During the growth of Suburban Menace my participants used the opportunities presented by the Hip Hop show in Club Stones to tap into a diverse network of emcees to establish MobCoW. No strict recruitment procedures were followed, but potential members were evaluated according to their rap music styles and their representation of local place. What this meant is that they always had to represent the Kuilsriver Hip Hop style community (see Alim 2009a), stage quality freestyle rap battles and have an attractive multilingual biography. They would avoid already established rap groups, but graded each individual emcee who intended to showcase their rap music and styles in terms of investment and marketability potential. Suburban Menace recruited what they thought were the stylistic and linguistic cream of the emcee crop that had performed at the Wednesday show. Word of the show reached out into the farming areas of the Western Cape as far as Worcester. The Wednesday night show launched with the name ‘No Stones Unturned’ and then became ‘Stepping Stones to Hip Hop’. Their message was simple and attractive: if emcees wanted to expose their talent to the local Hip

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Hop community in Cape Town, they should come to Club Stones to showcase themselves. Prizes would be up for grabs: usually this meant money, or a recording exchange (not a contract) with MobCoW productions (the independent recording label established after the founding of the MobCoW rap group). The network of emcees recruited by Suburban Menace was provided with mentorship, especially where it concerned the writing and performing of rap songs. The group provided members with free products such as T-​shirts, Hip Hop caps and services such as photoshoot sessions for promotional posters, as well as inviting them to performances in clubs and other venues across the Cape Peninsula and providing them with free alcohol at the bar and a small amount of money for public transport. This allowed for the ‘stylization of selves’, not only through a variety of commercially valuable multilingual practices but also by means of the self-​conscious endowment of the body with objects that range from acquiring dress styles (Hodkinson 2002:  131)  to exchanging grassroots ways of writing the Nike swish sign on shoes (Hebdige 1979). These are all practices that form part of the display of the material fetishization and commodification of Hip Hop as a spectacle. For MobCoW emcees, belonging to a rap group became an important part of identifying with local practices of rap performance genres and discourses in Kuilsriver. As noted earlier, language has a core role to play here. Although English was the preferred language to rap in for MobCoW members like M.D.K, Lil Holmes and MoB, there was space to perform in Kaaps, registers such as Sabela and stylects such as Tsotsitaal (Mesthrie 2008), as well as other languages and varieties such as Sesotho, isiZulu and isiXhosa. The MobCoW emcees consisted of the most linguistically diverse emcees in and around the Hip Hop community of Kuilsriver. This was indicative of how language was used by the emcees to tap into the groups’ multilingual diversity in the pursuit of inclusive Hip Hop group authenticity. I now turn to the social and historical aspects of particular members’ multilingual biographies. I  chose these members because they not only represent Suburban Menace and MobCoW but also because their multilingual repertoires and biographies offer insights into the multilinguality of the Hip Hop artists in the local Hip Hop culture of Cape Town. In particular, they help us understand how through trajectories and mobilities multilingual speakers invest in multilingualism as a defining feature of their linguistic practices. Emcee Bracen Kayle is a former member of an independent record label that operates out of Bellville. As a MobCoW member, he brings to the conglomerate a style that is witty and conscious. Influenced by pioneering Hip Hop artists

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in Cape Town such as King Jamo (see a detailed description of the important contribution King Jamo made to local Hip Hop in Cape Town in Warner 2007), Bracen sees his relationship with rap and Hip Hop as a natural progression of his human state. As a young emcee, he was often exposed to rappers, graffiti artists and deejays. Bracen is multilingual, speaking English, Afrikaans and German, and his long-​term involvement in making rap music stems from being told what to do and how to do it by people who had the power to control his daily life. He used Hip Hop as an outlet to express his frustration, and at the same time as a medium for his freedom of speech. He has used that freedom to elevate himself to a respectable Hip Hop head, and a freestyle lyrical battle emcee in the Hip Hop show at Club Stones. Narc is an Afrikaans-​English bilingual emcee who was influenced by the practice of Hip Hop from a very young age. At the age of twelve he wrote his first four lines of rhyme. His style of rap is based on East Coast rap in the United States, in particular the style of rap promoted by Bad Boy Records and Notorious B.I.G. As a young emcee he aspired to imitate the rap styles of The Locks, Mace, Flat Rob, Craig Mack and others affiliated to the Bad Boy crew led by Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs. Promoted into high school, he started feeling an affinity to West Coast gangsta rap. In particular, the rap music he found most attractive was that of Snoop Doggy Dog, Dr Dre and Tupac Shakur. When he arrived in high school, he only knew a handful of pupils who were ‘into rap’. Attending a former model C school and an almost all-​white school, he met MoB and Mseeq who encouraged him to perform rap music. He says that he at first shied away from performing rap in front of fellow pupils for fear of recrimination or shaming: Out of this white school, and even the coloured guys would look at you and laugh, ‘What the fuck! Are you serious?’ Now I be like, ‘What are YOU fucking serious?’. So never say to anyone look here! I rap. Never, brought it out. I never spat a verse like in a cipha (freestyle rap battle), that kind of thing. Like these guys do [referring to M.D.K], I never ever done something like that. (Interview at Menace Mansion)

After graduating from high school, Narc started a pharmacy degree, dropped out and then worked in a fast-​food restaurant. This meant a brief hiatus from practicing rap, but Narc never stopped writing lyrics and rhymes. Leaving school disconnected him from MoB and Mseeq. However, while working at the restaurant, he met Mseeq again by chance, and another emcee called Lil Holmes. Narc reconnected with old friends and other emcees. His dream of becoming a

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rap star seemed pursuable once more, because, as he put it to me, ‘I had these dreams of becoming a rap star and you look at these guys on the music video and you think you don’t believe you can get there . . . Actually you don’t believe you just love to be that and ja I spoke to Mseeq and we started sitting . . . reading stuff and rap stuff and whatever shit.’ However, talking then about achieving a dream made it seem less tangible to Narc. He decided instead to do a stint of work in London. While there, he never disconnected himself from the rap performance activities that Mseeq, MoB and Lil Holmes planned back home. In fact, he increasingly became agitated about the need to rejoin the three emcees to pursue a rap career. Eventually, when Suburban Menace was formed as a full-​ fledged rap group, Narc, who raps in English and Kaaps, returned to Cape Town to start performing and recording. In the formation of Suburban Menace, Emcee M.D.K was the last member to join the group. A bilingual Afrikaans-​English speaker, M.D.K recalled his rise to performing rap music as very different from any other member. He decided to become part of Hip Hop culture when he was introduced to the rap music of Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. Amidst the great fanfare created by Hip Hop in the 1990s, M.D.K found that to express his ideas about life as a young Coloured male, writing rap lyrics and rhymes was a good outlet. M.D.K became an English freestyle rap battle emcee. An earlier inclusion in the MobCoW rap group was MC Cole. Cole is also an Afrikaans/​English bilingual emcee who has frequently engaged in freestyle rap battles and rap performances at the start of the Suburban Menace Hip Hop show. He was one of the first emcees to perform in the show. As an unsigned artist, he used to freestyle rap on the weekends, hanging out on the corner, blowing off steam. Before joining the MobCoW rap group, Cole’s rise to rap fame in the local Hip Hop community of Cape Town brought him much acclaim. He rarely lost a freestyle rap battle match in Kaaps, and he rarely struggled with performances in English. Thus far, he has produced four albums, all in Kaaps. These linguistic biographies are indicative of how almost all the aforementioned emcees have centralized in the trajectory of their social and cultural writing lyrical poetry and rhymes. They all resist mainstream discourses, and do so by using non-​standard languages, language varieties and registers that function to stylize their Hip Hop selves. They also actively work and rework on a daily basis the range of their communicative repertoires in practice and performance. Compared to the rest, the most multilingual emcee in the MobCoW rap group is Baza Lo. At the beginning of conducting research for this study, I had just missed Baza Lo’s debut performance. One Wednesday evening, I  had the

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opportunity to correct this, and afterwards I interviewed some of the patrons and Hip Hop fans gathered on the balcony of the club. During an interview with a female Hip Hop fan, the question about Baza’s (multilingual) performance came up, and the response I  received from the fan was as follows:  ‘They [the emcees] communicate in pretty much their own language and the language that they think the people want to hear. They do English and Afrikaans, kombuis [kitchen] English is extremely popular, they swear and they do hand gestures or make actions for dramatic effect or to just get the point across. And then there is Baza. Not sure what language that is.’ Baza performs rap music not only in Kaaps, but also in isiXhosa, SeSotho, isiZulu and Tsotsitaal. He is a young emcee and on one occasion, when I interviewed Mseeq about Baza, Mseeq took the chance to reflect on his performance: Last night, Chuck was on stage beat boxing and Baza was spitting in Sotho, nobody understood what they were saying, but everybody understood that something special was happening. That was enough for them, you understand? It’s the same thing, Baza is our little experiment, he’s like our little experiment nobody understands what he raps but the emotion he carries forth. It’s like a beat nobody understands and it moves you unfortunately. We know our plans with Baza. (Interview at Menace Mansion)

In our interview, Baza explained to me that when he performs his rap music, for the audience to decode his style, he indicates through material objects, such as clothes, whether he will rhyme or lyricize in English or in a language such as Sotho or isiXhosa: Umm, ja, hoe kan ek sê. Soes ekke nuh, ek rep in Sotho in, sien djy. Umm ja, basically as ek in Sotho dingese kom, ek sien, ek maak ‘n voorbeeld, ek gaan ‘n gig doen in Sotho in, nuh, en daar is like mense, hulle, die way ek dress, hoe kan ek sê umm, ek gie my culture klere wat ek aan het, dan gaan hulle sien, ok, die way ek spit, hoe kan ek, djy wiet mos spit nuh, en kleredrag gaan ook saam. Basically, wat ek wil vir jou sê nuh, as ek, as ek my drag aanhet, ek maak ‘n voorbeeld ek, hoe kan ek sê my Sotho klere aan en wat wat ek ek is op die stage, wat gaan djy dink. Sien djy, wat gaan djy dink as djy sien ek het dai hoed op. Djy wiet mos, en ek kom op die stage, wat gat djy dink ek gaan spit. Obvious, Sotho. Sien djy, hoe kan ek, dit speel ook ‘n groot rol. Die kleredrag gaan ook saam. Umm, yes, how can I put it. Like me, I rap in Sotho, you see. Umm, yes, basically if I rap in Sotho things come, you see, let me make an example. If I go do a gig in Sotho, nuh, and there’s like people. How can I put it? The way I dress, how can I,

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Remix Multilingualism I put on my culture clothes, then the people will see, ok, the way I spit. You know, spit and the way you dress go together. Basically, what I mean nuh, if I have my culture clothes on, my Sotho clothes, on stage, then what are you going to think. What are you going to think if I wear a cap. You know that when I come on the stage, you know mos what I’m going to spit. Obvious, Sotho. You see, Sotho plays a big role, as well as my clothes. (Interview at Club Stones, Kuilsriver)

In the branding of MobCoW as a local rap group, the individual Hip Hop biographies of the emcees offer insight into the downscaling processes of global Hip Hop. In the first instance, the rap fan who expressed her views about Baza Lo’s multilingualism points to how he and others were aware of the transmodality (cf. Pennycook 2007a) of Hip Hop performed in Club Stones, to such an extent that they remix their multilingual performances in languages spoken by audience members in that place. What is particularly interesting about the transmodal performances in the Hip Hop show is how the emcees themselves are aware of what to do to construct new meanings through the remixing of multilingualism. Although performing in more than one local language, register and style are important: it is not the only channel that transmits meaning about local rap identities or rap styles. Mseeq’s comment about Chuck beat-​boxing and Baza spitting in Sotho, while on stage, for instance, provide important evidence here. Their transidiomatic performance, on stage, is framed by the rap producer as special. It is therefore not an anomaly or a different channel because it is Baza’s stylization of language and rap: ‘a beat nobody understands and it moves you unfortunately’. It is a very local beat, of which most young multilingual speakers in Club Stones are aware, though perhaps not consciously (hence the response from the fan). What we find in the above description of emcee multilingual biographies is the stylization of multilingual repertoires that stems from the individual emcee diachronically assembling (DeLando 2006)  and inserting a range of styles (linguistic and non-​linguistic) and ‘‘ad lib’ range of identity styling practices’ (Blommaert 2014: 137) to be drawn upon at a particular time (later that night on stage), in a particular place (on the corner, in the Menace Mansion, or on Facebook) or during a live performance of rap music (touring with the crew). The different linguistic biographies I have shared, and the multilingual repertoires built into such profiles, reveal much about how registers such as Sabela and stylects such as Tsotsitaal, and varieties of language such as Kaaps, are co-​ usable to a language variety on the periphery of the world system such as South African English, co-​existing with AAE in the performative process of linguistic remixing. Some of them may not have ‘enough’ (Blommaert and Varis 2011) communicative competence in a particular language, register or style –​if we

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enforce a classical understanding of language competence –​but they nonetheless have enough of a repertoire to ‘defy existing dominant orders of indexicality in using language’ as they ‘opt in and out of identity categories, often on the basis of topic, interlocutor or event type’ (Blommaert 2012: 8). In the next section, I briefly describe the other two Hip Hop spaces that my research participants frequent in order to practice Hip Hop, remix multilingualism and perform marginalized voice. The first one is the place that my research participants use as an informal recording studio, a leisure space and a living and meeting space. The second one is the online space created by Suburban Menace to interact with their fans.

4.4  Multilingual Remixing in Other Spaces: The Menace Mansion, Social Media Before and after every performance of the Hip Hop show in Club Stones, Suburban Menace could be found in the Menace Mansion, a place that doubled as living quarters and informal recording studio. The Menace Mansion is a play on Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. The first day I visited the Menace Mansion was also the very first day I met most of the members of Suburban Menace. I had arranged a pick-​up from Club Stones in Kuilsriver with MoB, and after the car pulled out onto the main road, past the Kuilsriver cemetery, past the industrial area and spent ten minutes in traffic, we eventually reached our destination: the gated community of Smoorsville (not real name). Like many gated communities, Smoorsville is topographically well spaced and laid out with red and grey brick houses that are similar in their design. And, like most gated communities, they are surrounded by barbed wire, recorded by cameras and guarded by security personnel. To Suburban Menace (and some of their fans) this is a home away from their own homes. Inside the Menace Mansion, the physical space (layout and design) is as simple as the red and grey brick exterior. It has an open-​plan kitchen contiguous to the living room. Stairs lead up to three bedrooms and a bathroom. The house comes equipped with a basement and a garage, suited perfectly for a comfortable suburban life. The living room is decorated with A3-​sized poster advertisements for previous Suburban Menace Hip Hop shows. The room has a worn-​out sofa, and many musical instruments stand around, including a keyboard, computers with recording software, microphones, deejay deck-​tables and sheet music. In the kitchen, empty bottles of beer are stacked in a corner from the previous night. In between the living area and the kitchen, a small storage area has been converted into a recording booth. A studio microphone has been attached to a

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sheet music stand, so emcees are able to perform their rap lyrics unencumbered –​while checking them, in case they forget. It is here in the Menace Mansion that countless meetings led to the formation of the MobCoW rap group, where questions were raised as to who should be included in the group, where decisions on which languages were to be emphasized in performances were taken and discussions about how to brand themselves as authentic local rappers, indexed with global Hip Hop’s authenticity, were held. In Chapter 8, I will demonstrate how the performativity of rap genres in the Mansion index gendered identities, and how the linguistic remixing of gendered speech is emphasized in the Mansion, as compared to Club Stones. As part of finding emerging and technologically easy ways to connect with their fans, followers and peers in the local Hip Hop community, Suburban Menace created a Facebook page. In so doing, they ensured the glocal scaling of language and Hip Hop cultural practices from global Hip Hop. I  followed the updates and comments on the Facebook page very carefully, particularly after the Hip Hop show in Club Stones every Wednesday night. CC, mentioned earlier in this chapter, would provide a summary of the show, which was usually followed by comments by members subscribed to the page (see Figure 4.5).

Figure 4.5  Screenshot of Suburban Menace Facebook Page

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The Facebook page was an open page, allowing interaction from everybody who was interested in it. I mentioned earlier that most of the audience was made up of so-​called Coloured fans –​the linguistic reach of multilingual remixing might have been limited racially –​but with the Facebook page Suburban Menace had access to larger multilingual communities. They used the Facebook page to initiate topics on language and identity struggles, and engaged in debates about Hip Hop authenticity and history, particularly local Hip Hop history. It was a good forum for young artists to learn about the conduct of other local Hip Hop performers, and also very important for the older generation of Hip Hop heads to interpret the responses from fans and artists on the Suburban Menace brand. The Suburban Menace Facebook page facilitated ‘online talk’ which ‘extends Hip Hop focused interaction, and making a homepage and or weblog extends practices of fan productivity’ (Androutsopolous 2009: 54). Multilingual remixing was exported and stylized with online ways of writing that saw a mixture of English, Kaaps, isiXhosa, SeSotho, isiZulu and Tsotsitaal and texting language, such as would be recognized on mobile communication platforms.

4.5  Conclusion In this chapter, I  have described the topographical layout of Club Stones and its spatial affordance in terms of the practice and performance of multilingualism. I have also described the other important spaces and places: the Menace Mansion and Facebook. The second part of the chapter discussed how commercial repertoires emerge as incidental and iconic forms of multilingualism utilized as part of the larger performativity of local Hip Hop, but also as part of non-​linguistic processes of stylization. In the chapters to follow, I will explore how these young rappers remix multilingualism, link its performance of marginalized voices to other rap genres, as well as how they perform their masculinity and femininity, in the process of putting forward a downscaled product of global Hip Hop informed by their shared sense of locality. In Chapters 5–​8, I aim to demonstrate how the stylization of multilingualism, the enregistering of personae through braggadocio, the performance of locality in freestyle rap battles and the staging of masculinity and femininity contribute to our understanding of the performativity of local marginalized linguistic voice, and new orders of multilingual interaction in the highly globalized and commercialized Hip Hop culture of Cape Town.

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Multilingual Braggadocio and Intertextuality

Alim (2009b: 16) has drawn critical attention to how the intricate interrelationships of language, multilingualism and identity serve as the discursive ingredients for the contextualization and recontextualization of voice in global Hip Hop. Scott (1999: 215), earlier and in a similar vein, has focused on the peripheral nature of marginalized voices, and how they are implicated in performance genres (see also Pennycook and Mitchell 2009:  40). In this chapter, I  want to illustrate how, through a local scale-​levelling of rap genres, global Hip Hop is reconfigured and recalibrated by emcees in the context of Club Stones. The emcees in this book, as I have demonstrated in the previous chapter, come from Hip Hop spaces and places now more than ever defined by new cross-​cultural diversities and Cape Town from their perspective can best be understood as an urban network of intertextual diversities that yield different intercultural voices (Bauman 2004), such as new forms of migrant groupings in the township, the diversification of racially homogenous areas, new forms of mobilities and new modes of selves. In this chapter, I argue that emcees draw on intercultural voices to represent a version of their own marginalized voice, as a consequence of being local and being a local multilingual speaker in a mobile Hip Hop community (compare Wünderlich 2006). I suggest also that by doing so, emcees are arguing on behalf of those multilingual speakers who need to be heard, who are not normally recognized in the mainstream: those (1) ‘self-​aware voices –​that are now beginning to discover their own collective power of analysis both within and across borders’ (Sarkar 2009: 142); and (2) ‘poetic voices . . . of a new multilingual, multiracial urban generation seemingly left out of the language planners’ calculations’ (Sarkar 2009: 153). This chapter is an analysis of the intertextuality of the genre of rap performances referred to as braggadocio. The aim here is to analyse how MobCoW rap group members in Club Stones entextualize the genre of braggadocio and link

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local varieties of language and registers to an intertextual gap in the interests of ‘keeping it real’ (see discussion in Section 5.3). In the next section, I offer a brief definition and description of braggadocio, followed by a discussion of the practice of sampling and intertextuality in Hip Hop. This is followed by the presentation, description and analysis of a multivocal strip of a transcribed braggadocio performance that focuses on the stylization and multilingual ‘languaging’ by emcees affiliated to MobCoW. I conclude this section by attempting to draw out preliminary threads and implications about the enregistering of marginalized voice in the performance of braggadocio.

5.1  Performing Multilingual Braggadocio Suburban Menace was the first rap group out of the larger MobCoW rap group to perform every night during the Hip Hop shows. The MobCoW rap group was packaged and polished for a regular showdown in Club Stones. There, fans and Hip Hop heads were treated to new ways of using local languages and the expression of emerging rap styles and identities. Suburban Menace started releasing ‘Mixtape Volumes’ as the MobCoW rap group became more firmly established. These monthly releases by emcees of MobCoW secured a loyal audience of fans and Hip Hop peers, who were listening to and being influenced by the lyrical poetry of the rap group. Studio recordings had in fact predated their first performances at Club Stones, but the act of performing together, on a stage, in front of a local audience, had the unique function of representing the MobCoW rap group, who started to perform an authentically ‘MobCoW’ identity. To do so successfully, they had to keep it real. One example of representation and keeping it real came in the performance of the rap genre braggadocio. In global Hip Hop, celebrating rap styles and boasting about success is a ubiquitous practice across many localities (see Rose 2008). An emcee performing on-​stage would often key into their rhyme specific topics, such as their sexual exploits, physical attractiveness, accumulation of money, their swagger (coolness) or their linguistic skills. This genre of rap performance is known as braggadocio (bragging, or bravado). According to Smitherman (1997: 12–​13), a prominent commentator on African-​American English, [braggadocio] is richly interwoven into the everyday (AAE) conversational context, and it is ritualized in the toasts, longstanding epics from the oral tradition. ‘Shine’, ‘Stage-​o-​Lee’, ‘Dolemite’, ‘the Signifying Monkey’, and other well-​known

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toasts are rendered with clever rhymes, puns, and culturally toned experiences, and references from a fresh and new perspective.

Braggadocio requires creative and artistic skill, clever multivocal languaging (Higgins 2009:  112), and the ‘gift of the gab’ to brag about exploits, promote particular rap styles, and represent place and rap crews. It is, as Higgins puts it, a form of ‘self-​praise’ which ‘[echoes] both local and global cultural practices at the same time’ (2009: 113). In the performance of lyrical content and rhyming, emcees continuously use braggadocio to performatively index how they are keeping it real or representing; in other words, their authenticity. Emcees may use braggadocio to disrespect (diss) their fellow Hip Hop peers or relegate them to the margins by negating their ‘attributes [physical or otherwise] while praising one’s own’ (Keyes 2004: 137). Sometimes this leads to trouble with other emcees, especially between different rap groups. Braggadocio draws on varieties of language, registers and speech styles originating in social aspects of life in the township. These socio-​linguistic ingredients for staging voice in multilingual modes are used strategically to create relations between different performances of the braggadocio genre. The genre allows emcees to bend, blend and mix words, phrases and registers, with the polysemic features and salient socio-​phonetic features of the local multilingual repertoires; in short, to remix their own multilingualism. The fact that performances of braggadocio employ highly heteroglossic forms of stylization is very suggestive of a process of social change; as Bakhtin observes, ‘the word in language is half someone else’s’ (Bakhtin 1981: 293–​294). In this process of making other speakers’ words their own, performers of braggadocio have generally employed a multivocal approach that draws on the personae and discourses of Hip Hop originating in and influenced by that of the United States. Commenting on the local appropriation of the discursive features of braggadocio, Pennay (2002:  124)  describes how German rap crew Rödelheim Hartreim Projeckt developed their rap style by amalgamating braggadocio lyrics and rhyming with particular sound sampling to satisfy a German Hip Hop fan base:  ‘Their sound is a mixture of rap braggadocio with laid-​back grooves and slick production and makes use of their regional accents (a marker of class as well as geography).’ Similarly, Forman (2004: 209) describes how, during the urban genesis of Hip Hop, the rap style of emcee Mix-​A-​Lot was filled with braggadocio lyrics, the content of which articulates ‘a purely capitalist discourse of monetary and material

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accumulation, reproducing the terms of success and prosperity that conform both to dominant social values and to the value system inherent within the rap industry’. Present-​day emcees seem to continue in this vein, perpetually developing and reinterpreting the genre. For the purpose of this chapter, and specifically for approaching braggadocio as a performance genre, the notion of genre generally will be taken to mean a ‘complex of communicative formal features that makes a particular communicative event recognizable as an instance of a type’ (Blommaert 2008: 43). Genre also indicates ‘a social category . . . made up by people in their social encounters’ which at one point or another are formed into a coherent text that ‘gives us insights into the make-​up of the social world in which it was made’ (Kress 2003:  100). The focus on genre as socially constituted and anchored in space and place, and subjected to the scale-​levelling of performances, supports the conclusion that all genres leak . . . [they] never provide sufficient means of producing and receiving discourse . . . [and because] elements of contextualization creep in, fashioning indexical connections to the ongoing discourse, social interaction, broader social relations, and the particular historical juncture(s) at which the discourse is produced and received. (Briggs and Bauman 1992: 149)

Briggs and Bauman suggest that genres are never complete when used in performance and talk. Genres are instead uneven, and therefore offer us an opportunity to approach braggadocio not only as socially constituted –​that is, as shaped by the everyday languaging of multilingualism by emcees –​but also as being a significant locus for studying and understanding multilingual practices, and their social foundations more generally. As such, an analysis of how braggadocio operates within the local context of Hip Hop also provides insight into how multilingual emcees go about sampling sounds and languages, and their varieties, registers and styles, and how keeping it real and linguistic virtuosity are used as metrics for evaluation of the genre in the local. While the data below demonstrate very little audience participation, as compared to the analysis of freestyle rap battles in the next chapter, what does become evident is that the sampling of texts in the braggadocio performed by each emcee are set up as intertextual dialogues, performative re-​enactments of voice for interaction on the performance stage. We will see presently how braggadocio unfolds among the emcees affiliated to MobCoW. But in order for us to move to that point, a discussion of sampling practices in Hip Hop and the intertextual nature of genres is in order.

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5.2  Sampling and Intertextuality Sampling and intertextuality are two important concepts to clarify in order for us to understand how the stylization of voice is accomplished in different varieties of language, and how voices become entextualized in performances of braggadocio. Sampling is the meshing together of sounds and styles by selectively adopting various existing sounds, beats, styles and personae in order to produce mimesis and hybridity. Rap music, as it developed lyrically and musically, has always been about sampling, and emcees have customarily defined their particular artistic profiles in terms of their specific individual polylingual and polysemic practices. The manner in which sampling practices have developed since the inception of Hip Hop and rap music in the 1970s has changed significantly, with the speed of change fuelled by present-​day globalization. With the development of technology, the internet and file sharing (see an excellent study by Haupt 2008), all neoliberal characteristics of global capitalism, what is digitally sampled became part of the local practices of ‘the relentless sampling of sonic and verbal archives’ (Potter 1995: 53). That in turn, according to Rose (1994: 89), has given rise to ‘a process of cultural literacy and intertextual reference’, which has lead Shusterman (2004: 530) to propose that an informed and sympathetic close reading will reveal in many rap songs not only the cleverly potent vernacular expression of keen insights but also forms of linguistic subtlety and multiple levels of meaning, whose polysemic complexity, ambiguity, and intertextuality can sometimes rival that of high art’s so-​called open work.

Taking this call seriously, Appert (2011: 16) demonstrated that developments in sampling allowed for the indigenization of global Hip Hop in Senegal, allowing ‘Senegalese youth [to] draw on both the social function and the performance style of the griot to create overlapping musical, social, and generic intertextualities’. This rings true for a number of other African localities (cf. Künzler 2011 on Mali and Burkina Faso; Mbaye 2011 on West Africa; and Mose 2011 on Kenya). Haupt argues that, since the 1980s, sampling practices in Hip Hop have provided the means for marginalized people to claim some form of a mainstream voice, allowing them to ‘realise that any media representation could be appropriated and recontextualized in order to produce meanings that compete with hegemonic perspectives’ (Haupt 2008: 76). His argument is that the voices of the multitude –​captured in the poetics of the emcee, the modern-​day griot –​are an

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assemblage of grassroots politics blended with new transmodal technologies. In a similar way, but specifically related to language, Roth-​Gordon (2009) notes how conversational sampling among young multilingual speakers in a Brazilian favela occurred when they drew on familiar phrases of Hip Hop in their conversations, how they performed rap music and their accurate usage of famous lyrics. She defines conversational sampling as the ‘seamless integration of rap lyrics into everyday speech’ (Roth-​Gordon 2009: 64). She describes how those speakers ‘recycle’ songs and lyrics by using language that recontextualizes global Hip Hop for local participation in their communities (Roth-​Gordon 2009: 64). At its simplest, conversational sampling denotes the meshing of global texts about Hip Hop (and its elements) and how bits of the discourses of Hip Hop at different scale-​levels are transformed into relocalized genres (following Pennycook 2010a). In many local contexts, both in and outside of the United States, when emcees use different languages to perform rap genres, they generally sample an African-​American voice through the use of African-​American English (AAE) (Androutsopolous 2009:  58). This suggests that sampling practices operate at different scale levels, in various localities, and with various complexities as tied to the local Hip Hop community politics. The way emcees display their voices and personae in braggadocio rests fundamentally on how they deploy creative practices of intertextuality. Sampling, and conversational sampling in particular, is one form of such intertextuality in the context of Hip Hop performances. According to Bauman, intertextuality is the ‘relational orientation of a text to other texts’ (2004: 4). The concern for Bauman here is about generic intertextuality as organizing principles for describing and illustrating how certain texts are taken on and manufactured. For Bauman, intertextuality does not simply mean the adoption or adaption of linguistic features of a language, but that texts and its features are historically traceable across cultures and to genres of those cultures (Androutsopolous 2009: 45). As such, intertextuality concerns the repeated citation of texts as well as how texts are reiterated in linguistic practices and performances such as parody and play. We find intertextuality at the interplay or nexus of dialogue that exists between texts. Texts are brought together and negotiated in specific contexts, and it is in context where they speak to each other in dialogic ways (Bakhtin 1986: 162). The question I pose here is not so much whose voice is put on display by the emcee on-​stage, but rather how the voice is enregistered as not necessarily a signifier of marginalization in the recontextualization of multilingualism and texts. In other words, a close study of the linguistic means for sampling should

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reveal to us how different forms of multilingualism result from the promotion of marginalized voices. Expressed differently, analysing how localization is managed and encoded in local linguistic resources yields insights into specific ‘local’ conditions for multilingual remixing. In this chapter, the approach I take to the way emcees sample from everyday texts circulating in and outside of Hip Hop spaces focuses on how their performances may be indicative of intertextual sampling, and how they localize the space through sampling and the delocalization of genre. I apply the notion of intertextual gap to illustrate how the performance of braggadocio constitutes an incomplete genre relocalized from the global to the local. The notion of an intertextual gap, introduced by Briggs and Bauman (1992), aids in the analysis of how voice is structured in uncompleted genres, and of the process multilingual speakers undertake to break through into genre performance. As they define it, the uncompleted parts of the generic model of a genre make way for a process whereby ‘particular utterances’ are linked to that model and ‘thus necessarily produces an intertextual gap’ (Briggs and Bauman 1992: 149). In other words, for any genre an intertextual gap will occur, and will do so in the following manner: On the one hand, texts framed in some genres attempt to achieve generic transparency by minimizing the distance between texts and genres, thus rendering discourse maximally interpretable through the use of generic precedents. This approach sustains highly conservative, traditionalizing modes of creating textual authority. On the other hand, maximizing and highlighting these intertextual gaps underlies strategies for building authority through claims of individual creativity and innovation (such as are common in 20th-​century Western literature), resistance to the hegemonic structures associated with established genres, and other motives for distancing oneself from textual precedents. (Emphasis in original)

The processing of intertextual gaps is thus about what forms and functions of language and multilingualism fit, or do not fit, in the uncompleted parts of the generic model of a genre, and how speakers exploit the ‘inherent dialogicality’ (cf. Briggs and Bauman 1992: 150), or multivocality, of the model. This idea of an intertextual gap holds significant implications for how multilingual remixing is thought and studied. Thus, the questions I pose here are: How do emcees sample local varieties of language and registers to stage what they believe to be their particular stylization of voice and personae in their local context? And how can the genre notion help us understand the specific social dynamics at work in these contexts?

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In the following section, I  will demonstrate how emcees’ intertextual performance is indicative of everyday conversations about Hip Hop and the performativity of marginal voices as they perform the braggadocio genre. These performances connect global Hip Hop to the uses of language and voice found in the ‘everydayness’ of multilingualism in Cape Town. I  demonstrate how emcees recontextualize the generic structures of braggadocio by maximizing its intertextual potential, and by linking local varieties of language and registers through strategic manipulation, and the exploitation of intertextual gaps.

5.3  A MobCoW Performance: Voices in Intertextual Gaps At ‘No Stones Unturned’1 on Wednesday, 19 March 2009, Lil Holmes and CC were the MobCoW rap group hosts. That night was a good example of how local emcees de-​emphasize the use of English as a global language, one that has to a great extent defined braggadocio, using instead non-​dominant languages, registers and varieties to produce a ‘secondary genre’ (Bakhtin 1986: 62) –​a local intertextual braggadocio. This local braggadocio deliberately normalizes –​that is, enregisters –​their marginalized voices as they ‘absorb and digest various primary (simple) genres’ (Bakhtin 1986: 62). In their performance, MobCoW emcees linked particular forms of speech, registers and speech styles to the generic model of braggadocio, maximizing its intertextual gaps and recontextualizing the genre in the local. The evening started with a set programme: booked rappers and emcees were scheduled to perform, drinking games and promotions were also slated. At about 9 p.m. Lil Holmes stepped on stage and opened the show. Deejay Earl Scratch faded the music and Lil Holmes presented the first act for the evening, quipping, Once again Wednesday nights, Suburban Menace in the house. I got my boys Boesmankamp in the house tonight, some tight emcees. I  want to give some thanks to Wendell, the main Hustler. Hy sponser vanaand se event vir ons [He is sponsoring tonight’s event for us]. His laces is 20 bucks, hey, and a mixtape is 30 bucks.

The audience listened attentively. After Boesmankamp’s performance, Lil Holmes readied the audience for the performances by the MobCoW rap group, and the audience replied with loud cheers. He then turned to deejay Earl Scratch and motioned him to play the beats (the rap music base track). At that point, MoB and M.D.K.  stepped onto the

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stage, microphones in hand, shaking their heads to the music, opening the performance. Emcee M.D.K.’s performance was largely inaudible because of technical difficulties; hurriedly, MoB continued the performance, with some lyrical bragging: Extract 5.3.1 MoB: 1. Ok 2. Let me do this M.D.K. 3. Come on 4. Yeah 5. After all it’s a man’s world 6. But her universe 7. And my verse 8. Every sixteen I call it [inaudible] 9. And I’m hard to cross 10. Like a border 11. Bottomless lines 12. Serving me 13. Kind of a tall order 14. Till we slaughter 15. So don’t mess around 16. Because we don’t drop bombs 17. We shoot mortars 18. And you know we’ll be lauded 19. Applauded 20. Can switch lanes quicker 21. Than [inaudible] 22. Can switch flows quicker 23. Than a river 24. So fuck the tide 25. We stay above water 26. We deliver flawless shows 27. The best sixteen 28. And entertainment 29. Stay consistent 30. Stop all the payments 31. Still a man’s world 32. But girls make it excited

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33. I write my own rhymes 34. In bed I resort to bitings 35. It’s my life 36. I stay behind bars 37. Serve out my sentence 38. Hand me the pen 39. I’ll still be comprehensive

MoB prides himself on being a good lyricist, a good-​looking rapper and someone who earns money (‘chases paper’) for Suburban Menace. His entextualization of braggadocio is based on a hustling style which can be grouped into three themes. He makes the body of a woman exotic in relation to his own, staging the local everyday heteronormative rules of masculinity in the Hip Hop space (lines 5–​8, 31–​34). He sings his own praises, as it were, focusing on his lyrical talent (lines 9–​13, 20–​3, and 36–​39). He also boasts about the MoBCoW crew by ‘keeping it real’ and ‘representing’ the unity of the group (lines 14–​19 and 24–​30). MoB uses English to make ironic statements that offer meta-​commentary on the overwhelming dominance of men in Hip Hop culture. In his interpretation, women control the ‘universe’ that overwhelms his ‘man’s world’ (lines 5–​6). Relations with women are as important to him as the recording of (sixteen) bars of music, as he explains, ‘and my verse every sixteen I call it universe’ (lines 7–​8). After twenty-​three lines of rhyming along this theme, MoB re-​emphasizes the importance of relations with the opposite sex as a rapper. Although he asserts that it is ‘still a man’s world’ (line 31), he implies that men alone cannot manage it. What we find in MoB’s performance is an emphasis on asserting in English his rap group’s (the ‘we’ he constantly refers to in the text) lyrical coherence, linguistic virtuosity, work ethic and Hip Hop cultural philosophy. He expresses the risk rival groups take in confronting MoBCoW rap group members by informing the audience present in the club that MobCoW will ‘slaughter’ (line 14) any emcee who dares to cross their path. ‘So don’t mess around’ (line 15), forewarns his audience that when MoBCoW rappers respond, it will be lyrically explosive: ‘we don’t drop bombs /​we shoot mortars’ (lines 16–​17). This is why MoBCoW rap group members are ‘lauded’ (line 18) and ‘applauded’ (line 19). MoB’s performance then develops into boasting about staying consistent in the face of adversity, and the financial difficulties that plague rappers not signed by big commercial labels. By adopting an aggressive tone and body comportment, he dismisses encroaching adversity by means of commercial imagery. He

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and the MobCoW rap group members always find new ways to navigate the rough seas: ‘So fuck the tide /​We stay above water /​We deliver flawless shows’ (lines 24–​26). They do this by producing ‘The best sixteen /​And entertainment’ (lines 27–​28). He is therefore able to dispense the following, somewhat hyperbolic advice: ‘Stay consistent /​Stop all the payments’ (lines 29–​30). Part of rap braggadocio is the artful display of self-​awareness in a rapper’s overall performance (Higgins 2009: 113). In the case of MoB’s performance, he asserts his rap and English linguistic virtuosity as a particular authentic style that stands out from the rest of the MobCoW rap group. Nobody can assail him lyrically because he is ‘hard to cross /​like a border’ (lines 9–​10). This is because he supposedly has a ‘bottomless’ (line 11)  store of lyrics and rhymes. And if any emcee ascended to any rap or lyrical battle with him, they would probably lose: ‘Serving me /​Kind of a tall order’ (lines 12–​13). He compares himself figuratively to a race car that changes lanes quickly, and also to a rushing river: ‘Can switch lanes quicker /​. . . /​Can switch flows quicker /​Than a river’ (lines 20–​ 23). Importantly, he addresses both normal audience members and his Hip Hop peers when he positions himself as being part of a crew but also an individual rapper who is able to rap over any type of music (‘I stay behind bars’, line 36) for as long as it takes (‘Serve out my sentence’, line 37). And he reasserts this toasting of individual lyrical consistency and brilliance by inviting anyone of the emcees to ‘Hand me the pen’ (line 38) because, as he ends the performance, he’s ‘still . . . comprehensive’ (line 39). MoB’s organization of his on-​stage performance and lyrical content enacts the themes he boasts about. His performance emphasizes aspects of gender identification and lyrical creativity in English, as he ‘convincingly acts as though something were at stake beyond the entertainment of those who are watching’ (Goffman 1974:  125). MoB raps in English inflected with an AAE accent. By delocalizing the genre in an AAE accent, the emcee moves to promote how emcees and perhaps Hip Hop fans in general practice multilingualism in their (conversational) sampling practices in Club Stones. In other words, how they perform becoming and being Hip Hop artists and fans involves using both global and local Hip Hop culture and language. The use of AAE locally in Cape Town, whether to talk about Hip Hop as fans or to perform braggadocio as an emcee, forces an intertextual gap with other local varieties. Thus, for the emcee, keeping it real is to perform his lyrics in an AAE accent sampling from everyday talk about braggadocio that typifies emcee conversations. In other words, it is normative to use AAE accents in talk, and it is normative to see it unfold in onstage performances of braggadocio.

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After he finished the last line, emcee Cole reframed MoB’s braggadocio performance by entextualizing the genre not through English, but through a local variety of Afrikaans: Kaaps, deregistering English in favour of a marginalized variety. But before emcee Cole came on stage, MoB’s performance opened to an intertextual link by sampling a text atypical of global Hip Hop braggadocio: call and response.2 M.D.K. (who remained quiet on stage) joins MoB: Extract 5.3.2 M.D.K.: 1. Yeah! 2. Yeah! MoB: 3. Make some noise! 4. Emcee Cole! 5. [the audience cheers and claps while Emcee Cole comes on stage] Emcee Cole: 6. One two, one two (Emcee checks the Microphone) MoB: 7. Yoh, we got Emcee Cole in the building!

This short section of call and response between emcees M.D.K. and MoB serves to introduce the upcoming performance by emcee Cole. This strategy features prominently throughout the corpus of data I  gathered from on-​stage performances of the MobCoW rap group. Firstly, M.D.K. affirmed the effectiveness of MoB’s performance in two turns with the verbal cue, ‘Yeah’. Then MoB immediately elicited ‘noise’ from the audience by way of welcoming emcee Cole to the stage. This interaction is accomplished in English; the audience plays their part by responding with cheers. Call and response here serves as the generic framing for braggadocio, and it is significant that MoB opens his performance in a variety of English. The call and response initiated after his performance created certain expectations from the audience –​and other emcees –​that some of the same lyrical content might be performed or other types of intertextual relations introduced. The audience anticipates that emcee Cole will perform braggadocio lyrics that reveal his style, linguistic virtuosity, and much of the same sexual escapades mentioned by MoB. Furthermore, they anticipate that the call and response, as a relational aspect of the genre braggadocio, will prepare the way for emcee Cole to reframe his braggadocio performance, also through English, given his linguistic expression of ‘one two, one two’ which is the standard discursive move in Hip Hop that follows

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‘mic check’. But as becomes apparent below, the emcee instead used the stage event to manipulate the intertextual gap by choosing to sample his braggadocio as a combination of everyday texts based on Kaaps: that is, by tapping into the local multilingual normativities of Kuilsriver. Extract 5.3.3 Emcee Cole: 1. Ja   Yes 2. Is ja!   Oh yes! 3.                 [the audience cheers] 4. Julle is excited jong   You are guys are excited 5. La’t dai beat in kom   Bring in the beat 6. La’t dai beat in kom   Bring in the beat 7. One two, one two 8. Is ja almal   Oh yes everybody 9. Die’s parana opgetek   The piranha’s opened up 10. En wannee’ skarrel die cat   And when the cat hustles 11. Om ‘n kroon te maak   To make money 12. En dai is hoe ek dwala in jou bek   That’s how I run across your mouth 13. Die’s impossible flows   These are impossible flows 14. Ek wil ‘n hospital bou   I want to build a hospital 15. Vir al die beseerde emcees   For all the hurt emcees 16. Kyk hoe verpos is julle nou   Look at how forlorn you are now 17. Die’s ‘n klomp mad goete’s       (pointing to MOB and M.D.K.)   These guys are mad performers

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18. [inaudible] 19. La’t die vloere nou laat bless   Let the floors now be blessed 20. Maak die stage warm   Warm up the stage 21. En berei soes change Labarang3   And prepare like change to Labarang 22. Julle kan my nie vriet ‘ie   You can’t consume me 23. Ek’s soes vark vleis op Labarang   I’m like pork on Labarang 24. [inaudible] 25. Right, die tyd stoot   Right, time’s pushing 26. Djy sê djy’s groot   You say you are mature 27. Djy’s a pikinini4   You’re a boy 28. Wat nog toet-​wys word   That is still becoming conscious of pussy 29.                 [the audience cheers!] 30. One two, One two 31. Bo oppie track   On the track 32. My gazi5 hoe djy gecheck   My brother, how did you check 33. [inaudible] 34. Ek rep my plek   I represent’ my place 35. Dan staan my tande   Then my teeth stick 36. Soe uit my bek    [lifts hand up into the dark lit air to motion, up]   Like this out my mouth 37.             [the audience cheers!] 38. Dan ons move met respek   Then we’ll move with respect

Emcee Cole’s rap performance breaks with the AAE omnipresent in global Hip Hop to use the language variety spoken on the Cape Flats. In so doing, he paves the way for other local varieties and registers to be entextualized in braggadocio.

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Whereas MoB’s performance had a clearly organized group of lines that concentrated on sexual exploits, boasting of lyrical fitness and finesse, and celebrating the present and future successes of MoBCoW, emcee Cole used his opportunity to frame braggadocio in a far more locally relevant fashion. He starts his performance with almost ten initiatory lines to acknowledge the call and response interaction with the audience (see lines 1–​8). He then raps about what he has to do for money; that it is necessary for him to ‘hustle’ (work). He then compares himself to a piranha, a fish known as a vicious killer when hunting in numbers (‘parana’, line 9). Emcee Cole toasts his particular style of rap through the use of local words, such as dwala, which means to interrupt, to make quiet, to speak out of turn by interrupting others. The use of the form ‘dwala’ is a feature of local registers such as Tsotsitaal and Sabela as spoken in Cape Town. It forms part of registers that are shared among youth on the Cape Flats who encounter specific practices of multilingualism not only in Hip Hop genres, on-​stage, but in their everyday language practices. The linguistic form that appears in Cole’s performance is linked to his further use of the word kroon (money). As the emcee toasts about his ‘impossible flows’ (line 13) and about building a hospital for all the injured emcees (line 14), he creatively employs the linguistic resources of Kaaps. With further boasts, emcee Cole’s rap style is made to seem incontestable. Lines 22–​23 are particularly forceful in light of local religious beliefs: ‘Julle kan my nie vriet /​Ek’s soes vark vleis op Labarang’ (‘You can’t consume me /​I’m like pork at Labarang’). Labarang is the local term (from Malay or Javanese) for the international Islamic Eid festival celebrating the end of the fast. Emcee Cole indexes Islamic ritual celebrations to liken his individual lyrical and linguistic creativity to the inedibility of pork. He thus registers his style as taboo, not to be copied. Lines 26–​28 comment on rites of passage in the township: the emcee draws on culture-​ internal stereotypes (Agha 2007) through Kaaps and invokes adulthood (‘maturity’) and the physical changes linked to sex and stereotypical gender roles. He concludes his braggadocio by asserting to the audience members and his peers that they are privileged: ‘Dan staan my tande /​Soe uit my bek /​Dan ons move met respek’ (‘My teeth stick out /​Like this out my mouth /​Then we’ll move with respect’, lines 35–​36 and 38). Thus, in the concluding lines of Emcee Cole’s braggadocio a link is made in Kaaps to performing local rap music intertextually, and at the same time, in the process of enregisterment, a deregistering of English takes place. After Emcee Cole’s performance, MoB, who stayed on stage during his whole performance, initiated a call and response with the audience, giving time for the next performer –​emcee Narc –​to take centre stage, and start his performance:

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Extract 5.3.4 MoB: 1. Make some noise! 2.                  Audience: [cheers] 3. Ok 4. Can we bring Chuck back on to the stage? [Motions to Chuck and Baza but Narc comes instead] 5. Make some noise for N-​A-​R-​C! Narc: 6. Yeah! 7. Put your hands up 8. I say put your hands up 9. Yeah! 10. Uh MoB: 11. Come on 12. Come on 13. Yeah Narc: 14. Yeah 15. Yeah 16. I got a superrag man 17. Call me supaswag man 18. And I spit this shit 19. Like I just won a grandslam 20. Yeah 21. I’m a Caped Crusader 22. And I don’t [inaudible] 23. I don’t hate you haters 24. [inaudible] for me 25. To make my paper 26. [inaudible] 27. Music is my saviour 28. I’m what music gave 29. Yeah 30. Alright 31. Ok 32. I don’t hate 33. No way

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34. I just let these mothafuckas 35. Get a thirst of my swag 36. I smoke them quicker than a drag 37. Cause you struggle with the basics 38. I keep it real 39. You guys are living in a matrix

The call and response in lines 1–​6, initiated by the leading emcee, MoB, has a double function in that it holds the attention of the audience, wandhile introducing rap personae onto the stage. As MoB introduces the next few emcees to the audience, he realizes that Narc has already stepped onstage and so, instead of stopping Narc’s performance, they both engage in verbal cueing for the sake of stage continuity (e.g. ‘Yeah’ in lines 6 and 13–​15, respectively). Verbal cueing is an important performative strategy employed by emcees in rap performances. The purpose of verbal cueing in the performance is to structure the lyrics that Narc is going to perform. He eventually succeeds in doing so from line 16 onwards. Unlike the emcees that performed before him, Narc performs his braggadocio in a way that showed the ‘cool’ side of his identity (his ‘swagger’ or ‘swag’). According to Kearns (2010:1), swagger is the mindset of fearing nothing, complete self-​determination above and beyond any laws, moral codes or social norms, and the intention to back all of this up without hesitation, by any means necessary, be it wealth, weapons or women.

From line 16 onwards, Narc promotes his rap authenticity in a localized form of swag, making a reference to the ‘Caped Crusader’ (Batman) that puns on the place, Cape Town, and could also be heard as ‘Cape Crusader’ (line 21). Although an under-​researched performance genre, swag is often misunderstood outside the cultural world of Hip Hop as inspiring conventional differences and as enforcing seemingly simplistic stylizations among Hip Hop heads themselves. However, it is argued here that swag is a form of sampling that becomes decontextualized, is iterable and contributes to the overall coherence of braggadocio in local Hip Hop contexts. In Narc’s performance, for example, a variety of different intertextual relations are brought together in the sampling of swagger lyrics. Firstly, his performance is in a variety of English which is stylized in accented African-​American English (AAE), therefore providing linguistic evidence for the display of global Hip Hop authenticity. Secondly, the sampling of swagger lyrics in the broader structure of his braggadocio makes for an interesting reflection:  the overuse of the verbal cue ‘yeah’ (seven in total) is usually not a significant feature of the braggadocio performance. This may indicate that Narc

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struggled to remember his ‘writtens’ –​his written and rehearsed lyrics. He stylizes not only the verbal cue in accented AAE, but also African-​Americanised lexical items such as ‘supaswag’ (line 17) and ‘muthafuckas’ (line 34). One single intertextual theme runs through Narc’s lyrical content: the present or future jealousy of rival Hip Hop heads, labelled here as ‘haters’. The term ‘hater’ is linked to the celebration of commercial success among emcees in Hip Hop communities across the world. According to Perry (2004: 48), who comments on Hip Hop in the United States, hating is ‘thrown at those imagined to be envious of one’s wealth or abundant suitors’ (see also Boyd 2004: 114). Narc’s performance suggests that in order to prevent inauthenticity, i.e. to ‘keep it real’ (line 38), he and his emcee crew actually need haters, because without them the crew would not be able to ‘make [the] paper’ (i.e. money, line 25). To this end, Narc’s sampling of swagger lyrics, in a broader sense, recontextualizes the performance of braggadocio through the global language variety AAE. In the context of the Cape Flats, because of the ubiquity of US Hip Hop, Narc’s performance in accented AAE would not necessarily be brought into question. However, in the local context of the Hip Hop show, his performance is an attempt to performatively link up with the other emcees performing braggadocio through language varieties or accented Englishes. We see that Narc’s entire lyrical structure is outlined by toasting his swagger intertextually. Although swagger is often understudied by Hip Hop sociolinguists, its history as a text set in global linguistic flows (cf. Alim, Ibrahim and Pennycook 2009) is important because emcees associate swagger with a kind of ‘coolness’ or with the pimping culture of American rap in the southern US states (Perry 2004). Thus we see that Narc’s attempts to incorporate swagger lyrics and stylize accented AAE in his braggadocio taps into the processes of mainstreaming marginalized voices. The literature on the politics of English in the United States surrounding AAE has opened up a space for dialogue around the linguistic voice of previously marginalized citizens in that country. Researchers like Smitherman (1977, 2000) and Alim (2004) have shown that it is not enough to recognize the creative capacity of speakers in order to mainstream voice; we also need to recognize what these voices actually signify. In other words, we need to demonstrate how marginalized multilingual speakers challenge the linguistic imperialism of English and point to alternative, utopic scenarios of linguistic hybridity and diversity (Stroud and Guissemo 2016). Nevertheless, what we see Narc achieving here is a display of an awareness and recognition of language varieties in his surroundings and the semiotics of performing in a global language variety which, in the process, gives others a sense of what they can do phonologically

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or lexically in order to remix their multilingualism. What is remixed here is not only AAE but also a version of South African English that stylizes Narc’s local voice. As a consequence of finding himself in a local space, then, Narc chose to demonstrate to the audience that he is able to draw on different linguistic voices, which are tied to his rap identity and authenticity, in order to link up to other types of voices (e.g. country and black African-​American voices). After the end of Narc’s performance, MoB returned to call and response, continuing with his rendition of braggadocio in the local space. The last two emcees to end the performance were Chuck and Baza Lo. As they stepped onto the stage, they were cheered on by a highly expectant audience who knew that this was the first time they had performed together. Many of the MobCoW rap group members hoped the combination of Baza Lo (an isiXhosa/​Sesotho/​English/​Kaaps multilingual emcee) and Chuck (an emcee with language knowledge of Kaaps/​Sabela) would not only contribute to the racial diversity of the group but also complement the multilingualism of the group and the development of Hip Hop style. As with the previous rap, call and response prepared the way for the main performance: Extract 5.3.5 Narc: 1. Ok 2. No way 3. I get okay 4. I need cash ok MoB: 5. Alright Narc: 6. Ok Chuck: 7. Alright 8. OK 9. I don’t dance 10. No way 11. I just (inaudible) 12. My style is fokkel   My style is nothing 13. My broe’   My brother 14. Djy sal wat mens kan tokkel   You’ll have to speak up

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15. Djy sal moet koppel   You need to connect 16. Sterk Emcees moet kophou   Tough Emcees keep up 17. I’m strong for ghettos   I’m strong for ghettos 18. Soe verlap in die ghettos   So downtrodden in the ghettos 19. Emcees maak verplette   Emcees I murder 20. Maar belieg kapettos   I lied I axe you 21. ‘Ek moet my bek hou’   I must shut up 22. Terror sê soe   Terror said so 23. Ek sê, ‘Nie, I let go’   I say, ‘No, I let go’ 24. Want ek het jou   Cause I got you 25. Djy lat my waarheid   You let my truth 26. Maar uithou   Really persist 27. Verstaan jou ma   Understand your mother 28. Djy dra haa’ bra van kan dikhou   You wear her brassier ‘cause you persistent 29. Ko’ haal jou piel   Come get your dick 30. Die string het jou flow   My cadence got your flow 31. [inaudible] my beat kannie uithou   [inaudible] my beat can’t last longer 32. Volwassenes   Adults 33. Masters   Masters

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34. Wat djy ko’ dophou   You need to come and watch 35. Anders sal djy nooit kan getuig van the Chuck Ou   Otherwise you’ll never witness the Chuck guy 36. Die only true emcee   The only true emcee 37. Wat die laities nou gan vashou   Keeping the kids attention 38. [inaudible] 39. In die Filistyn   In Philistine 40. Emcees op julle getrain   Emcees I trained on you 41. My style is freestyle   My style is freestyle 42. And my stuil will remain   And my style will remain

Similar to that of Narc, the performance by Chuck presented here can be viewed as a combination of sampled texts as well as an attempt to absorb these texts into the generic structure of the braggadocio genre. Like the other emcees that went before him, the audience expects Chuck to draw on texts that have already been sampled (bragging, metaphors, idiomatic expressions, etc.). However, Chuck surprises by performing a very different form of sampling which impacts significantly on the intertextuality of the local braggadocio performance. At the beginning of his performance, although it is not immediately clear, Chuck addresses either someone in the audience or somebody out of sight. He starts performing simultaneously with the end of the call and response, suggesting to the audience that he is not an emcee that dances to the beat of others (line 9). This proclamation of ‘not dancing’ is a sufficient segue into the entextualization of an incident which occurred in global Hip Hop. At the 1995 Source Awards in New  York, amidst the East vs. West Coast rap battle, Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight (representing the West Coast) ‘dissed’ Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs, the founder of New York–​based Bad Boy Records, for not only dancing in his music videos but also in music videos by artists signed to his record label. Knight had proposed that New  York City–​based artists defect from Combs’s label, saying, amongst other things:

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Any of you artists out there that want to be an artist and wanna stay a star, and don’t have to worry about the executive producer trying to be all in the videos, all on the records, dancing, come to Death Row!6

Knight’s statement was viewed as contentious and fanned the flames of the battle. To relate this back to the context of Club Stones, Chuck raps that he is not dancing in order to index his tough stance (Jaffe 2009). For instance, in lines 13–​15, it is still unclear whom he is addressing, but what is clear is that he uses a number of Sabela phrases to suggest that whoever addresses him lyrically will have to speak up (line 14) if they want to connect to his braggadocio (line 15). Only after these lines have been performed do we understand that his intended audience is all the tough men in the crowd (line 16). By opening his performance in Kaaps, and using the Sabela register, Chuck’s use of words such as ‘koppel’ sets the stage for a lyrical battle with an emcee in the audience, as he warns: ‘Sterk emcees moet kophou’ (‘Tough emcees need to keep up’, line 16). The sampling of these lyrics is set in the general structure of the local braggadocio, as Chuck raps that he is not a stereotypical emcee when it concerns representing his place because he is ‘strong for ghettos’ (line 17). He is also mindful of what is ‘verlap in die ghettos’ (‘downtrodden in the ghettos’, line 18), which invokes both his socio-​economic condition and that of many audience members. In this way, Chuck celebrates a particular style of rap by referencing ‘ghetto’ and by emphasizing the inequalities in townships. According to Gerard and Sidnell (2003:  282), emcees ‘offer spatial descriptions that include place-​names [which] are often received with expressions of appreciation (for example, applause), and as such these descriptions provide opportunities for audience members to engage as active participants’. Here we can clearly see how the emcee uses ‘keeping it real’ and linguistic virtuosity as metrics for evaluating what types of sampling (do not) fit in the relocalizing of the braggadocio, as the sampling of a different text is introduced in his performance. In subsequent lyrics performed in Kaaps and Sabela (lines 21–​31) Chuck samples in the genre of ‘beef ’. According to Smitherman (2000: 65), beef can be understood as ‘conflict, squabble, a problem’ between rap groups or crews over one or several particular issues. Similarly, Fitzpatrick (2005: 6) states that ‘beef is a long-​standing disagreement between individuals or groups. The different sides in a beef may use battling as a way to defame the other side, although this is not necessary.’ In our example, Chuck gives the impression that someone else started beef with him by saying he should shut up (line 21). To elaborate, we hear that ‘Ek moet my bek hou’ (I need to shut up), which is in fact a sample reference

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from an earlier performance by, Terror MC, a veteran emcee in Cape Town Hip Hop. This sampling is an indication that Chuck is infuriated because if there was any beef between him and Terror MC, they could have settled it on-​stage in a freestyle rap battle –​one of the more standard and agreed-​upon ways of settling beef (see a detailed analysis of freestyle rap battles in the next chapter). However, because this has not happened, Chuck has to reply with battle lyrics in a braggadocio performative frame, using attacking rhymes with gusto (line 23) but refraining from any physical encounters (lines 25–​26). Interestingly, by performing in Kaaps and Sabela, Chuck mediates his beef by sampling discourse aspects of tough masculinity in his lyrics. He subjects Terror MC to a vicious, emasculating attack by suggesting that he wears a brassiere (line 28)  and has been castrated (line 29). Chuck then moves out of battle genre mode to perform braggadocio lyrics and suggests to Terror MC and the audience that he is the only true emcee (line 36) and that his style (of braggadocio) will remain (line 42). Chuck is the only member of the MobCoW rap group who has had significant exposure to Sabela. His rap style incorporates the physical mannerisms and gesturing that is often associated with the Number gangs in Cape Town. His entextualization of rap braggadocio is unique in comparison to the more globally inflected performances of MoB and Narc, as it is relocalized to the ‘extreme local’ by being performed in Sabela, a register which shares a lot of vocabulary with Kaaps. This sets Chuck apart from the rest of the MobCoW rap group, as does the way in which his braggadocio lyrics overlap with his performance of beef which, on the surface, seems disorganized. However, Chuck seems to view this as an encouraging way of performing his braggadocio, linking Sabela and Kaaps to the local generic model. What is clearly achieved by Chuck’s performance is the mixing of Sabela and Kaaps into the Hip Hop space of the show. Specifically related to his performance, he remixes multilingualism on stage by according strategic importance to Sabela, which is used here to perform beef lyrics. At the same time, Chuck also highlights the performative relevance of Kaaps. Given the history of marginalization surrounding the use of Kaaps (cf. Prah 2012), he stylizes (unintentionally and perhaps without a larger purpose) this Afrikaans variety for the purpose of mainstreaming his own linguistic voice and that of other audience members who share that voice. The final performance of braggadocio was that of emcee Baza Lo. For the first time, we find no call and response, but rather an abrupt move with no overlap by Baza Lo as he performs after Chuck:

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Extract 5.3.6 Baza Lo: 1. Baza, Baza lo, phum’ enkonzweni   This is Baza, Baza, straight out of church 2. Gcwala ngifun’ ozong’tshela   Recognize what I want, who’s going to tell me 3. I wanna hear ozong’tshela   I want to hear who’s going to tell me 4. Yes, xa ungamkele ngwana woza uzong’ thola   Yes, if you’ve accepted me girl come get me 5. Lana ngipeth’ uBaza, Baza, bheka ngubani ozo ndicrossa?   Here I have Baza, Baza, who is going cross me? 6. Ngithi ng’rap apha   I say I rap here 7. [inaudible] 8. Lapha mfana abang’funi   They don’t want me here dude 9. Ukuthi vel uzong’thola   Because they know they’ll get me 10. Hahaha 11. Kuhleli zona zodwa   Only they are sitting here 12. Apha ng’hleli nabantwana vele uzogcwala, yes!   Here I’m sitting with girls, of course you’ll appreciate, yes 13. S’pheth’ ighetto mfethu   We own the ghetto my friend 14. Abantwana bathi ‘Sifun’ ukuth’ uvele uzoyithola’   Girls say ‘We want you to come and get it.’ 15. Izokuphel’ imali yotwala, vele ng’lapha ebackdoor   Money for alcohol is going to end, I’m here at the backdoor 16. Ek willie praat van jou   I don’t want to talk about you 17. S’phth’ i-​check nou   We have the checks right now 18. Staan op, my penis, vele san’ uzoythola   Stand up my penis, of course, you will get it 19. Abantwana ba-​’skriekie’ –​ek, believe uzothola   Girls are ‘skriekie’ –​I believe you’ll get it 20. En hy’s skaam van jou   And he’s shy of you.

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21. Abantwana sbathol’   We’ll get the girls. 22. [inaudible] 23. Ghetto Style baba! 24. Ghetto Style baba!

Here, Baza Lo is performing in isiXhosa, English and Kaaps. He is the only emcee on stage who is able to perform lyrics employing these three linguistic resources. As his performance unfolds from line 1, it is difficult to discern whether he samples one or another intertextual relation absorbed in the braggadocio by his crew members. It is also unclear whether he samples swagger or beef texts. One could argue that he is performing a non-​intertextualizable braggadocio, which perhaps would be the whole point of his performance. However, this is really just a surface appearance, as Baza Lo’s lyrics entextualize an eKasi style of rap (an emerging rap genre created in black townships across South Africa) that is strongly linked to the practice of Spaza Rap. He boasts about his masculinity, and his ‘supaswag’ is self-​evident as he boasts not only to women but also to the ‘haters’ (line 8) that he has cheques (line 17). Spaza Rap uses isiXhosa, a variety of South African English, Kaaps and other language forms from various African languages, to comment on the realities of black township life. In addition, Spaza Rap celebrates and criticizes the politics of the new black middle class. Baza Lo, however, only seems to do the former. In doing so, he introduces into the braggadocio performance a stylization of isiXhosa, English and Kaaps as a way to resemiotize (Jacquemet 2005) the ‘gangsta-​pimp-​ho’ discourse prevalent in global Hip Hop (see Rose 2008; Sharpley-​Whiting 2007). In its place, he samples an eKasi street-​smart persona to entertain his audience. The task Baza Lo challenges us with is to read his persona as an intertextual and interpersonal event. According to Agha (2007: 239), like any semiotic activity, the activity of reading persons has a text-​in-​context organisation in any given interpersonal encounter; it is shaped by text-​level indexical effects. But it is also mediated by stereotypes of indexicality, namely stereotypical social images associated with discrete signs that specify default ways of reading persons who display them.

The linguistic strategies Baza Lo employs in his lyrics are mediations about his persona, ‘Baza, Baza’ (line 1), a tough eKasi guy who is streetsmart about women and rap. Similar to Chuck’s performance, we find that Baza Lo metapragmatically suggests that ‘Baza, Baza’ is the guy that nobody should attempt to assail (line 5). Secondly, the emcee suggests that he does not necessarily feel out of place in

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the context of Club Stones and cares very little for being accepted because he owns the ghetto and the women as well as having money in plenty. Although he performs that he raps here, it is difficult for him to do so because nobody wants him in the place (lines 6–​8). In his live performance, Baza Lo reflects on some of his audience members not being able to understand him, not because he performs in isiXhosa, but because some may be jealous of him because he has all the women. Who ‘they’ are, as referred to in line 9, is an intriguing reinforcement of the challenge to haters. The emcee shrugs off his haters and suggests that he is made to feel accepted because of all the women seated near and around him (line 12). The celebration of money and success is a global aspect of Hip Hop, but in the case of Baza Lo’s braggadocio performance, we clearly see a number of intertextual relations of a locally scaled nature sampled into the generic model of that genre. The remaining lyrics in Baza Lo’s performance (lines 15–​24) are a reinforcement of stereotypical representations of women and a statement of his desire for them. In addition, these lyrics reinforce the eKasi rap persona. He toasts this style of rap as an enregistered ‘Ghetto Style’ in the performance. The reference to the ghetto reinforces the ‘gangsta-​pimp-​ho’ image and simultaneously recontextualizes the braggadocio performance space as one where ghetto style is allowed. Thus Baza Lo’s performance mediates a semiotics of feeling out of place, but we nevertheless see him remix his multilingualism in an attempt to open up conditions for an eKasi persona to be accommodated by the braggadocio.

5.4  Conclusion In the beginning of the chapter, I organized my argument about the enregistering of marginalized voice around recent pronouncements in language and Hip Hop literature. I pointed out that the emcees above draw constantly on the cross-​cultural terrains of Cape Town and its outlying townships to highlight the nature of marginalized voices, particularly historically marginalized ones. These are intercultural voices shaped by recent socially transformational politics in South Africa, and the performance of new forms of selves (see Jones and Dlamini 2013). Because of those diversities, the creative predilection of emcees is to create new spaces, sui generis, for marginalized voices in a transgressive semiotics almost never recognized in the mainstream. In this chapter, voice as performed through braggadocio centres on intertextual

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relations and personae. Those personae are exaggerated by the braggadocio and suggest that larger processes are drawn on to display them as socially constitutive of marginalized voices on the periphery of Cape Town, creatively assembled in the staged event. I approached braggadocio as an uncompleted genre that is relocalized by emcees in the local. I introduced the notion of sampling, including conversational sampling, and of the intertextual gap as a way to account for the creative and performative processes emcees would undertake to enregister their voice. Specifically, in the multivocal performing of braggadocio, each emcee emphasized different but similar ways of doing so. They did so by sampling everyday texts, stylizing local forms of language varieties and register, and also resemiotizing the function of certain varieties of language (such as the use of AAE accent) and registers in the entextualization of braggadocio. This allowed them to relocalize the genre, but also to promote their authenticity by keeping it real, displaying unique linguistic virtuosity, and presenting metrics for evaluating the genre. In the final chapter of this study, I will attempt to draw these aspects together to demonstrate the implications for the study of multilingualism. In the next chapter, I aim to present an analysis of freestyle rap battles and how a shared sense of locality emerges in the way emcees remix multilingualism.

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6

Multilingual Freestyle Rap and Performing Locality

The study of Cape Town Hip Hop has focused largely on the narratives and poetics of resistance, race and counter-​hegemonic agency in apartheid and post-​ apartheid contexts (Haupt 1995; Ariefdien 2005). Despite this attention, Hip Hop freestyle rap performances and battles remain relatively under-​researched. This chapter suggests that these performances display linguistic and discursive features that are of interest not only to scholarship on rap music and Hip Hop on the Cape Flats but also to research into the core issues surrounding the remixing of multilingualism and voice more generally. There are many good reasons to agree with Alim (2009b:  1)  that freestyle rap battles are ‘marvelous speech events. They are inviting and also very challenging. They have become a litmus test for modern day griots’ (cf. Peterson 2001). Freestyle rap performance is a type of performative discourse created when emcees combine freestyle lyrics, rhyming, linguistic ability and the sampling of various rap music styles. It is a type of rap performance that displays linguistic and discursive features that speak to the core issues around rap personae, and the embodiment of multilingualism and voice. Freestyle rap performances have always attracted a huge audience and were an enormous success in displaying emcees’ linguistic and discursive abilities in Hip Hop spaces, whether it is in the favelas of Brazil, in the streets of Hong Kong and India or in the rural Eastern Cape towns of South Africa. Many freestyle battles in Cape Town use two or more languages to convey information of place, identity, rap style and interaction with the audience. The languages used between the emcees and the audience, in this case, are a variety of English, African-​American English (AAE) and Kaaps, often including registers and unexpected, uncommon language forms and functions not usually associated with rap performing. Of course, freestyle battling is far from a mere performance of rapping virtuosity, but constitutes an engagement with global forms to create a sense of a shared

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locality and acknowledgement of voice (see Alim, Lee and Mason 2010, 2011). This chapter suggests that the way emcees use their language in Hip Hop spaces such as Club Stones, connected to places like the Menace Mansion and online social medial spaces such as Facebook, offers up an instructive example of the remixing of English, Kaaps, and texting language by youth on the Cape Flats. It employs the notion of extreme locality to frame how multilingual emcees go about remixing multilingualism locally and negotiate multilingualism and identity in online spaces such as Facebook. In this chapter, I demonstrate and analyse the processes of entextualization with respect to freestyle battle performances in Club Stones, the Menace Mansion and Facebook.

6.1  Introducing Freestyle Rap Battling In the data I analyse here, a salient feature of the discourse is how aspects of space, both local spatial coordinates as well as non-​local spatial elements, are entextualized in the actual performance of a freestyle rap battle between two emcees on-​stage and in a natural language situation defined by freestyle rap performing. Core features of local space bind participants together around a common understanding of the local bric-​à-​brac of happenings and reference points they share and the people they know, and how languages or varieties of language, together with aspects of audience presence and transmodal features of the interaction (such as an ongoing TV programme), are variously referenced multilingually and incorporated into the performance. Both these facets of the rap battles are essential to the co-​construction of locality. Moreover, in the freestyle rap battling studied here, the battles between protagonists are in fact nothing less than competitive bids, whereby elements and forms from different languages are remixed and entextualized by protagonists, indexical of the register of rap. In the examples that I comment on in this chapter, I have focused on how locality emerges in freestyle rap performances by means of verbal cueing representing place, performing disrespecting (dissing), making (deictic) reference to local coordinates, transposing or recontextualizing transidiomatic phrases and incorporating local proxemics and audience reactions through commentary and response. I argue that competition around acceptable linguistic forms and framings (metalinguistic disputes) of locality comprise the very micro-​processes behind the formation of new registers. At the same time, these registers create the semiotic space for the exercise of voice through multilingual practices; that is, through linguistic citizenship.

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6.1.1  Emcee Keaton versus Emcee Phoenix On a typical Wednesday night, freestyle rap performances start at 10 p.m. and end around midnight. On the night of the freestyle rap battle between rappers Keaton and Phoenix, Club Stones attracted a large audience of youth for the Suburban Menace Hip Hop show, ‘Stepping Stones to Hip Hop’.1 Before every battle, emcees sign up onto a performance roster, though they do not necessarily know who their opponent will be. Only at the start of freestyle sessions will a battle mediator (or time-​keeper), who would usually be Mseeq, call the emcees onto the stage. Performances are timed to last no longer than 60 seconds, and within that time emcees must outperform their opponent, who is revealed by the mediator. In order to initiate the battle, a coin is tossed to determine who will start first. Compared with the street freestyle version of this genre, the stage is highly regulated. In street freestyle rap battles, the rules are more relaxed in terms of who ‘falls off ’ the (imagined) stage and who ‘jumps in’ the battle circle, and instead of a mediator who imposes a rule in the divide, the audience keeps order (see Lee 2009a; 2009b for excellent examples). Keaton and Phoenix are two emcees who had not met prior to their lyrical duel that night at Club Stones, and neither knew from which township or part of Cape Town the other hailed. However, as emcees, they have a great deal in common in the way of creativity, lyrical style, and Hip Hop musical tastes. Keaton is in his early twenties and has practiced rap since he was a schoolboy. He is fluent in Kaaps and English, is able to rap in both languages, and understands the street register Sabela. Born and raised in the area historically demarcated for Coloured and Black people in Kuilsriver, Keaton is considered an inexperienced emcee in his home Hip Hop community. Since the start of ‘Stepping Stones to Hip Hop’ he has made use of the opportunity to perform his music; recently he has started attempting to battle-​rap, something he would have shied away from before. He is an unsigned artist, and his record for winning freestyle rap battles has been poor, largely due to his inexperience. Phoenix, on the other hand, is a MobCoW rap group member and a veteran emcee. Since the start of the Wednesday night Hip Hop shows, he has attracted a small audience that supports him, and wants him to win. He has more than eight years of experience as a battle emcee. His first major performance was at ‘ “Spoeg [Spit] Jam” Afrikaans Hip Hop’. He also lives in Kuilsriver and considers himself a rap artist and a ‘student of life’. His aspiration is to become the Afrikaans rapper in South Africa, and a household name. Most Hip Hop heads know him as Phoenix, but he also raps under alias Charlie Raplin. The highlight of his career

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so far has been being crowned the ‘Heal the Hood’ best artist award. His multilingual ability, like Keaton’s, is grounded in his fluency in Kaaps and English and his understanding of Sabela. Hip Hop music has had a huge influence in his life, and he boasts of having ‘a sharp mind that took to rhyming’. He writes rap lyrics and records frequently. In Club Stones he has established a reputation for being the best comical rapper, and has recently signed up to the independent label CapCol.

6.1.1.1  Analysing First Round of the Freestyle Rap Performance: Entextualizing the Discourse of Verbal Cueing, Biting Rhymes and Representin’ At the beginning of the first round of battling, Mseeq (the mediator) called the inexperienced Keaton onto the stage first, and then the veteran Phoenix. Mseeq then asked for a coin from the audience. Keaton, the more junior of the two, was given the chance to choose heads or tails. Keaton chose heads, but Phoenix won the toss. Phoenix elected Keaton to begin. Extract 6.1.1 Round 1: Keaton 1. Yoh, yoh… yoh, yoh 2. Ek gat Engels spit, nuh   I’m going to perform in English, right 3. Julle verstaan SMEngelS   You understand SMEngliSh 4. Hie’ gat ek   Here I go 5. […] 6. My favourite colour is red 7. Like a bloodshed 8. With purple haze 9. When I shoot the sucker dead 10. I’m rolling in a 11. Shish kebab 12. When I woke this morning I was a lost soul 13. Cause I got [inaudible] 14. And a sore throat 15. A wardrobe with an army robe 16. In a [inaudible] signing autographs 17. I just remembered that I’m absent-​minded [inaudible]

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18. That it crossed my mind 19. I can’t rhyme it 20. I freestyle every verse I spit

Keaton began his performance with a verbal cue used predominantly as a turn-​ taking element in freestyle battles, ‘Yoh, yoh . . . yoh, yoh’ (line 1). The use of this particular cue is common in African-​American English (AAE). Keaton’s use of it in this context suggests that he is tapping into transnational forms in what can be interpreted as an attempt to promote himself as a credible emcee with a translocal identity, someone able to perform freestyle rap battles meaningfully, rather than the inexperienced rapper he is in reality. Another feature of Keaton’s freestyle rap is that he violates the basic rule requiring him to perform battle lyrics, rhymes and punch-​lines that together comprise a personal attack on his opponent. He is expected to spend his stage time disrespecting his opponent. This may include dismissive commentary on his opponent’s verbal abilities, or non-​verbal comportment. Instead of adhering to the norms of the genre, Keaton rhymes about being a protagonist in a series of events, where: (1) he links various colours to the outcomes of violence he plans against a ‘sucker’ (lines 6–​9); (2)  he compares his car to a spicy ‘shish kebab’ dinner (lines 10–​11); (3) and claims that even though he feels like a lost soul with a ‘sore throat’ when he wakes up (lines 12–​14), (4) his warlike outfit and his fans remind him of his ability to think off the top of his head and perform his freestyle lyrics (lines 15–​20). Noticeable is the constant meta-​reflection on his person rather than the expected entextualization of interpersonal and combative relationships. The lyrical content is managed largely through the use of English, although it is evident that Keaton is attempting to engage and appeal to both English and Afrikaans speakers among the audience. In lines 2 to 4, he rhymes: ‘ek gat Engels spit [I’m going to perform in English], nuh, julle verstaan [You understand] SMEngelS. Hie’ gat ek. [Here I go]’. The form SMS (mobile phone texts, or ‘short message service’) is commonly associated with the linguistic practices of texting (the combination of acronyms, short phrases and icons usually used in social networking real time chats [RTC]). Keaton builds his lyrical content around this form of semiosis, thus assuming that those in the audience who practice texting or frequently visit social networking sites such as Facebook will understand this. Through asserting that ‘julle verstaan [You understand] SMEngelS’ (line 3)’ he recognizes that interaction with audience members figures as an important part of freestyle rap battles; audience

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members are the assessors of good battle performances, as well as significant co-​constructers of them. A feature of Keaton’s performance is that many of the lyrics that he performs are from the American rapper Eminem’s song ‘Cum on Everybody’ off the Slim Shady LP (1999). Rappers frown on this practice, as it is seen as biting rhymes (or plagiarism; see definition in Smitherman 2006). Lee (2009b:  316)  states that an emcee would be accused of not only plagiarism but inherit the dubious reputation of ‘spitting writtens’. Through monitoring and policing the sampling practices of emcees, the audience is intrinsically involved in the ongoing emergence of Keaton’s battle performance itself. Towards the end of his performance, many of the audience members started to boo him off the stage. His attempt to be lauded as an emcee was clearly slipping from his grasp. To make matters worse, Keaton’s competitor Phoenix turned his back on Keaton, whereupon the jeering by the crowd of Keaton grew even louder. While the music faded into the background, Mseeq had this to say to Phoenix: Extract 6.1.2 Mseeq: 1. Ooh, djy draai jou rug   Ooh, you turn your back 2. Lyk my djy wil in die hol geëet word   It looks like you want to be fucked in the ass 3. Waar’s 28?   Where’s 28? 4. Is 28 in die building?   Is 28 in the building? 5. [Laughs] 6. Dai’s ‘n Facebook joke   That’s a Facebook joke 7. OK, Phoenix is djy gereed?   OK, Phoenix are you ready? 8. Is djy gereed Phoenix?   Are you ready Phoenix? 9. OK, [name of DJ] sit die man se mic hard genoeg   OK, [name f DJ] increase the volume for his mic

In lines 1–​5, Mseeq is entextualizing his and the audience’s shared knowledge of street battles, including forms of same-​sex sexual violence, associated with

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the Number gangs in Cape Town. By going on to say ‘That’s a Facebook joke’ (line 6) he wryly updates and amends his reference, bringing it into the age of social networking. In his interruption, Mseeq makes reference to a variety of features that are essential to a shared sense of locality, namely: (1) the number 28, associated with a particular Numbers gang, and the use of the Sabela register (an admixture of isiXhosa, Kaaps, Zulu, as well as non-​verbal gang signs) such as reference to the number 28 (see lines 3 and 4); and (2) the language and discursive practices used on Facebook. Local knowledge of language, including the admixture of elements of various multilingual repertoires, is in this example not sufficient to unpack certain indexical relationships, as a speaker would have to be familiar with the goings-​on of various groups, interactions and cultures in the local milieu to understand what is going on. The reference to homosexual sex in the context of male dominance and gang culture, far from being a socially transgressive statement by Mseeq, only underlines the heteronormativity of the freestyle rap battles as metaphorically linked to Number Gangs, and their ways of being men inside and outside the prison context or Hip Hop stage. Thus, in a single linguistic interchange –​which preceded Phoenix’s first-​ round freestyle rap performance in response to Keaton –​Mseeq entextualized both linguistic and non-​linguistic aspects for local spatialization. This communicative action rescaled (Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck 2005b) Keaton’s entextualization of verbal cues and lyrical content in AAE, even though Keaton had attempted to align himself with transcultural Hip Hop. Mseeq also contributed to scale-​jumping with his rejoinder by commenting on Keaton’s performance in Kaaps, bringing in local identities and local discourses and community practices. With respect to each of the features highlighted in Mseeq’s interruption, Keaton is guilty of violating some of the fundamental principles of rap performance. Not only does he choose to rap in AAE instead of Kaaps; he spits writtens. This latter feature suggests how it is improvisation, rather than intertextuality, that contributes to the locality. Improvisation of course is by its very nature a situated practice, dependent on the local context. And finally, by erasing all references to the immediate context –​such as choosing not to refer abusively to his protagonist –​Keaton once again fails to contribute to the construction of locality. It is precisely his failure to anchor his performance in the local that earns Keaton the audience’s derision. It was now Phoenix’s turn to respond to Keaton:

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Extract 6.1.3 Phoenix: 1. Yoh, yoh, is ja   Yoh yoh, yes 2. Kuila ruk die ding ja   Kuila keeps it rocking yes 3. Kuila ruk die ding ja   Kuila keeps it rocking yes 4. Kuila ruk die ding ja   Kuila keeps it rocking yes 5. Jy! Jy!   Yes! Yes! 6. Ek kom met ‘n sword in   I come with a sword 7. Ek druk hom binne ‘n bord in   I’ll drive it (like) through a wooden board 8. Ek sal die bra hop-​tail   I will jump on this guy 9. Dan kap sy gevriet in by Jordan   And slice his face like [Michael] Jordan 10. Ja, tjek ‘it uit, ja   Yes, check it out, yes 11. Kyk hoe lyk djy my broe’   Look at yourself, brother 12. Djy het nie eens geld nie   You don’t even have money 13. Vir jou sal ek wen soes Liverpool teen Chelsea   I will win against you like Liverpool against Chelsea 14. Is ja   Oh, yes 15. Djy’s gefok ja   You’re fucked yes 16. My broe djy kan kans drobba   My brother, you can’t even drobba 17. My broe djy lyk met ‘n fake hare amper soes Drogba   My brother, you have fake hair almost like Drogba

Like Keaton, Phoenix begins his performance, and links sections of it, with verbal cues (lines 1, 5, 10 and 14). However, what makes his performance different

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from Keaton’s at the outset is a sampling of AAE verbal cueing code-​mixed with Kaaps (see lines 1, 5 and 10). He commences the performance with ‘Yoh, yoh’ and ends the verbal cue with ‘ja’, thereby introducing Kaaps into a position in this battle sharply different from what had preceded it. In other words, what Phoenix does is to (re-​)entextualize the use of AAE verbal cueing by Keaton in a more poetically and aesthetically pleasing format for the audience and his Hip Hop peers, with a clear, local anchoring of global Hip Hop authenticity. His lyrical content is neatly constructed, and between lines 2 and 4 he rhymes the phrase, ‘Kuila ruk die ding ja’2, paralinguistically waving the audience members to participate in the call and response. Phoenix entextualized the phrase intentionally to enact what is commonly referred to in global Hip Hop communities as representing your place (see Smitherman 2006). Morgan (2009: 72) states that, To represent in Hip Hop is not simply to identify with a city, neighbourhood, school, and so on. It is also a discursive turn –​it is the symbols, memory, participants, and objects and details that together produce art of the space and time. Representing rebuilds and reinvigorates the space by making it Hip Hop. Representing accomplished through a fantastical and complex system of indexicality –​literally pointing to and shouts out place, people, and events when an interaction is framed around important referential symbols and contexts.

Because Phoenix is from Kuilsriver, he used the majority local audience from the community to rally behind his performance. These phrases are repeated in no more than two lines and preceded the verbal cue, ‘Jy! Jy!’ (line 5) performed with a slight rise in pitch, all provocatively directed at Keaton. Phoenix continues his performance in Kaaps. His use of the phrases such as ‘Ek kom met ‘n sword in’ [I come with a sword] (line 6), ‘druk hom’ [drive it through] (line 7), and words such as ‘hop-​tail’ (line 8) and ‘smash’ (line 9) exact the violence generically required in freestyle rap battles in Kaaps. For example, he draws on the discourse of poverty to denigrate the rap identity of Keaton by comparing him to someone who has poor taste in clothes and no money (lines 11–​12) and to someone who always backs the losing team in a soccer match (line 13). Buoyed by his lyrical creativity –​and cheered on by members of the audience –​Phoenix continued to assail his opponent who he lyricized as forlorn (‘Djy’s gefok ja,’ line 15) and unable to bounce back (‘kan kans drobba,’ line 16). Line 13 is formulated to reference to Keaton’s prior performance directly. Towards the end of the performance, Phoenix had turned his back and looked up to the television set, to watch the match between Liverpool and Chelsea. The lyric in line 16 is inspired by the dribbling ability and running passes of

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footballer Didier Drogba –​an aspect of the match that Phoenix incorporated into his lyrics, thereby inserting it into the pace of the performance as a transmodal instance of local space. This lyrical attack in Kaaps on Keaton is insinuating that Keaton is unable to respond to his battle rhymes because he ‘kan kans drobba’ and identifies Keaton in line 16 as a fake emcee whose lyrical performance (assumingly ‘writtens’) are comparable to the supposedly fake hair on football star Didier Drogba’s head. As mentioned, most of Phoenix’s lyrical performance was managed in the Kaaps. His use of verbal cues through the latter language is an emerging performative discourse in the Hip Hop community of Cape Town.

6.1.1.2  Analysing Second Round of Freestyle Rap Performance: Entextualizing Disrespect (Dissing) In the performance discussed in the preceding section, Keaton and Phoenix performed very different freestyle raps. For Keaton, the upscaled and global use of AAE for verbal cueing was the language variety he thought to be more useful to infiltrate the space and appeal to the linguistic sensibilities of his audience members. This was not well received, and his opponent, Phoenix, used his failure to score a win. In the next performance –​the second round –​Keaton’s performance reveals two things: (1) that he now understands that he must perform battle rhymes, and not rap about himself; and (2) that he has realized that he must do freestyle rap lyrics in a language variety or register other than AAE in order to win. In the second round, the audience attempts to influence the emcees’ performance even more explicitly and loudly than before (see lines 1, 3, 4 and 5 in Extract 6.1.4). Their goal is to put pressure on Keaton to freestyle in what they consider to be the correct language. Because he started the first round, Keaton also starts the second. He entextualizes the discourse of disrespecting (dissing) with an frequent use of expletives in Kaaps: Extract 6.1.4 Keaton:       Audience Members: 1.           Afrikaans man!             Spit Afrikaans, brother! 2. Is julle reg?   Are you ready? 3.           Ja!              Yes!

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Multilingual Freestyle Rap and Performing Locality 4.          Doen Siebela!            Do Sabela! 5.          Djy jou naai!           You mothafucka! 6. Vir hom ek sal sy masse poes   For him I’m going to muthafucking (lit: mother’s cunt) 7. se fokking bek ba’s   Fuck his mouth up 8. Ek sal sy fokken afkap   I will fucking axe him up 9. en dan smetterig smeer   And grease him good 10. Ek fokking rhyme   I fucking rhyme 11. want ek probee’   Cause I try 12. Ek reppie   I don’t just rap 13. want ekke rep soe’ fokkien wheck   I rap so fucking whack 14. Wat?   What? 15. Hie’ kom ek deur   I’m coming through 16. Ek kom deur met respek   I’m coming through with respect 17. Ek briek sy fokking nek   I break his fucking neck 18. Ek slat my skoen somme binne   I kick my shoe inside 19. In sy bek   In his mouth 20. Ek worry nie   I don’t worry 21. want ekke nie worry   Cause I don’t worry 22. en hy’s fokking geworried   Cause he’s fucking worried

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23. want hy is dik gesplif aan die Darry   Cause he’s high on hash 24. Ja   Yes 25. die fokking…   the fucking…

In this round, Keaton appears to have become aware how freestyle battle rhyming in AAE was limiting his ability to get the audience members to engage with him, just as his use of biting rhymes had not been received very well by the audience and his opponent. His response is thus to introduce linguistic forms in Kaaps and use the register of intimidation through Sabela to disrespect Phoenix, in the use of words such as poes (cunt) and phrases such as fokking bek ba’s (break your fucking mouth) to violently attack his opponent. What is particularly salient about Keaton’s lyrical content is that in the second round he employs forms of language with more masculine and underground connotations that are indexical of the co-​constructed locality of Club Stones. The location of the battle in Kuilsriver, his use of Kaaps, his aggressive body stance towards his opponent (moving up to his opponent’s face for example), as well the audience’s encouragement to use Sabela and use of expletives (see lines 4 to 5), all work together to construct the locality of the performance. Keaton thus attempts to accommodate what he perceives to be his audience’s wishes, while hoping to negate the impact of his first-​round freestyle rap battle performance. This appears to find some success among audience members, although Mseeq policed Keaton after his performance by saying: Extract 6.1.5 Mseeq: 1. Whoooo! 2. Keaton 3. As djy Afrikaans rap   If you’re going to rap in Afrikaans 4. Dan moet djy wiet wat djy sê jong   Then you must know what you are going to say 5. Jou masse frikken…   Your mother’s freaking… 6. Djy is dan net net dit…   You are then only that… 7. Kom Phoenix let’s go   Come Phoenix let’s go

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Mseeq admonishes Keaton when he points out that there are norms to rapping and rhyming in Kaaps, not directly commenting on Keaton’s use of the language, but more on the lyrical norms adopted in his content. Phoenix continued to skilfully close of the battle between him and Keaton: Extract 6.1.6 Phoenix:           Audience Members: 1. Uh, tjek ‘it uit. Tjek ‘it uit   Uh, check it out. Check it out 2. Kuila!   Kuilsriver! 3.                  Hosh!                     Look! 4. Hosh, o’s represent   Look, we represent 5.                  Jy!                     You 6. Met die pen   With the pen 7. Met die slet   With the slut 8.                  Tsais!                     Get him! 9. Djy moet ken   You must recognize 10. Uh 11. Djy’s ‘n disaster   You’re a disaster 12. Ek is die master   I’m the master 13. As ekke klaa’ is   When I’m done 14. Dan lien djy by iemand ‘n plaster   You’ll need to borrow a plaster 15. […] 16. Hy is die flow   He’s the flow 17. Djy moet onthou   You must remember

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18. Vir jou gooi ek soes vleis op die braai   I’ll throw you like meat on the braai 19. Want djy is rou   Because you’re raw 20. […] 21. Djy bly my gryp   You grab me all the time 22. Djy is ‘n meit   You’re a virgin 23. Lyk my ek moet hom weer hop-​tail   It seems I’ll have to hop-​tail him again 24. En vir hom die keer ryp   And rape him this time

Phoenix’s final performance is devoid of expletives. He started his second round of the battle in an almost identical way to his first round, as can be seen from the way he uses verbal cueing (see line 1 and 2). With the exception of a few omissions in lines 15 and 20, the performance here shows both improvisation and a clever use of freestyle lyrics. In the first round, Phoenix performed ‘representing’. In this round, he initially appears to be preparing a repeat of ‘representing’, but instead of producing intimidating rhymes and lyrics, he switches over to a lyrical meta-​reflection on the creative process preceding a freestyle rap performance. The audience engagement and co-​construction in Phoenix’s performance comes out in the way they offer greetings in Kaaps and Sabela. ‘Hosh!’ (line 13)  is a socially acceptable way of greeting among multilingual youth on the Cape Flats, and used to exclaim a person’s presence. On the other hand, it is also an invitation to engage in talk commonly associated with Sabela. The use of the lexical form ‘Tsais!’ has multiple meanings but is used here by audience members to emphasize that Phoenix must push Keaton ‘off-​stage’ because the latter fails to construct good battle rhymes. The manner in which ‘tsais’ is used is further suggestive of the desire that audience members signalled earlier to have Kaaps as a central part of the evolving register. It subsequently becomes clear that Phoenix, by refraining from picking up on these words, choosing rather to remain comical in his rap style and refusing to succumb to consistent pressure from the audience, shows himself once again to be a better emcee than Keaton. The lyrical turns in Phoenix’s second performance are innovative and improvised to further denigrate the young emcee Keaton. In clearly organized turns of four stanzas, Phoenix reflects on Keaton’s previous performances in the freestyle rap battle; that he is much too young to rhyme against him; and that he has

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been feminized. Phoenix makes it clear to Keaton that as a young rapper who attempts to freestyle, rap battle against him will always be a disaster (‘Djy’s n disaster’, line 11), because he is a better emcee (‘n master’, line 12). His performance is always threatening and hurtful. He informs the audience that Keaton thinks he can rhyme (‘hy is die flow’, line 16), but because Phoenix is the master, his lyrics are better, and Keaton must remember that he is still a raw young emcee that will fail (lines 17–​19). In the last lines of his performance, Phoenix feminizes Keaton. He does this by making reference to how Keaton was pulling on his clothes (‘grabbing’, line 21) in order to add paralinguistic value to his use of expletives. What Phoenix suggests is that Keaton in reality just wanted to hold onto him; that he is a sex-​ hungry virgin (line 22); and because Keaton continued with the action Phoenix must win the second round by violating him again (lines 23–​24). In this way, Phoenix clearly ends the freestyle rap battle performance as the winner. To summarize the analysis above, freestyle rap battles in Club Stones are structured, on-​stage performances. Unlike street battles, where an audience stands in a circle around emcees, the on-​stage battles are organized around a specific material configuration of objects. There is also an interesting tendency by the audience to insist on the use of a particular language variety and style in the performance. This insistence, coupled with the other semiotic features discussed above, give rise to the idea of extreme locality. In turn, it is also the performativity of the extreme locality that give shape to the remixing of multilingualism. In the next part of this chapter, I analyse the performance of freestyle rap battles in the Menace Mansion. I will demonstrate how in close interactional contact the rules of street freestyle rap performing overlap with those of everyday interactional talk. It will be clear that in the midst of creating an equidistant circle –​the first meaningful act of street-​like freestyle rap battles –​and depending on who the emcees are that are battling, a certain language variety, style or register will be preferred.

6.2  Freestyle Battling at the Menace Mansion One evening, after a Hip Hop show in Club Stones, I  left for the Suburban Menace Mansion with members of MobCoW and their fans. Once there, we splintered into various smaller groups in the living and kitchen area to engage in talk and performance. In the living room, a group of emcees starting playing Xbox games; nearby, another group deliberated over the successful hosting of

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the Hip Hop event; another group formed around the following freestyle rap performance, led by emcee Cole: Extract 6.2.1 Cole: 1. Nou, as ‘n youngster   Now, as a youngster 2. Opgegroe al twee kante   Growing up on both sides of the track 3. Yak   Yes 4. Baie rof en griewelik sat gewies ook amper   Rough and ill-​disciplined, almost dead 5. Den danke aan die man van bo   But thanks to the man on high 6. Wat gekyk het met die hardegat laaitie van soet   That looked after this hard-​headed kid, from a sweet age 7. Dies was my kranke gebly by my tante   I stayed at my aunt 8. Tot op Standerd twee daai tyd was ek heavy geinfluence deur P.O.C   Until Standard 2. That time, that time I was heavily influenced by P.O.C 9. ‘Ek sê my broe al daai dinge moet djy los’   ‘I say my brother leave all those things’ 10. ‘Daai geld kon gegaan het vir die wiek se kos’.   ‘That money could have gone for the week’s food’. 11. Nou ek was permie op ‘n pos   Now I was permanently on a hustle 12. Toe daai numba gedruk het   When that music played 13. Almal het nou en dan skief getrap   Everyone has gone off the path every now and then 14. Kom manne admit dit   Come on, admit it 15. En Kuila ruk die ding wat   And Kuilsriver rocks 16. Nou op dieselfde dan trap…   Now on that same hustle… 17. Op dieselfde tyd dan slik hy jou in   This life will swallow you whole

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18. Jou huis is din   Your house is thin 19. Djy moet slim trap   You need to walk slowly 20. Aim is op met die BB-​gun of die kettie teen die duiwehok   Aim with a BB-​gun or slingshot against the Devil’s house 21. Die tjil spot was die game shop   The hang out spot at the game shop 22. 2bob ‘n kredit en ek praat van daai silwer ene   Two bob credit, that silver one,way back stories 23. Ek het te veel vir julle   I said too much 24. Everybody else in the Room: Oh! [Clap hands] 25. 3. M.D.K.: Naai, gevaarlik.     Nah, excellent (lit. dangerous). 26. MoB: Oh shit!

In the above extract, emcee Cole opens the freestyle rap performance by rapping about his upbringing on both sides of Kuilsriver: the poorer, more dangerous area, and the safer suburban side. He raps about how he was a delinquent youngster for some time but by Standard 2 (fourth grade) he was positively influenced by the 1990s Cape Town rap group Prophets of da City (P.O.C), and he quotes lyrics from their song ‘Dala Flet’. He then goes on to reminisce about his childhood games and struggles in Kuilsriver (Kuila). The response from the small audience (lines 24–​26) and the clapping of hands reflect a positive assessment of the performance by emcee Cole. Spatially and linguistically, emcee Cole opens the performance in Kaaps and it continues to sustain the notion of extreme locality developed in Club Stones. A  spatial ideology has thus been enregistered regarding the local coordinates of local space, Hip Hop space in particular, and here a language such as Kaaps anchors the semiotic activity. As he hands over the floor to emcee Phoenix, this anchor is loosened slightly through code-​switching that facilitates the next performer’s Hip Hop word play: Extract 6.2.2 1. Phoenix: Hosh ja, tjek dit uit = =        Look, yes, check it out = = 2. Cole:            = = Hie’ kom, hie’ kom = =               = = Here it comes, here it comes = =

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3. Phoenix:               = = Phoenix ruk die ding = =                    = = Phoenix rocks it = = 4. Cole:     = = Die ‘s ‘n hond die meneer, enige tyd = =        = =  This is a dog, this man, any day (looking at M.DK.) 5. Phoenix: = =Tjek ‘it ui, tjek ‘it uit ja.     = = Check it out, check it out yes. 6. Uh… 7. nie hie’ ko ek in met die patte’n van ‘n batten   so how come I come with a pattern of a batten 8. binne in jou bek in   in your mouth 9. wat vas sit in jou nek in   that sticks in your neck 10. so ek reckon djy gaan sat in ‘n second   so I reckon that you’ll die in a second 11. en daar kom ek Bretton   and I come Bretton 12. ek is ‘n weapon   I’m a weapon 13. ek is die riede hoekom djy biewe binne jou bed in   I’m the reason you shake in your bed 14. kry dit in jou pattern   get it in your pattern 15. ek maak jou naar soos melk in ‘n tet in   I make you nauseous like sucking on a tit 16. terwyl ek jou smelt in die section   while I melt you in the section 17. die’s vir een en elke lesson   this is for each and every lesson 18. die’s my passion = =   this is my passion = = 19. Cole:      = = Awe!             Cool! 20. Phoenix:      = = Nou een geraak want die is my passion… Ek ken nie nog ‘n ander woord nie.           Now this is my passion. I don’t have another word for it. 21. Cole: Awe   Cool 22. Ronelda: Go Phoenix!

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23. Phoenix: Nai, ek het dit nou opgemors. Wat’s daai anne verse? = =   Nah, I’ve messed it up now. What’s the other verse?

What is immediately striking from the freestyle rap performed above is that the kind of verbal cueing evident in Phoenix’s battle with Keaton is almost entirely absent, although in line 10 the exhortation to ‘tjeck dit uit’ (check it out) is an exception. He also performs in Kaaps, and he celebrates his rap style, as he did in the battle against Keaton. Performing locality quite clearly exceeds paying attention to the remixing of multilingualism only. The freestyle rap performed by both emcees in Extracts 6.2.1 and 6.2.3 is performed in the Menace Mansion, and the emcees pay attention to the local arrangement of bodies and other physical objects –​to their physical demeanour and body positions. In Extract 6.2.1 we find that it is historically marginalized language varieties such as Kaaps and the register Sabela that are held in high symbolic esteem in Hip Hop spaces such as the Menace Mansion. So far in the performance we have dealt with Kaaps, Sabela and English in the linguistic analysis of freestyle rap performance. What I will demonstrate in the next part of the chapter is that the choice of language(s) in a freestyle rap battles has been a major point of contention between members of Suburban Menace, MobCoW and their fans. This issue deals much with the idea of multilingualism, and ultimately what type of remixing is possible. To explore it, I will analyse a post on the Facebook page of Suburban Menace that invokes aspects of this debate explicitly. I  argue that meta-​reflections on the use of language in such performances contribute significantly to how space is scaled, but also the performativity of locality, particularly extreme locality. I point out that whatever is discussed –​with relation to multilingualism and Hip Hop –​influences the decisions of Hip Hop performers, and the spatialization employed by emcees when they do battle in Hip Hop spaces.

6.3  Talking as Battling about Battling: ‘Should the Battles Be Limited to 1 Language at a Time?’ This was the question posted by one founding member of the Suburban Menace rap group, emcee MoB, on their Facebook page. Since the staging of their Hip Hop show in 2008, ‘Stepping Stones to Hip Hop’, in Club Stones, Suburban Menace had sought to broaden the multilingual scope of their show, particularly

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in rap performances and freestyle rap battles. A few months had passed since the debut of the Hip Hop show, and the proposal to include emcees from across Cape Town led to the question of which combinations of multilingualism to emphasize, including which languages should be included in on-​stage rap performances, and with respect to freestyle rap performances, how many languages. A debate began among emcees and audience members who attended the show in offline and online contexts, but ultimately the decision was left to Suburban Menace as the producers of the show to decide whether the freestyle rap battles should be limited to one language at a time, or whether it should be linguistically inclusive. Although the audience who attended the show was made up largely of so-​ called Coloured Hip Hop fans and Hip Hop artists, increasingly, Black and White fans and artists also started making an appearance. The question of language use thus took centre stage. On their Facebook page, Suburban Menace established a forum for debate around issues of language, identity and local Hip Hop authenticity. This forum allowed fans and artists to interact with each other. This ‘online talk … extends Hip Hop focused interaction, and making a homepage and or weblog extends practices of fan productivity’ (Androutsopolous 2009:  54). Suburban Menace under the stewardship of their label, MoBCoW Records, had to consider the multilingual rap practices of some of their own rap artists who did not perform in English only. The label’s Black emcee, Baza Lo, with his combination of Kaaps, isiXhosa, SeSotho, isiZulu and Tsotsitaal, was a good example. Moreover, Suburban Menace also considered that their fellow emcees, and their fans, are from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds. This is evidenced on the Facebook page, where they frequently wrote in texting language, and a variety of language styles. With these multilingual issues as a backdrop, emcee MoB’s question provoked answers from emcees and Hip Hop fans who not only commented on the indexical values of particular languages as they are used in freestyle rap battles in the Club on a Wednesday night, but also on the need to emphasize multilingual diversity and the intermixing of racial and ethnic speech forms. In Extract 6.3.1 below, MoB is the first one to respond to his question: Extract 6.3.1. Exchange on Suburban Menace Wall 23–​26 March 2009 1. MoB (07:27): This is certainly one of the biggest debates going around. In my opinion it doesn’t really matter looking at demographics of the people coming to Stones on Wednesday Nites. I mean at the end of the day the crowd decides the winner and I think most of the people speaks/​understands English

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and Afrikaans! The one thing that I see and like about the battles is that we’re creating the atmosphere again that the music listerner’s are being taken serious. And that’s going to help with the quality of music that the local artist will bring out. No more ‘artistic masturbation’ please, we need to find the balance between creation and connection! 2. Gift (07:48): I say battles must be in Afrikaans . . . Reason Being –​The people wanna laugh Afrikaans can be the most funniest shit . . . even the English people will laugh them fucked up!! We ive noticed since I came to stones, is that the English rappers are battling!! Eg. Revelation –​Hegot some good punches, good Flow, Using Metaphors at times, But it don’t really strike the crown as hard as Jack denovan, Bio Hazard, Cole or Cream does!! So imo . . . I say AFRIKAANS is the best language to spit in!!tell me what you guys think

In line 1 above, MoB contends that even though the argument about which language should be used in freestyle rap battles is one of the ‘biggest debates going around’, to him it does not ‘really matter looking at (the) demographics of the people coming to Stones on Wednesday Nites’. He goes on to say that it is the crowd which decides a winner, and that he thinks ‘most of the people’ in the audience ‘speak/​understand English and Afrikaans!’ He also recognizes that they, as Suburban Menace, are providing a listening environment for their fans and audience members to appreciate ‘the quality of music that the local artist will bring out’ because they as artists are trying ‘to find the balance between creation and connection!’ Gift responds to MoB by arguing that freestyle rap battles ought to be held in Afrikaans because ‘people wanna laugh’ and Afrikaans lyrics would effectively be funny and ‘the English people will laugh them fucked up!!’ As responses were written on the wall, some commentators argued that English emcees are just as good as Afrikaans emcees in freestyle rap battles. Others argued that Afrikaans emcees have more lyrical content to deliver than English emcees, irrespective of the opinion that English is a global language and much more valued in the marketplace. Nevertheless, toward the end of the online conversation, participants in the discussion explicitly move their answers to the question posed by MoB in the direction of multilingual diversity, drawing on the rhetoric of post-​apartheid South Africa and discourses of racial and ethnic diversity. Extract 6.3.2: Exchange on Suburban Menace Wall 23–​26 March 2009 1. Gavin (10:50): Soe lank it net nie xhosa is nie, van d ninjas vat kla oor op metro fm, hip hop is all about da msg but how do u get da msg when its dat

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kakalak taal? eish me I don’t know, but Afrikaans is more original n lyk marlow wys kak funny 2. Clayton (12:24): LMIMP @ GAVIN . . . moetie hulle swak makie . . . i think they will feel the same way if we spit Afrikaans and they don’t understand it . . . You know our slang can be confusing to anyone not from cpt. I do think that if we can sit it smengels it doesnt matter. You should do anything to move the crowd. Cause at the end of the day. That is what we do –​move the crowd 3. Marvin (14:13): True Clayton! 4. Gavin (17:24): Volle waarheid clayton I was only tawking my kop se kak, I own a lot of hype mixtapes and most of the artist on there r rapping in chosa but they got potential n I keep their shit banging top volume . . . I aint racist some of my best friends r black lmimp

Extract 6.3.2 above speaks to the difficulty of discourses of diversity, but also to how some young multilingual speakers approach the issue of race, and the racialization of multilingualism in South Africa. One of the interlocutors suggests that freestyle rap battles would be understood in English and Afrikaans, but not in isiXhosa (line 1 above). The writer, Gavin, argues that because ‘Hip Hop is all about da msg [the message]’ audience members in the freestyle battle space would find it difficult to understand the message if isiXhosa is used because ‘d ninjas’ [a racial epithet denoting Black people] are already taking over ‘metro fm’ (Metro FM, a popular radio station that broadcasts from Johannesburg). Subsequently, Gavin labels isiXhosa in Afrikaans as a ‘kakalak taal [cockroach language]’, explicitly racializing and dehumanizing Black speakers of the language, which he then underscores with a comment that parodies accented Black South African English ‘eish me I don’t know’, denigrating both the form and the speaker through the use of a ‘mock’ variety He then argues that the use of Afrikaans in the local freestyle battle space ‘is more original’ because the language of Hip Hop authenticity in Cape Town is Afrikaans. In other words, Gavin reaches back into (an imagined) Hip Hop history, to a time when Hip Hop culture in Cape Town was initially in Afrikaans but then transformed into a bilingual and then multilingual culture to reach multilingual audiences in the country. Clayton admonishes Gavin for his racist comments, and he does so by writing not only in English and Afrikaans but also in texting language. Firstly, Clayton writes in text shortcode, LMIMP (which means in English-​Afrikaans text shortcode, Laugh Me In My Poes [Cunt]), and signifies (using the logographic @ sign) that his comments are directed at Gavin, whom he asks not to

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insult black people in Afrikaans: ‘moetie hulle swak makie’ (literally translated as ‘don’t make them weak’). Secondly, Clayton, himself a well-​ known emcee, suggests that isiXhosa speakers would probably also not understand Afrikaans freestyle rap battles if emcees used ‘our slang’ version because it ‘can be confusing to anyone not from’ Cape Town. By our slang, Clayton is referring to the use of Kaaps, the language most often used by emcees and other rap artists in the Hip Hop community. He suggests further that if emcees, whether isiXhosa or Kaaps speakers, are able to perform their lyrics in ‘smengels’ it would not really matter because the goal of freestyle rap battles is to move the crowd. On this wall post, Clayton writes ‘smengels’ which, as noted above in Keaton’s rap, is a combination of ‘SMS’ and the Afrikaans label for English, that is, ‘Engels’. In this instance, such a combination of words is typical of social media writing practices, and allows Clayton to appeal to the complexity of youth multilingual practices. Moreover, Clayton argues that whether in Afrikaans, English, isiXhosa or texting language, as in the case here with ‘smengels’, as long as the emcee moves the crowd, the crowd will accept the emcee’s multilinguality. It is this type of writing on Facebook message and discussion boards that Androutsopolous argues gives Hip Hop artists and their fans ‘a space of vernacular literacy’ where ‘they may draw on a variety of linguistic and multimodal resources to construct their glocal Hip Hop identities’ (Androutsopolous 2009: 56). Gavin’s follow-​up response to Clayton is immediately apologetic, but also sarcastic. In an attempt to atone for his racist prejudice, Gavin argues that he was only ‘tawking’ (talking) nonsense and that he actually listens to and owns ‘a lot of hype mixtapes’ and that some of the ‘chosa’ (meaning, Xhosa) artists ‘got potential’. Hype in this case is a rap music producer who has executively produced a number of black Spaza emcees’ rap music (emcees who raps in isiXhosa, English and Afrikaans); prominent members are Rattex (from Khayelitsha township in Cape Town) and Driemanskap (from Gugulethu, also in Cape Town). But it is clear Gavin is not sincere in his apology because he argues further, and rather sarcastically, that he ‘aint racist’ because ‘some of [his] best friends r black’ which is followed by the Afrikaans texting logographic glossed above: ‘lmimp’. In countering Gavin’s duplicitous response, a number of respondents agree with Clayton that it doesn’t matter whether emcees perform in Afrikaans, English, isiXhosa, French or even Portuguese, it is about multilingual diversity and moving the crowd in the end.

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In summary, the remixing of multilingualism above does not occur in isolation, but intersects with ideologies and practices of identity, diversity and language. In the extracts above, we see how respondents, conscious of the racial, ethnic and cultural diversity of South Africa, respond to the question posed by MoB by explicitly and implicitly expressing opinions on what they believe are the best linguistic solutions to ‘solving’ language use in freestyle rap battles. From the excerpts we learn the following:  first, that the commentators point to the difficulty of multilingualism, but also give various reasons to use either English or Afrikaans, or both, for simplicity, creativity and comedic effect; second, that although they all recognize the multilingual diversity of the country and the increasing mixture and intermixing of racial and ethnic speech forms, some celebrate the marketability of a language like English, while others still find it difficult to cross over to a language like isiXhosa because they associate multilingual speakers of that language with racist meanings; third, and perhaps most directly related to youth multilingual practice on a computer-​mediated communication medium such as Facebook, we can learn from the multilingual nature of the comments. While the very first two exchanges (Extract 6.3.1) were mainly in English, in Extract 6.3.2 we find the use of English, Afrikaans, accented parodic isiXhosa voicing and texting language. The creative use of texting language in particular reveals the appeal of remixing multilingualism amongst those active in the Hip Hop community.

6.4  Conclusion In this chapter we have seen how space and the emergence of a shared sense of locality are important in navigating semiotic modes that occur simultaneously and are brought into the freestyle rap performances between emcee Keaton and emcee Phoenix. In this context, language is an important resource for scaling space, but not the only meaning-​making practice to win a freestyle rap battle. We saw in this chapter that both emcees took full advantage of the semiotic phenomena occurring on-​stage, but were also aware that the transmodal design of Hip Hop has as a central part of its make-​up the audience as an important dynamic for successfully performing freestyle raps. The fact that the audience insisted on the use of particular varieties provides evidence of

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the multilingualism and transmodality of the Hip Hop show in Club Stones. Furthermore, we observed a continuation of the co-​construction of extreme locality at the Menace Mansion, as well as the waging of language ideological battles on Facebook over which language(s) would be most appropriate to use in the freestyle rap battles in Club Stones.

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7

Staging Masculinity: Emceeing Toughness, Toughing up the Emcee

Hip Hop culture has been critiqued as a male-​dominated social sphere, crowding out the potential contribution of female and non-​binary artists and fans. But with its spread around the world, and changing social mores, Hip Hop culture is increasingly influenced by female emcees and other women, including queer rappers (see Haupt 1995). The challenge for progressive practitioners of Hip Hop is to pierce the hegemony of male voices, which privilege a mode of remixed multilingualism that pushes the speech practices of women and non-​ binary contributors to the margins, enregistering discourses and ideologies that privilege the notion of becoming a man through apprenticeship in Hip Hop. Likewise, in linguistic studies of the genre, the language use and performances of men are foregrounded and analysed in isolation from their interaction with and embeddedness in a broader gender order. In Chapter 8, I will focus more specifically on interactions between men emcees and women. Some time into my fieldwork, during a short interview in Club Stones that I conducted while the show was on, I asked a female Hip Hop fan how she felt about the all-​male braggadocio performance analysed in Chapter 5. She replied that while she thought the Suburban Menace and MobCoW emcees were lyrically accomplished, she would have liked them to rap about being fathers, or about being responsible men: I get annoyed when they feel they need to swear excessively, especially when it’s things like ‘jou poes’ [‘fuck you’, lit. ‘your cunt’] and such things. It’s brilliant when they talk about real things, living in today’s environment, the challenges that the people face. I love it when the guys actually show a tad bit of emotion because it shows they are human, and not just the ‘money, sex, alcohol’ stereotype. I personally don’t like that ‘money, sex, alcohol’ notion, cause that’s so far from real life. I’d like to see more props given to women though. Surely these emcees have partners that they would like to pay tribute to? And what about

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their kids? And why [not] share some successful moments –​like about how and what they did to improve their circumstances? (Interviewed at Club Stones)

To her, the emcees perform a particular form of masculinity, and are in thrall of a specific ideology of what it means to be a man, a notion we will explore later in this chapter. I had noted that in a male-​dominated space such as the Suburban Menace Hip Hop show, men were given much more mic time than women were. The male-​dominated nature of the Hip Hop space, inherited from global Hip Hop, centres on and overvalues the performances and practices of men. In recent decades, sociolinguistics has devoted close attention to masculinity as ideology, practice and performance, and its influence on the use of language. In a seminal anthology brought together by Sally Johnson and Ulrike Meinhof, entitled Language and Masculinity (1997), men and their language use in various locations received critical analytical attention. This collection of path-​breaking essays shaped the terms of research on the language of men and arguably influenced many of the arguments in the fields of feminist linguistics (Eckert and McConnell-​Ginet 2003), language and gender studies (Bucholtz et al. 1999) and language and sexuality (Cameron and Kulick 2003). In that volume, the authors present the dynamic ways in which language and discourse produce the practices and ideologies of men as they speak about and enact their masculinities. The volume lays bare that when men talk, when they interact with each other, it is never in isolation of other social factors such as their class, social status or social categories such as race and ethnicity (see, in particular, Coates 1997). In the introductory chapter, Johnson lays out the agenda for analysing language and masculinities, as distinct from other ways of approaching gender, through critical forays, from deconstructing hegemonic or ‘dominance’ framings of heterosexual masculinity to addressing the idea of ‘difference’. Particularly, she argued that ‘[w]‌hat we really need is to know more about the complex role played by “difference” in the construction of “dominance,” ’ going on to say 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). In today’s globalized world, the heteronormativity enforced by heterosexual men, including how they see themselves as men and how they practice being men, is placed under the spotlight, because the common

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problem of men is their masculinity (see studies by Shire 1994; Bourdieu 2001; McConnell-​Ginet 2011; Atanga et al. 2013; Milani and Shaikjee 2013). Heteronormativity assumes the norm of heterosexuality; with a view to unsettling this assumption, Milani (2011: 183–​184) argues that in order for us to fully grasp the reality of what heterosexual men do with language and their masculinity, we have to assume a critical stance toward the manifold ways in which masculinities manifest. At the same time, we must ask how, why and with what linguistic and semiotic means do men produce their heterosexual masculinities in various contexts (Milani 2011: 183–​184; see also Milani 2015). In this chapter, I  aim to contribute to answering Milani’s call to begin to unpick the conditions that enable the production of heterosexual masculinities, by analysing how the multilingual emcees in the Hip Hop show of Club Stones –​affiliated and not affiliated to MobCoW and Suburban Menace –​stage and entextualize the language ideologies of various non-​standard languages (Woolard 1998), and how those ideologies are tied to the performance of a particular element of masculine ideology –​toughness –​in freestyle rap performances. In the next section, I  briefly review the scholarship on language ideology, gender, and masculinity. This is followed by a discussion of masculinity, particularly tough masculinity, in global Hip Hop. I then analyse how tough masculine ideology emerges in freestyle rap performing, before concluding.

7.1  Language Ideology, Gender and Masculinity In the opening quotes, the two emcees use English not only to communicate with a wider audience but also to perform Hip Hop authenticity. Rapping in English not only displays a specific linguistic ability; it also suggests their subscription to a particular language ideology. This language ideology is tied to the social, individual and group identities of the rappers. Indeed, it is partly because they are members of the Suburban Menace rap group that they see the use of English as closely tied to their rap identities, and consequently to their masculinities, as I shall argue here. An analysis of language ideologies, or the ideological associations of language in the context of gender and masculinity, concerns itself with how the

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former is tied to the performativity of gender. To attempt such an analysis, especially in the context of local Hip Hop practices, is to highlight how multilingual speakers –​whether apprenticed in Hip Hop or just fans of Hip Hop –​valorize ideas about language use and structure. In other words, the study of language ideologies informs us of the links that are forged between the use of forms of talk, speaker perceptions about the value of language and the power of these language(s). Language ideologies can be made explicit or implicit in statements, actions and performances. They are derived from a speaker’s or a community of speakers’ beliefs about what a language or language variety means and are ‘a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use’ (Silverstein 1979:  193). According to Woolard (1998), language ideologies are often the primary motivation for a speaker’s choice of a particular linguistic form to be used in interaction or performance; it defines the sense of community and individual identity, including how race, gender, ethnicity, age, religion, nationalism, education and law are structured in societies and cultures (Woolard 1998: 3). In the context of gender studies and analyses of gendered language, an analysis of how language ideologies are linked to gender identity became a significant feature of how feminists approached ‘the salience of gender itself in many (pre-​and non-​feminist) representations of language’ (Cameron 2003: 448). According to Cameron, feminist and gender researchers for decades analysed, debated and disentangled ‘established ideologies of language’ that reinforce stereotypically the differences between men and women as ‘natural’ (Cameron 2003). This naturalness is, to a large extent, an illusion, and feminist linguists in particular have challenged the representation of differentiated language use among men and women, leading many analysts interested in such analysis to ask how gender identities are represented and which ideologies are involved. These antiquated ideological positions frame ‘gender appropriate behaviour’ (Cameron 2003: 449), which consequently convince people ‘that there are clear-​cut, stable differences in the way language is used by women and by men’ (Cameron 2003: 450). Subsequent research has indeed shown that these differences are not as clear-​cut as they might have seemed (see Ehrlich, Meyerhoff and Holmes 2014). Furthermore, language ideologies as tied to stereotypical gender practices disregard the heterogeneous multilingual contexts of situation and speech situations created when diversely gendered people interact today. Those situations are not only multilingual but are considered to be polycentric, multi-​scalar and linguistically more

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complex than what previously had been thought. Cameron argues further that, in essence, it is always been an empirical fact that gender interactions have been defined by ‘intra-​as well as intercultural variation in the representation of language and gender’ (Cameron 2003: 451; italics in the original). Notwithstanding this fact, even our globalized world is still defined by gender inequality, hegemony and repression in many contexts, partly driven by the language ideology that ‘women are linguistically inferior to men’ (Cameron 2003: 453; italics in the original). This is especially the case where heterosexual men dominate gender talk, discourses and interactions and impose heteronormative rules (cf. Cameron 1995). Those discourses, for example, are almost always defined by categories such as class, ethnicity, place and nationality and, when looked at closely, reveal the complex nature of heterosexual interactions across various local contexts. For example, Milani and Jonsson (2011) demonstrate how language ideological pronouncements in the Swedish media filter into society and are appropriated in heterosexual interactions. Their study illustrates how ‘immigrant young men’ negotiate ‘positions of power, authority and solidarity’ in the school and classroom context (Milani and Jonsson 2011:  241)  and slip in and out of ‘ethnic, sexist and homophobic insults and jokes’ (ibid.) as they interact with each other. The authors also illustrate how those ethnically other young men bring into doubt a dominant ideology in Sweden –​an ideology of equality –​prescribed by the teacher. They argue that this ideology of equality is ultimately ‘an essentialist view of ethnic and national belonging’ (Milani and Jonsson 2011: 250), and as a result they conclude that the young men in the classroom resort to ‘ethnic insults, gay innuendos and misogynistic talk’ because such talk not only constitutes the interactional resources from which they draw to make meaningful classroom interaction, but also helps them to negotiate ‘the local masculine order’ (Milani and Jonsson 2011: 265). Recent studies on language and gender in sub-​Saharan Africa also attest not only to the relevance of studying language ideologies and heterosexual masculinities but also to their importance for understanding gender relations of power and dominance in post-​colonial settings (cf. Morrel 2001; Atanga et al. 2013). Atanga et al.’s (2013) volume, for instance, demonstrates how gender traditions, struggles and the fight for change are complicated by hegemonic gender relations, discourses of power and language use among men and women. Language and ideologies of masculinity in South Africa in particular cannot be usefully understood outside the context of the country’s history of colonialism and apartheid (Hearn and Morrell 2012). While it is beyond the

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scope of this chapter to rehearse how the gender hierarchy was structured during colonialism and under apartheid, some comments about the way in which post-​apartheid South Africa has addressed gender relations, in the context of civil rights and various institutions including the media, are appropriate. Reid and Walker (2005:  1)  point out, for example, that with the dawn of a new democracy, the patriarchal gender order in South Africa ‘has given way to new ideals of equality between men and women, which are enshrined in the Constitution’. Given the constitutionally enshrined rights of gender equality, one may indeed be puzzled as to why hegemonic masculinity is still so relevant in multilingual interactions. Does it have to do with ‘perceptions’ of being a man in the context of a new South Africa? Or is it that men dominate the gender order because of cultural and religious prejudices against other men? These are some of the questions related to the study of masculinities that have occupied feminists and other gender activists for a long time. David Morrell concluded not long ago that when we study men in a post-​colonial country like South Africa, we have to realize that ‘there is no one, typical South African man’ (Morrell 2001: 33), which many further studies in language and masculinity support (see for instance Milani and Shaikjee’s 2013 study on the ‘new’ man). Taking the above into consideration, the study of language ideologies and how they emerge in talk, discourse and interaction is important for analysing how gender and masculinity are framed. This focus can be useful, and further sharpened on men’s language use and performances, especially on how constructions of masculinity emerge in space and time. This is because, as Cameron puts it, ‘ideologies of language and gender . . . are specific to their time and place: they vary across cultures and historical periods, and they are inflected by representations of other social characteristics such as class and ethnicity’ (2003:  452). Language ideologies are thus important resources to understand gender power struggles in interactions (cf. Milani and Jonsson 2011) and performances, particularly in the staged performance of tough masculine identities –​which is the focus of this chapter. In general, tough masculine identities are associated with physical prowess and the attainment of respect, or participation in contact sports, and are among the checklist of prime indicators for measuring toughness. They are sometimes a driving factor for how men anchor their dominant roles in gendered interactions and performances. For example, to be a tough man means is to act in accordance with subjective power-​driven expectations and experiences, and

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to exert power over others when and where it is required by your peers (see Walker 2005). More specifically related to language use, Lawson (2015) states that articulations of tough masculinity can be studied by looking at the language of toughness, and how it is often associated with ‘interpersonal violence, aggression and delinquency’ as men try to obtain respect from their peers (Lawson 2013: 369). As he points out, men performing toughness typically articulate characteristics of the ‘hard man,’ those men who perform ‘a particular form of masculine identity which draws on . . . stereotypical working-​class characteristics such as toughness, physical strength, courage, and so on’ (Lawson 2013 see also Lawson 2013:  370). For Lawson, articulations of toughness emerge in conversational turns and performances that are viewed by men as competitive and where they engage in ‘one-​upmanship’ (Coates 2003:  56). What characterizes articulations of toughness are verbal insults and abuse, and the goal is always to assert ‘linguistic power’ (Eliasson 2007: 48), because, according to Seidler, ‘language comes to be used as a weapon for the defense of masculine identity, rather than as a mode of expressing connectedness with others’ (Seidler 1989: 7; compare Evaldsson 2002).

7.2  Hip Hop Burdened by Tough Masculinity Tough masculinity, as the title of this section suggests, burdens most Hip Hop spaces across the globe. Specifically, as evidenced by the male-​only rap performances analysed in previous chapters, the popular practice of Hip Hop presents a remarkable cultural context in South Africa, where tough masculinity is so clearly represented that it may be profitably deconstructed. Toughness, from the perspective of global Hip Hop, is prevalent, unquestioned and almost an everyday index of hegemonic masculinity throughout Hip Hop culture (Rose 1994). As a historically urban culture born out of poverty in urban spaces and practised in a way that reinforces patriarchal relations, it is not surprising that scholars have lamented the dominance of toughness, the lack of emphasis on the plurality of masculine identities and the subjugation of women and their bodies (Rose 1994). It was Rose’s (1994) comprehensive study on rap music that shed light not only on how rap artists’ use of misogynistic and homophobic lyrics denigrate women but also how the under-​representation of female emcees in

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localized Hip Hop cultures and gender marginalization in global Hip Hop persist (see also Morgan 1999; Perry 2004). In most Hip Hop studies, toughness is consistently and predominantly associated with the apprenticing of boys, young men and older men into the culture and its practices (Sharpley-​Whiting 2007). Since Rose’s study, a stronger emphasis on men in Hip Hop and their masculinities has arisen among Hip Hop feminists and cultural theorists (Forman and Neal 2004; Pough et  al. 2007). In her fascinating comparative study on graffiti artists in London and New York, for instance, Macdonald (2001) corroborates many early studies of gender marginalization in Hip Hop, although focusing on how young male graffiti artists position themselves as tough men in search of respect, and how they draw on a wealth of social, semiotic, political and linguistic resources in order to make tough masculine ideology dominant. Macdonald’s study illustrates how young men contest and co-​produce toughness (Macdonald 2001: 96). Toughness is not only associated with practices of respect between graffiti artists; it is also the preferred masculine ideology among young men, often associated with physical confrontation. Furthermore, tough masculinity is a dominant feature in the practice of both b-​boying and b-​girling (Schloss 2009), or turntabling; it is also a prominent feature in rap music and freestyle rap performances. Morgan (2009), for instance, demonstrates how in the performance of freestyle rap music young black men perform tough masculine personae in response to the large macro-​social issues impacting their daily lives, and often comment through clever lyrics and rhymes on how those issues pervade the immediate spaces in which they perform rap and Hip Hop (see also studies that draw similar conclusions: Pardue 2008; Roth-​Gordon 2009). Global Hip Hop studies have underscored how the flow of language and masculine ideologies ties into the local lifestyles and lived realities of black men who actively participate in Hip Hop culture, and how those men idolize and very often act out in ‘real life’ the constructed personae of artists in rap music videos. The popularity of the late rapper Tupac Shakur and his motto, ‘Thug Life’ (an acronym for ‘The Hate U Gave Little Infants Fucked Everybody’), and on the other hand, the gun-​ toting, saggy-​pants-​wearing, Alizé-​drinking ‘Gangsta Rap’ popularized by groups like NWA (Niggas With Attitudes), G-​Unit and emcees 50 Cent and The Game. These images reach various localities across the globe and become recontextualized by young men apprenticed into local Hip Hop cultures. This is also the case in South Africa. However, South African rap music has typically focused much more on socioeconomic inequality and counter-​hegemonic agency in apartheid South Africa

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(Haupt 1995), and less on language, gender and masculine ideologies under the democratic dispensation. Much the same can be said of the South African scholarship on Hip Hop. There are a variety of reasons why this is the case. First, rap music in South Africa has focused on the lyrical narration of state resistance, race and place in the context of apartheid and the early days of post-​apartheid South Africa, and few scholarly texts have highlighted the nature of masculinity in the local culture. Secondly, research on the plurality of masculine ideologies has often been mentioned in passing, and, though it remains an active area of investigation (see, for example, Ariefdien 2005), there is still much room to explore in greater depth the local instantiations of masculinity and masculine ideologies (Haupt 2008, 2012).

7.3  Tough Performance as Entextualization Building on the discussion to this point, in this section I shall demonstrate how specific language ideological associations are taken up and performed by emcees in freestyle rap (cf. Williams and Stroud 2015). These include (1) the marginalization, working-​class-​ness and ‘non-​standard’ stereotyping that have come to define Kaaps; (2) the violence, gangsterism and aggressiveness typically associated with the use of Sabela; and (3) the use of African-​American English (AAE) as a racialized variety. I will explore two instances of toughness from freestyle rap performances in Club Stones. I  aim to demonstrate in the analyses how emcees prioritize toughness as a masculine ideology mediated and remediated in the performance of freestyle rap (Reeser 2010). In the analysis that follows I demonstrate how male-​centred Hip Hop cultural practices of tough masculinity entextualized in freestyle performances may repress the staging of other forms of masculine identities. I  also demonstrate how forms of transnational toughness circulating in global Hip Hop are relocalized in the local freestyle battle space. I  point out how toughness indexes the historical framing of Black and Coloured bodies as emcees lyrically insult and threaten each other on-​stage. I also illustrate how emcees articulate toughness through Kaaps and AAE to ideologically showcase their particular form, but also to assert specific registers of toughness of communities associated with extreme violence, as in the case of Sabela. I do this by analysing in the next section how the emceeing of toughness involves the entextualization of tough popular culture figures and personae in the local freestyle rap space under consideration.

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Second, I  demonstrate how everyday discourses of chauvinism, homophobia and sexuality are associated with the ‘toughing up’ activity of emcees in freestyle rap performances.

7.3.1  Emceeing Toughness with Personae: Chuck vs Bio.has.it The ‘tough’ content of the freestyle rap performances analysed here has its origins in trouble started between emcees from opposing style communities in Cape Town’s Hip Hop culture in the Northern Suburbs. As part of their effort to bring high-​quality Hip Hop performances to the area, MobCoW not only gave a platform to emcees across Cape Town –​as I described in Chapter 4 –​but also specifically recruited the people they perceived to be the best rap lyricists in Kuilsriver. Two of these emcees, Chuck and Jack Denovan, very rapidly earned a reputation as the best, but also the most aggressive, emcees in Club Stones. Performing as a duo, named ‘You Two’ by MoBCoW music producer Mseeq, they captured the hearts and minds of the audiences, to the point that they felt emboldened to challenge then–​freestyle rap champion Bio.has.it, an emcee representing the Bellville South Hip Hop style community, at the weekly Stepping Stones to Hip Hop freestyle event. What follows is a transcript of a recording of the bout between Chuck and Bio.has.it. The freestyle opened with the mediator, Mseeq, calling both emcees to the stage. After each had shaken the other’s hand, Mseeq asked the emcee who initiated the battle –​Chuck –​to choose heads or tails. Chuck won the toss and elected to start, opening his freestyle with four lines of verbal cues (lines 52 to 54), before he went on to perform his toughness against Bio.has.it: Extract 7.3.1 Chuck: 1. Uh 2. Uh 3. Uh   [Chucks moves closer to Bio.has.it] 4. [inaudible] 5. Djy sal jou weg moet stiek   You’ll need to hide 6. Van vir my lyk djy  ’Cause to me you look 7. soes Liewe Heksie    [Bio.has.it lifts his hands in the air, dancing]   Like Liewe Heksie [lit. ‘Dear Little Witch’, a well-​known TV children’s TV character]

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8. Met jou fokking kak tekkies [Bio.has.it touches sneakers/​shows thumbs up]   With your fucking shit sneakers

Chuck opens his attack on his opponent’s toughness by entextualizing a fictional character depicted in a local children’s television puppet show, ‘Liewe Heksie’, broadcast from the early 1980s to the early 1990s in apartheid South Africa. The ‘Dear Little Witch’, Levinia, was the heroine of a series of popular books by Verna Vels first published in 1961, and depicting the world and travails of a little witch with a garden, a kitten named Matewis, elf friends in ‘Flower Land’ and a grown cat who drives a car and owns a helicopter. The dear little witch sometimes summons a magic horse named Griet; she is beholden to King Rose-​Wreath, whom she often frustrates through her lack of magical skill. She occasionally fights with a yellow witch and her underlings, the ‘Little Poison Apples’. When she finds herself outnumbered, the Fairy Queen comes to her rescue. From its debut on television, the show’s target audience was toddlers, and the language in which the puppets spoke was standard Afrikaans. Chuck draws on the persona of Liewe Heksie in order to mediate the opening lyrics of his performance: by telling his opponent to hide away he invokes the shared knowledge of the shy, frightened and ineffective character. Her worn-​out black clothes and shoes, combined with her unkempt and unattractive appearance, are all reflected onto Bio.has.it, brought to a fine point in his reference to Bio.has.it’s ‘shit’ sneakers (line 8). Liewe Heksie is the very opposite of tough, and in comparing Bio.has.it to Liewe Heksie Chuck undermines his toughness and his masculinity. He extends this strategy as he moves into a more aggressive style, making use of more expletives to drive home his message about Bio.has.it: Extract 7.3.2 1. Chuck verstaan as djy wil verloor   Chuck understands if you want to lose 2. Want dai’s die skill   Cause that’s the skill 3. wat ek jou met kan betoor   With which I can put you under a spell 4. Afrikaans, kan djy praat van dai   Afrikaans, you can speak of that 5. Djy’s ‘n Boesman van Afrikaans   [Bio.has.it waves Chuck away]   You’re Bushman speaker of Afrikaans 6. Probeer, jou naai!       [Audience response: ‘Whoa!’]   Try, you cunt!

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Moving on from his commentary on Bio.has.it’s resemblance to Liewe Heksie, Chuck develops the theme of magic to contrast his skills as a rapper to those of his opponent. He wryly points out that he would understand if Bio.has.it wants to lose (line 1) after Chuck’s own lyrical skill has placed him under a spell (line 3). Unlike the incompetence of the bumbling Levinia, Chuck’s mastery of language is enough to subdue his opponent. Moving on from the dear little witch, Chuck entextualizes a second character –​a ‘Bushman’ –​to undermine Bio.has.it. The use of the label ‘Bushman’ has specific sociolinguistic implications, including that of speaking supposedly ‘inferior’ Afrikaans. Chuck offers this second persona to the audience as a way to read his opponent’s use of standard Afrikaans as questionable (line 4 to 6). To draw on Agha, the ‘activity of reading persons’ is almost always ‘mediated by stereotypes of indexicality, namely stereotypic social images associated with discrete signs that specify default ways of reading persons who display them’ (Agha 2007: 239). Thus, what unfolds in Chuck’s performance of toughness is the entextualization not only of ethnic Bushman linguistic stereotyping but also the racialization of his opponent as a Coloured speaker who fails to speak ‘proper’ or ‘standard’ Afrikaans. Chuck offers a clear example here of apartheid’s monoglot ideology (Silverstein 1996), where Afrikaans and its varieties were valorized hierarchically. In other words, Chuck offers meta-​commentary and ‘moral indignation’ (Woolard 1998) on the way Bio.has.it performs Afrikaans lyrics, as not ‘suiwer’ [pure] Afrikaans as spoken by white Afrikaners. Instead, he speaks working-​class Kaaps, which is typically associated with Coloured speakers. Chuck follows up this attack with an even more aggressive tone, as another social persona is entextualized: Extract 7.3.3 1. Hy se ek loep rond  [Bio.has.it shows Chuck the middle finger]   He says I go around 2. Ek naai vir twak   [Chuck faces the audience]   I’m fucking for cigarettes 3. Hah-​hah! 4. Hy fokken naai met Chuck   He’s fucking with Chuck 5. Die ouens [inaudible] met dai brak   The guys […] with that dog

Chuck plays on the ‘fucking with’/​’fucking for’ (lines 2 and 4) around the hysterical laugh in line 3, neatly inverting the assumed sexual slur into a justification for violence. The street-​smart figures he introduces, the ouens (line 5) (compare

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Ratele 2001) with the reference to a dog, implicitly link with the transnational figure of Dark Man X (DMX), whose aggressive style embodies a (hyper)masculine ideology. DMX music videos feature young Black men, wearing tough Timberland boots, holding back salivating bull terriers tied to tight collars. In the global linguistic flow of Hip Hop, this tough-​guy figure has become part of the local masculine orders in various local Hip Hop contexts, not least in Cape Town. By using the male Kaaps honorific ouens, however, Chuck highlights that outside the freestyle rap performance space his opponent is likely to encounter members of his crew (compare Salo 2004: 204). The use of that honorific cuts right to the heart of the aggressive ideology Chuck wishes to associate with the artistic use of Kaaps. He exploits the perceptions of his audience and opponent about how ‘honorifics are embedded in an ideology in which a low-​affect style can be other-​elevating’ (Irvine 1998: 62), but also how the use of honorific ouens seems to manage or prioritize tough masculinity in terms of ‘affectivity and conventionality’ and ‘rank and power’ (Irvine 1998: 62). Bio.has.it’s response remediates the persona of the ouens, its link to Kaaps and the toughness of Numbers gangsters: Extract 7.3.4 Bio.has.it: 1. Kykie         [Bio.has.it moves closer to Chuck]   Look here 2. Djy’s van Bruinstormers   You’re from Brownstormers [a pun on ‘brainstorm’; the Kaaps words for                        brown and brain sound very similar] 3. [inaudible] 4. Huil as die komkommers  (Chuck looks to the stage floor, listening)   Cry when the cucumbers 5. in jou hol in is   are in your ass 6. Want hoekom lyk jou gesig soe vol bommels?   Why does your face have pimples? 7. Djy lyk amper vir my soes   You look to me almost like 8. dai bra sonder ‘n face   that brother without a face 9. Djy’s ‘n volstruis wat gebasterd is met ‘n muis [Chuck laughs hysterically]   You’re a crossbreed between an ostrich and a mouse 10. Hoekom praat [inaudible]   Why speak?

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11. Kyk hoe lyk djy   Just look at you 12. Djy lyk soes ET   You look like ET 13. Djy moet jou naam change van Chuck   You must change your name from Chuck 14. na Auntie Beattie    (Audience Response: ‘Oh!’)   To Auntie Beattie

Bio.has.it’s reference to the Bruinstormers, a rap group not affiliated to MobCoW or the Kuilsriver Hip Hop community, compromises Chuck’s toughness, as Chuck has been considered a marginal member of the group, and this is quite well known in the larger Hip Hop community. The conventions of freestyle rap value creativity, and so Bio.has.it extends these lyrical combinations into new realms. He implies that Chuck is the submissive, or receptive (by implication, feminine) member of his group, who cries when he is penetrated by cucumbers. In this highly heteronormative context, he brings Chuck’s masculinity into question. Moving on from his sexual role, he comments on his sexual unattractiveness (his face is full of pimples, suggesting something has gone wrong) and his unusual sexual origins:  procreation between an ostrich and a mouse (lines 6–​9). Building on the theme of Chuck’s abnormal body leads Bio.has.it to introduce two fictional personae to denigrate his opponent (lines 12 to 14): ET, the extra-​ terrestrial central character of Stephen Spielberg’s eponymous popular film; and Auntie Beattie, an invented character modelled after Auntie Stienie, a character in the popular 1980s Afrikaans drama series, Agter Elke Man (‘Behind Every Man’). Auntie Stienie is a mature gossipy neighbour with rollers in her hair, who is always looking for juicy rumours to spread. Bio.has.it suggests Chuck is like an Auntie Stienie –​an Auntie Beattie. And in a similar way that Chuck entextualized Liewe Heksie, Bio.has.it also refers to widely known, local, Afrikaans-​ speaking figures. The dialogical construction of toughness staged by the emcees not only demonstrates how femininity is entextualized as figures of fantasy (such as Liewe Heksie); it also tells us how femininity is tied into the staging of an aggressive articulation of tough masculinity in the use of linguistic features of Kaaps. This is especially clear in the use of Kaaps expletives (such as ‘fokking,’ line 8, Extract 7.3.1; ‘naai’ in lines 6, Extract 7.3.2 and 2 Extract 7.3.3; ‘fokken,’ line 4, Extract 7.3.3), as well as the use of sexual image-​invoking words (such as ‘komkommers,’ line 4, Extract 7.3.4; ‘hol,’ line 5, Extract 7.3.4). We can add to that Cameron and

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Kulick’s argument that the ‘linguistic features that index femininity linguistically also index heterosexual identity, because of the crucial role played by compulsory heterosexuality in the construction of gender identity and gender relations’ (2003, 50–​51). Clearly, both emcees consider it relevant to use Kaaps to show toughness. This is particularly the case with Chuck, who explicitly links his toughness to the masculinity of his ouens, the street-​smart guys. They draw on historical discourses to construct each other’s masculinity, and throughout the whole performance Kaaps is made into the linguistic resource on which they draw in order to maintain the rhythm and cadence of freestyle rap performing. Furthermore, they put on display the value of Kaaps as a local Hip Hop language variety that should and could be used in freestyle rap battling, as well as in the performance of other genres. To summarize, the use of Kaaps by both emcees reveals the various ways in which they attempt to exert the power of toughness through the entextualization of gendered and sexually charged personae. No attempt by the emcees is made to distance themselves from such articulations; rather, they embrace these artistic expressions through Kaaps to index the relevance of performing toughness in the freestyle battle space. They enact but are also caught up and embroiled in relations of masculine power that subjugate their rap identities and make them subject to injurious discourses of sexuality, artistic humiliation, and face-​threatening speech (Foucault 1982: 781). In other words, this first struggle of toughness, or ‘agonism’ of toughness, between Chuck and Bio.has.it stages linguistic and symbolic power as acts and actions of domination, ‘of men upon other men’ (Foucault 1982: 787), typical of the local freestyle battle space. In the end, the lyrical bout was won by Bio.has.it. Given the ideological context for this battle, I would argue that Chuck lost because of the fierceness of the Bio.has.it’s lyrical attacks, the entextualization of the discourse of homophobia well known to be a feature of heterosexual masculinity (expressed in the lyrics 4 and 5, Extract 7.3.4), the referencing of feminine imagery captured in the suggestion of a name change (to Auntie Beattie) and the resulting cheers from audience members. This did not sit well with Chuck’s emceeing partner, Jack Denovan. They lost face (cf. Lee 2009a) and momentum when Chuck lost, and for an entire week clandestine plans were hatched by the pair to regain their You Two’s credibility as the best emcee duo. Together with other MobCoW emcees, Jack Denovan rose to the occasion to suggest that the best way to deal with Bio. has.it, and to reclaim their pride, was to face the latter on stage in a freestyle rap battle. The week following Chuck’s humiliating loss to Bio.has.it, Jack Denovan

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challenged the latter emcee in the freestyle rap space, and Bio.has.it obliged. The analysis of that lyrical battle follows in the next section.

7.3.2  Toughing up the Emcee with Sexuality: Jack Denovan vs Bio.has.it Out of loyalty to You Two, the organizers of the Suburban Menace Hip Hop Show agreed to stage the lyrical battle between Jack Denovan and Bio.has.it. In a dramatic and strange turn of events that night, Bio.has.it declared that he would enter the bout only if it would be his last. Mseeq, the mediator, therefore announced his retirement on the same night, just before the start of the battle. In the days leading up to the battle, Chuck and Jack had made intimidating threats against Bio.has. it, mainly on-​stage, and many believed that Bio.has.it’s announcement was influenced by this. His plan to retire, however, irritated many people in the audience. The performance started much like the previous one. After a coin toss, Jack Denovan began the bout by attacking Bio.has.it’s masculine identity. His performance opened with four lines of local verbal cueing in Kaaps (lines 1 to 4) followed immediately by references to Bio.has.it’s sexuality. Extract 7.3.5 Jack Denovan: 1. Is ja   Yeah 2. Kykie   Look 3. Is ja   Yeah 4. Kykie   Look 5. Bio, ek is an actual   Bio, I am an actual 6. Die ding is ‘n bunny   This thing is a bunny 7. Hy’s ‘n fokken biosexual   He’s a fucking biosexual 8. Kyk hoe staan hy   Look how he stands 9. Hande in die sak   With his hands in his pockets

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10. Ek het hom nog nie gebattle nie   I haven’t even started this battle 11. Toe sak hy al my plak   But I’m already unsettled

Jack articulates his own toughness as real, ‘actual’ (lines 5–​11) compared to Bio. has.it being a ‘biosexual’ (the word biosexual is a made-​up word offered by Jack to frame his opponent as a homosexual). Jack calls him a ‘bunny’, a word used among gay men and women who speak Gayle (Cage 2003), though the word is used here as an insult, calling into question the masculinity of his opponent. Jack also questions his opponent’s aggressiveness by pointing out that he has his hands in his pockets, taken by Jack to indicate Bio.has.it’s submissiveness before the battle has even begun (lines 8–​11). Jack goes on to resemiotize the transnational Hip Hop gangster image in the local freestyle battle space by lyrically undermining Bio.has.it’s credibility as a tough Black thug, that is to say, a fake gangsta rapper. As he performs, Extract 7.3.6 1. Hy’s ‘n nigga   He’s a nigga 2. gangsta rapper 3. but this fucka never pulled a trigger 4. Madonna se figure      [gesturing over Bio.has.it’s body]   Madonna’s figure 5. Ek is in Stones   I’m in Stones 6. Ek is bigger   I’m bigger 7. Wat gat jou aan?   What’s going on? 8. Djy one, one two      [Jack moves closer to Bio.has.it, who moves away]   You’re one and two-​ing 9 Ek maak vir jou ‘n poes   I make you out to be a pussy 10. Vir jou my broe’   For you my brother 11. Maak jou hand soe     Bio.has.it gesturing Jack is just talking]   Make your hand like this 12. Ek rap freestyle I rap freestyle

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13. Betieken die kom van boe [Jack touching his head]   Means it comes from above 14. Bring jou rhymes   Bring your rhymes 15. Is djy gecurse   You’re cursed 16. Ek guarantee vir julle [Facing the audience]   I guarantee you guys 17. Rap vir my ‘n verse   Rap me a verse

The lyrics above include a number of references to sexuality that follow from the opening of the emcee’s performance. First, Jack compares Bio.has.it’s stature to that of Madonna, the global icon of female pop sexuality, and points out the unfavourable comparison to his own, larger figure (lines 5 to 6). This comparison of Bio.has.it’s body to that of Madonna is interesting because ‘the materiality of the body’ is often considered ‘a site of desire’ (Milani 2013: 275). In other words, Jack attempts to literally transform Bio.has.it into a female sex organ. Second, the use of the expletive poes (‘pussy’) is seen here not only as an indicator of ‘power and masculinity’ but also a display of ‘connotations of strength . . . [and] confidence in defying linguistic or social convention’ (de Klerk 1997: 146–​ 147). Thus, in comparing Bio.has.it to Madonna and ‘making’ him a pussy, Jack produces a temporary symbolic reworking of his opponent’s masculinity: he is not tough; he can be sexualized; and he is a rather effeminate male emcee. Jack Denovan’s performance was followed by a short interlude by the freestyle rap mediator Mseeq who told the audience that Jack’s first-​round performance was just a warm-​up for what is to follow. But this mattered little in the freestyle rap space because Bio.has.it had to respond to Jack’s denigration of his masculinity. Instead of responding in an aggressive way, however, Bio.has.it avoided the use of expletives, or any reference to toughness. This is in contrast to the way that Jack toughened himself up with his chauvinistic lyrical content. Bio.has.it’s response was subdued, rhyming: Extract 7.3.8 Bio.has.it: 1. Kykie   Look 2. Djy hoor jou naam is Jack Denovan   You hear your name is Jack Denovan

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3. Vir jou sit ek liewendig   I take you alive 4. Binne in ‘n stove in   And put you inside a stove 5. Agterna is djy soes ‘n houbou   Afterwards you’ll be like a hobo 6. Wat kryp binne in jou eie skel   That crawls into your shell 7. Want hoeko’ djy’s dai bra   Because you that brother 8. vir wie ek gou enigetyd sal bel   Whom I’ll call anytime 9. om te se djy vervel   To tell you, you are shedding skin 10. Die mense wat jou kan sit binne hel   I’ve got people to put you in hell 11. Kykie   Look 12. My broe’   My brother 13. Nog altyd wie ek is   I’m still me 14. Bio.has.it sal jou   Bio.has.it will 15. Tot binne in die existence diss   Diss you into existence 16. As djy vir my kom tsais het   If you came to step to me 17. is djy dai bra wat gepick is deur ‘n luis   Then you’ll be that brother that was picked by lice 18. Sien djy my broe’ jou hele styl is uit   You see my brother, your whole style is whack 19. dai’s hoekom ek gebruik jou nog vir visse buit   That’s why I use you for fish bait 20. Djy’s dai bra wat nog gaan stink soos viskuit   You are that brother that will stink like fish eggs

In the lyrical content of Bio.has.it’s twenty lines of performance not one reference is made to sexuality, no homophobic slur is used, nor any other form of

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emasculation. While it may appear to those uninitiated to emceeing that Bio. has.it has deliberately thrown the freestyle rap battle, this is not the case. He in fact successfully brings into doubt whether the sustained toughening up entextualized by Jack in the previous spit is worth the effort. Although he chose to avoid entextualizing toughness, Bio.has.it chooses instead to focus on alternative aspects of Jack’s character: that he is a coward who hides like a vagrant in his shell (lines 2 to 6); that wherever he is, Bio.has.it will still be able to disrespect him, even in hell (lines 7 to 15); and that his style is whack (line 18), which makes him easy prey, like fish food placed on a hook (lines 19 to 20). What is perhaps also interesting to point out is that through the use of Kaaps, both Jack Denovan and Bio.has.it code-​switch between forms used in that variety typical of local rap performances and AAE (‘diss’ in line 15 and ‘tsais’ in line 16; see also Chapter 5). Overall, we see how Bio.has.it performs a distancing strategy from toughness by avoiding aggressive lyrics in Kaaps and the use of expletives. As such, he relinquishes the power to challenge Jack out of fear of violence and physical harm, subjecting himself on-​stage and ‘dividing’ (Foucault 1982:  778)  his rap identity in light of the power of toughness that hold sway in the freestyle battle space. It is clear that Bio.has.it’s dialogical construction of non-​toughness is a trade-​off, a ‘continuous oscillation between multiple identities’ which ensures ‘that no clear and unambiguous gender ideology can be permanently affixed to it, thus enabling it to achieve a kind of ideological inscrutability’ (Benwell 2011: 197). But be that as it may, the performance of much more subdued and non-​aggressive lyrics worked against Bio.has.it because in the end it was Jack who won the freestyle rap bout between the two. It was not only a victory for You Two but also a victory for the remediation of tough masculinity.

7.4  Conclusion In this chapter, I have demonstrated how language ideologies are associated with the use of Kaaps, Sabela and African American English in the process of remixing multilingualism, and I have also shown how tough masculine identities are performed in freestyle rap battles. At the beginning of the chapter, I sought to explore the ways in which emcees draw on language and semiotic resources to entextualize figures, characters and personae. I also sought to explore how discourses of sexuality are entextualized by emcees to stage their toughness (drawing inspiration from Kiesling 1997, 2007).

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From the analysis it is clear that language ideologies could be tied to the performance of masculinity in local Hip Hop in several ways, and this has implications for the way we should understand the remixing of multilingualism and the performance of marginalized voices. First, it is local languages that are remixed into a multilingualism that sustains a tough masculinity, itself inextricably tied up in the performance of local languages. In the analytical sections, we saw how emcees draw on Kaaps and Sabela to remix their multilingualism and to entextualize their versions of tough masculinity. Kaaps as a language variety and Sabela as a prison register are stereotypically used as local speech practices in the performances to reframe the freestyle battle space as one that over-​privileges the heteronormativity of tough masculinity and marginalizes the voices of other men, at least in the context of this research study. Second, the remixing of AAE features in the staged multilingualism, for example in emcee Denovan’s use of words such as ‘nigga’ and entextualization of the phrase ‘fucka never pulled a trigger’, offers insights into the upscaling of the linguistic features of local tough masculinity as linked to a global Hip Hop ideology of tough masculinity. In other words, AAE forms such as ‘nigga’, while generally not used by multilingual emcees in the local Hip Hop culture, are downscaled and given new meaning by emcees performing tough masculinity. The phrase ‘fucka never pulled a trigger’ is often a familiar phrase used in US Hip Hop freestyle rap battles, but is given new meaning in the local freestyle rap battle space. Tough masculinity in the local context is propped up as more authentic because of its global ties to AAE. However, by using Kaaps and Sabela, as well as stereotypical forms of AAE such as ‘nigga’, the emcees offered a limited definition of manhood circulating the local Hip Hop culture, on the one hand, and refused to acknowledge the plurality of manhood circulating in Hip Hop that could provide an expanded and more gender progressive ideology of Hip Hop in the local context, on the other hand. Third, on the matter of the performance of marginalized voice, it is clear that male emcees compete against each other for the sake of rap authenticity and the re-​enregisterment of the hegemonic discursive features of masculinity. It is the performance of tough masculinity that sets in motion the resemiotization of an imperfect ideology of masculinity, since no new ideas or alternative practices of masculinity had been staged, at least during the course of conducting the research for this study. In other words, it is the lack of recognition of the plurality of masculinity, of how different roles of men could be staged in the local Hip Hop culture, that not only continues to subjugate men against themselves in Hip Hop culture but also projects to listening and

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viewing world a non-​inclusive ideology of masculinity in Hip Hop. This non-​ inclusive ideology of masculinity not only has a continued negative impact on how men and their discursive and linguistic practices are viewed in Hip Hop culture but also further impacts negatively on the role of women in Hip Hop, and efforts to centralize women’s already marginalized voices in the culture. The next chapter focuses on this problem.

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Precarious Femininity: The Performativity of Sexualized Bodies

CC comes on stage to co-​host, saying: 1. One two 2. One two 3. Hey, hey 4. What’s happening? 5. Ok 6. For those of you who don’t know who I am 7. My name is CC 8. I am the presenter . . . [audience starts to make noise] 9. Hoekom lyk dit of niemand vir my luister nie?   Why does it seem that nobody is listening to me? Narc: 10. I don’t understand this 11. Please people listen to CC 12. CC doesn’t always come on stage 13. Special appearance by CC CC: 14. OK 15. I am the official presenter of Hip Hop City [CC’s mic gets cut off] 16. No! Female audience member: 17. Hulle maak haar stil.   They’re silencing her.

In the previous chapter, close attention was paid to how male emcees inside and outside of the MoBCoW rap group engaged each other as men through staging

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a form of heterosexual masculinity over-​privileged in the local Hip Hop community. I explored how the emcees entextualized discourses of gender and sexuality and ‘tough registers’ including using African-​American English –​tough blackness –​to subjugate and emasculate each other. I argued that discourses of femininity that circulate in the local Hip Hop community are drawn upon in the performances to stage tough masculinity; and that a language variety such as Kaaps is but one linguistic form that brings expression to such a masculinity. But there are limits to the analysis in the previous chapter. One of the most pressing challenges for Hip Hop sociolinguistic scholarship in the global South, and especially the post-​colonial world, is to understand gender in Hip Hop from the perspective of women and non-​binary people. Existing scholarship on the topic is inadequate to the extent that it fails to explain properly the intersectionality of gender with other social divisions (see Collins and Bilge 2016 on the notion of intersectionality). I will illustrate this point briefly, before moving on. In the extract quoted at the beginning of this chapter, CC, who was briefly introduced at the beginning of Chapter  4, comes onto stage to co-​host the Suburban Menace Hip Hop show in Club Stones. CC joined the MobCoW rap group informally at first, as she was interested in developing her own Hip Hop television show, and thought it would be a good idea to get more exposure to a local audience before venturing further. Her debut as co-​host of the Hip Hop show, in front of an audience consisting mostly of men, is recorded above. She attempts to introduce herself, but the microphone is not working properly. The audience are still talking amongst themselves, and she struggles to get their attention (line 9). Her co-​host, Narc, tries to appeal to the audience to listen to CC, but she gets increasingly frustrated, saying ‘No!’ (a performative in this context) as her mic gets cut off and she express her frustration at the intransigence of the audience. This would not be her last attempt to co-​host the show in a male-​dominated space. This interaction illustrates a number of problems that I have observed faced by women in the local Hip Hop culture. As is the case with global Hip Hop, the local scene is very good at projecting outward the cultural and linguistic dynamism of Hip Hop identities, but very bad at inward reflection on Hip Hop’s misogyny, including the ubiquitous sexualization of women’s bodies in Hip Hop videos and other media, the use of words such as ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ and so on. CC’s role as host before a largely male audience presents a challenge to the governing assumptions of patriarchal heteronormativity they have grown used to in Club Stones. CC self-​presentation is as the prospective presenter of a Hip Hop television show, a Hip Hop professional, not an overtly sexualized, gendered body.

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Her attempts to challenge the sexual objectification of her female peers, as well as the deeply misogynistic and sexist language used by emcees in various performances, such as those analysed in the previous chapter, must be understood in this context. There is a dearth of Hip Hop sociolinguistic studies of women’s language use, what participation looks like from the perspective of women apprenticed into the culture, and gender and body performativity in Hip Hop more broadly. Hip Hop sociolinguists have hitherto gone very little further than lamenting the over-​privileging of what men say and do, and how they perform gender, in Hip Hop scholarship across localities. What is to be done? We could perhaps follow Alim’s suggestion, and develop ‘[studies] of language and the construction of gender in Hip Hops that take us beyond the tired ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ critiques to an ethnographic understanding of how youth interpret and make use of ‘misogynistic’ and ‘homophobic’ texts’ (Alim 2009:  16), without losing sight of those critiques. This chapter attempts such an analysis. In this chapter, I focus on what happens to the body of female participants in Hip Hop spaces defined by heteronormativity. I aim to demonstrate here how the sexualization of female bodies involves figuring them as sites of investment (Foucault 1977) that illuminate the limits of essentializing and stereotyping gender relations in Hip Hop spaces. I also want to highlight how the sexualization of the female body is tied to particular speech practices on-​stage, or staged Hip Hop activities. In the next two sections of the chapter, I analyse the sexualization of female bodies through the performance of ‘body rap’ and Hip Hop-​like dance battles in Club Stones. I explore how in the performance of rap by male emcees, and Hip Hop dance by women, a central trope emerges: the ‘pornification’ (see studies by Hunter and Soto 2009; Lee 2010) of female participants and their bodies. In the third part of this chapter, I demonstrate the performativity of body resistance by one woman in the staging of a freestyle rap battle in the Menace Mansion, and offer some discussion and conclusions in the final part.

8.1  The Performativity of Sexualization in ‘Body Rap’ The sexualization of the female body in Hip Hop today through language and discourse is problematic. The reason for this is that over the past few decades the rapid commercial development of Hip Hop has commodified women’s bodies to the extent that they are ‘seen as sex symbols that simply must have sex and

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will submit to any fantasy that a man may have’ (Aubrey, Hopper and Mbure 2011: 360). Hip Hop culture has been overtaken by commercial styles captured by rap music videos that now sell products (videomercials) and themselves using women’s bodies to the extent that there is very little difference between Hip Hop culture and the ‘adult entertainment world –​particularly strip clubs and pornography production’ (Hunter 2011: 16). But there should be. Hip Hop culture is male dominated in practice, ideology and discourse –​ the on-​stage performances in the previous chapter serve as good examples –​ and with the increasing commercialization of Hip Hop today has also come the commodification of women’s bodies (see Hunter and Soto 2009). As Richardson argues, by handing over power of the use-​value and exchange-​value of Hip Hop culture to commercialism, a new ‘Hip Hop lifestyle’ emerged, and this has had significant implications for how bodies, especially women’s bodies, are seen (Richardson 2007). Critiques of Hip Hop continue to draw attention to misogyny, and many recognize that the global culture’s biggest challenge is to reverse the oversexualization of the female body, particularly in the ways in which women are only seen as sexual objects (Richardson 2007). Body rap is a sub-​genre of local rap, where the overarching theme in the lyrics is the sexualization and often the denigration of women’s bodies, performed for the pleasure of men. It is a type of performance that entextualizes discourses of sexuality in local Hip Hop spaces that are seen as hurtful, discriminatory and harmful against women in society at large. Body rap is also used by men against other other men, where the rap is about the man’s female partner, about women he associates with, or about an encounter with a woman in a Hip Hop space such as a club. The performativity of body rap, as I describe it here, potentially ‘mediates all reflection and action upon the world’ (Lock 1993:  133)  and produces knowledge about gender relations that are often not commented upon or closely scrutinized (Martin 1990). In essence, body rap is about the sexualization and bodily redefinition of women in the name of Hip Hop style and authenticity. In what follows, I demonstrate how body rap is staged by one emcee –​Chuck –​through focusing on two aspects: the local stylization of Kaaps, and the sexualization of the female body. At the launch of MoBCoW records, a prominent deejay was booked, and dancing and drinking competitions were held with gender-​specific prizes. Drinking competitions were held for men, and the winner won a pair of sneakers and other Hip Hop attire. Women were expected to participate in dance competitions, and the winner was awarded prizes such as spa vouchers, hair products and so on. Before the competitions began, emcee Chuck set the tone:

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Precarious Femininity Extract 8.1.1 Emcee Chuck: 1. Wat kan ‘n man dan maak?   What can a man do? 2. As die holle net wil skud   When her ass shakes 3. Die ape wil net hier voor   The apes just want to come 4. ‘n Ander man kom buk   Bend over in front of a man 5. Nou ek het groot geskrik   Now I got excited 6. Vir haar lyf and haar biene   For her body and legs 7. Ek sal haar tjais   I’ll chase after her 8. Maar sal haar burk my vergiewe   But will her boyfriend forgive me 9. Nou Chuck   Now Chuck 10. Chuck lykes vir jou   Chuck likes you 11. En sy haat vir Chuck   But she hates Chuck 12. Nou Chuck gaan haar tjais   But Chuck will get her 13. Demn, wat maak sy nou?   Damn, what is she doing now? 14. Los haar once vir my   Leave her just for me 15. Los haar once vir my   Leave her just for me 16. Los haar once vir my!   Leave her just for me! 17. Voor sy besluit sy gaat jou play   Before she decides to play you. 18. Nou kyk hie’   Now look here 19. Hosh!   Check it!

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20. Hoor die kak!   Listen to this shit! 21. Nou ken djy vir my   Now you know me 22. Ek is ‘n ander ou   I’m a different guy 23. Ek kom op jou goose   I’ll come at your girl 24. En sy verlaat vir jou   And she’ll leave you 25. Gedra vir jou   You better behave 26. Wiet djy hoe laat is dit nou?   Do you know what time it is? 27. Tyd om the march   Time to march 28. Soe goodbye met jou   So goodbye to you

Chuck opens his performance directly addressing the audience, asking rhetorically what he should do if a woman’s buttocks were to gyrate in front of him, when women –​or ‘apes’, a local derogatory name for women used mainly in township spaces, but also beyond –​want to ‘get low’ in front of him. The woman’s body and her legs got him ‘excited’ (line 5)  –​in other words, they excite him –​and he decides to ‘tjais’ (chase) after her (line 7) –​while wondering if he would be forgiven by her boyfriend. In a dialogical way, Chuck shifts his attention to a conversation with the woman (lines 9–​17) whom he tries to address by confiding his attraction to her: he realizes, however, that she strongly dislikes him (see line 11). Nevertheless, he vows to continue chasing her (line 12). His performance then transforms into a crises for him: his rhymes anguish over the fact that she will leave Chuck to be with her man (line 13) whom he implores to ‘leave her for’ (lines 14–​16) him. The audience cheers, and, feeling buoyant, Chuck continues. Chuck shifts the lyrical attention to the man she has gone to: by performing his seduction as in essence stealing another man’s girlfriend as if she were property, Chuck addresses not only the man in his performance but the (purportedly heterosexual) men in the audience. He tells this audience that they do not know him, that he is a different ‘ou’ (street-​smart guy) who will pounce on a woman (‘jou goose’, line 23) until she leaves him. Like ‘ape’ (line 3), the use of ‘goose’

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(line 23) here is another form of sexual objectification in body rap. The word ‘goose’ is typically used on the Cape Flats as a derogatory term for women. Emcee Chuck’s performance is in Kaaps mixed with a few words in Sabela (such as ‘tjais’, line 7 and ‘Hosh’, line 19). His use of language to sexualize the fantasy woman entextualizes the discourse of sexuality prevalent in global Hip Hop –​particularly in Hip Hop music videos where Hip Hop video hos get down low (see Rose 2008). His lyrics reinforce a stereotypical image of women that is given a local anchor through the use of local varieties. We encountered similar multilingual remixing using words like ‘hosh’ in in the discussion of freestyle rap performances in Chapter 6, but their significance here is that body rap is localized while overtly sexualizing gender relations (drawing on Hunter and Soto 2009) remain prevalent in the club culture of Cape Town (and of course beyond). Chuck’s performance carefully entextualizes sexualization discourses and commentary on the female body through Kaaps and Sabela. His acapella body rap reveals a Hip Hop heteronormative ideology that over-​privileges a skewed idea of the female body (following Milani 2014, 2015):  men are the apparent neutral consumers of overtly sexualized female bodies, and women are naturally submissive and sexually giving of their bodies (see also Butler 1993: 11 on the ‘sexed body’). To summarize, it is clear that emcee Chuck’s body rap is ideologically continuous with the refusal by the audience to listen to CC, who was trying to introduce the agency and voice of women into the space of Club Stones. In Chuck’s rap, women have no voice, and are exchanged like property. His rap goes no further than the stereotypical eroticization of the female body, and by extension puts on sexual notice the bodies of the other women in the club, thus leading to the representation of female bodies ‘as interchangeable bodies instead of active voices’ (Hunter 2011: 18).

8.2  The Performativity of Hip Hop Dance The previous section of this chapter serves as a segue into a more detailed analysis of the performativity of the body in Hip Hop dance. In the next three sections, I will explore the situated on-​stage processes of sexualized body performances, focusing on the staging of Hip Hop style dance by two women. I will focus on how and when in the on-​stage performance the dance becomes defined as a Hip Hop dance, but I will also demonstrate how both English and Kaaps are linked

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to discourses of sexualization. I  will also demonstrate how the dancers position their bodies, and are simultaneously positioned by language use on stage, to mimic the stereotypical body positioning evidenced in contemporary global Hip Hop. One night at Club Stones, early in the Hip Hop show, host emcees Mseeq and Narc selected four women from the audience who volunteered to compete in a dance-​off for specifically gendered prizes. Earlier in the evening, a drink-​off, or drinking competition, had been held between two men who volunteered from the audience. While Mseeq counted down, the men one after the other had to down a beer without spilling any. The winner received a pair of sneakers, and could choose between a T-​shirt and new laces. Mseeq and Narc then announced that the next on-​stage performance was the ‘main event’ for the night. At first, they did not specify the details of the main event, confusing regular goers to the Hip Hop show who had expected freestyle rap battles. Two barstools are placed in the middle of the stage. The curiosity of the audience (and the ethnographer) is further piqued. Mseeq and Narc, looking at the empty chairs, initiate the main event: Extract 8.2.1 Mseeq: 1. Sniggos [a well-​known alias for Narc], where do we = = Narc: 2.    = = OK, we got the two vouchers = = Mseeq: 3.       = = You to get the spa voucher. Narc: 4. I got the spa voucher. 5. You can get your massage and everything done here. 6. And you got the… Mseeq: 7. I got the hairdresser. Narc: 8. So, I don’t know if you were listening to Mseeq earlier, 9. But he explained exactly how this is gonna go down. 10. I need four girls to… Mseeq: 11. Wat gebee’ met jou mic?   What is happening with your mic?

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Narc: 12. Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo (testing his mic). 13. I need four girls. 14. Two are gonna compete for the spa voucher and two is gonna compete for the hairdresser voucher so…

Quite clearly directing their comments at the women in the audience, the emcees describe the prizes (the spa and the hairdresser) that are up for grabs (lines 4–​5 and 7). Narc reminds the audience that they would know ‘exactly how [the dance] is gonna go down’ (line 9) –​referring back to an earlier comment by Mseeq. He then asks for four ‘girls’ to join him on-​stage, but his mic cuts out, and he has to adjust it before encouraging audience members to come onto the stage to compete for the vouchers, as no takers have yet come forward. Mseeq soon goes on to recruit male judges from the audience: Extract 8.2.2 Mseeq: 1. First we need—​ 2. –​sorry Sniggos… 3. Two guys, two guys, two judges. 4. OK ek het kla twie ouens.   OK, I already have two guys. 5. Kamielo waa’s djy?   Kamielo where are you? 6. Kamielo stiek yt Kamielo!   Kamielo show yourself Kamielo! 7. Kamielo stiek gou yt Kamielo!   Kamielo quickly show yourself Kamielo! 8. Uh, Robbie het gesê Robbie gaat ‘ie kom nie.   Uh, Robbie said that Robbie is not coming. 9. Desmond, stiek gou yt Desmond!   Desmond, show yourself Desmond! 10. OK, ek het twie judges.   OK I have two judges. 11. I got special guest judges. 12. Gie vi’ die ouens drinks hie.   Give the guys drinks. 13. Gie vi’ hulle…   Give them…

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14. Nai nai, nai nai, gie vi’ hulle die agtes is fine…   No, no, no, no, give them those at the back, it’s fine… 15. Issie drinking competition vanaand.   It’s not a drinking competition tonight.

The two men ushered onto the stage, Kamielo (line 6) and Desmond (line 9), are referred to as special guest judges. They take their seats on the bar stools, without needing Mseeq or Narc instructing them to do so. They are then each given a bottle of beer from the back bar (line 14), as a prop for their masculinity (see Milani and Shaikjee 2012). And Mseeq then informs them that it is not a drinking competition (line 15). Mseeq and Narc now return their attention to soliciting four women from the audience to join them on stage and compete for the voucher prizes. Again, there are at first no volunteers. The audience begins to talk, and the increasing noise heightens the tension. The emcees then try to convince female audience members to participate in the dance competition, and eventually both express their frustration at their refusal: Extract 8.2.3 Narc: 1. A free voucher ladies! 2. A free voucher! Mseeq: 3. Wiet djy ek sukkel elke wiek om free goeters uit te gie.   You know I struggle to give away free stuff every week. Narc: 4. All you have to do is dance . . . I see

Shouting ‘A free voucher ladies!’ into the dimmed light, Narc’s frustration at women’s lack of willingness to provide the evening’s entertainment is palpable. He has reverted back to the referent ‘ladies’ (instead of ‘girls’), perhaps in an attempt to lure more women onto the stage with a cynical show of respect. Narc’s frustration leads Mseeq to say (switching to Kaaps) that he always struggles to give away prizes (line 3). Narc tries to soften the request, cajoling the audience, saying all they have to do is dance (line 4). Two women finally agree to go on-​stage. Their initial reluctance to come forward and participate in the dance-​off can be read as resistance to the sexualization of their bodies, as a challenge to their being boxed in, in the male space in the club, with the complicit heteronormativity of the all-​male Suburban Menace, promoting the commodification of their bodies. The

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initial non-​compliance of the women is a silent performative that goes against the preferred male norms with which female bodies are expected to comply in the club. As we have learned from Butler, ‘bodies never quite comply with the norms with which their materialization is impelled’ (Butler 1993: 2) (see also Milani 2014, 2015). It is no surprise then that the frustration expressed by Mseeq and Narc is a reflection on not only the non-​compliance of the women in the audience but also on their own performance as emcees who must meet the expectation of male audience members that they have control over women and their bodies. As the on-​stage interaction continues, Mseeq is set on re-​enregistering the expectations men have of women in the club. He proceeds to describe in Kaaps women’s resistance by entextualizing a specific gender ideology in the narration of a joke. Extract 8.2.4 Mseeq: 1. Yoh! 2. Ek het nog nooit soe . . .   I have never had such . . . 2. Wiet djy nuh as hie nou net swat en wit mense gewies ‘it sal hulle gou, hulle hou mos vannie Wittes.   You know nuh if there was a black or white person on stage they would quickly participate, they like the Whiteys. 3. Maar Bruinmense!   But Coloureds! 4. Yoh! Bruinmense hou nie van free goeters nie.   Yoh! Coloureds do not like free stuff. 5. Wiet djy een kee’ ek sê vir ‘n girl,   You know what one time I told this girl, 6. Kyk hie laat ek julle joke ve’tel:   Listen here, let me tell you a joke: 7. Een aand o’s hou ‘n mos die Hip Hop ding sien.   One evening we hosted this Hip Hop event you see. 8. Nou sê sê ek vi’ die kin, ‘Kyk hie, wie wil ‘n free cocktail hê?’   So I tell this girl, ‘Look, who wants a free cocktail?’ 9. Een Coloured girl skrie vi my, ‘I’m not cheap!’ [laughing]   One Coloured girl shouts at me, ‘I’m not cheap!’ [laughing] 10. Ek sê ek wil mossie vir jou koepie!   Come on, I don’t want to buy you! 11. All I was ask who wants a free drink. 12. ‘I’m not cheap I can buy my own drinks’.

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13. So, OK. 14. En julle wonne’ altyd hoeko’ die ouens soe dikgesyp is.   And you wonder why the guys are always drunk.

Mseeq racializes his interaction with the audience by entextualizing the essentializing and stereotypical cultural and racial discourses associated with Coloured people, comparing them to those associated with White or Black people. He does so in order to further express his frustration at women in the audience who don’t want to come forward to participate in the Hip Hop dance-​off. In lines 1 to 5, he suggests that if the male judges were Black or White, the women in the audience would have jumped on stage to compete in the dance-​off, because Coloured women supposedly like White men (line 3), not Coloured men (line 4). Mseeq proceeds to reflect on what he told ‘a girl’ (line 6)  during a previous hosting of the Hip Hop show. He enacts a meta-​reflection on the sexually explicit scripts (Stephens and Phillips 2003) of Coloured women and their bodies in night clubs and Kuilsriver Hip Hop culture. His tells the joke in Kaaps, and essentially ‘capitulates to patriarchy by defining “good women” as loyal to men at the expense of their own health and safety’ (Hunter and Soto 2009: 186). In other words, Mseeq entextualizes a gender ideology that insists Coloured female participants in the local Hip Hop cultures let go of their independence, choosing instead to rely on their men and be loyal to them at all costs. Nevertheless, men on their barstools with beer in their hands, and two willing participants ready to compete in the dance off, Narc leads the audience: Extract 8.2.5 Narc: 1. Are you guys ready? 2. Are you guys ready for this? Mseeq: 3. Wait, wait, wait, 4. Let me first explain to them what they must do. 5. Just dance to him, like you would do in a club. 6. Lyk my julle meisies dans ‘ie mee vir ouens innie club ‘ie.   It seems you girls don’t dance for guys in the club anymore. Narc: 7. (laughing) 8. Come let’s go. 9. Alright let’s go! Dance-​off: 10. [Two women start to dance]

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Mseeq: 11. Wag wag . . . daai’s orite.   Wait wait… that’s alright. 12. Os doen ‘it Hip Hop battle style!   We do it Hip Hop battle style!

Facing the men seated on the bar stools, the women poise their bodies in anticipation of the music to be played. Mseeq turns to Narc and the audience and then points out what the ladies should do. He instructs the women to dance for the male judges as they would usually do in a nightclub (line 5). They assume that they should dance provocatively for the men. Though this is never said explicitly, it is clearly indexed in the phrase, ‘Just dance to him, like you would do in a club.’ He then switches to Kaaps to make a comment that comes across as an accusation, ‘It seems you girls don’t dance for guys in the club anymore’ (line 6), which individualizes the females, attempting to make them feel guilty, falsely making them culpable for not dancing for guys provocatively enough in the club anymore. Though the women say nothing, and Narc laughs at Mseeq’s jab, the dance-​off nevertheless proceeds (line 10). As they dance, the women slide their bodies up and down the legs of the men seated on the bar stools. To point out that they are (supposedly) doing it wrong, Mseeq stops the music and suggests the women should dance ‘Hip Hop battle style’ (line 11). This comes across as confusing as the ladies had assumed that their dance did already constitute a kind of Hip Hop dance battle style: the kind of dance you see in Hip Hop music videos. The dance battle between the women presents a weird and disturbing carnivalesque staging of bodies gnawed at by the sexualizing gazes of the men seated on the barstools. As special guest judges, the ouens literally have the best seat in the house as the women grind up and down their knees and mimic the dance moves of strippers. While the audience has been led to expect that this is a Hip Hop dance battle, nobody seemed persuaded that it was. In essence, and for the female audience members, the dance-​off does not necessarily offer new meanings, nor is it meaningfully transgressive for suggesting an alternative understanding of a female body as a complex site of interaction. Rather, the fact that the two women dance like Hip Hop strippers re-​entextualizes Hip Hop dance as ‘an activity that young men and women do together to one where women perform for men . . . [where] women dance for men’ (Hunter 2011: 26). Of course, the overarching reasoning is that in the club environment, according to Campbell, ‘it is more difficult to evade the gaze of the others [because] . . . the pleasure of dancing lies as much in being watched, and making visual

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contact with others, as in the actual movement’ (Campbell 2004: 506). Thus, if the women dance like strippers, they ‘perform a highly sexualized femininity for a male gaze’ (Hunter 2011: 28) by putting on display their ‘body’s sensuality and desire’ (Campbell 2004: 505). This dance-​off, the grinding of the female bodies against the knees of the men seated on the barstools, reinforces the sexualized materiality of their bodies. The grinding suggests that women’s bodies are muted on stage in the Hip Hop show, and not seen as equal or worthy of mutual respect, as are the bodies of their male counterparts. Another reason is that while the men are seen as passive, they also watch while the women grind and display their sexuality. The women are silent –​they do not engage in language –​except with their bodies. Nor do they offer any indication that they reject the objectification of their bodies. Instead, they are silenced according to the expected heteronormative register of ‘do it Hip Hop battle style’ (line 110).

8.3  The Performativity of ‘Hou Op, Hou Op!’ as Bodily Resistance In the Menace Mansion, female fans and friends who followed or were invited by members of MobCoW and Suburban Menace participated fully in Hip Hop-​related activities. However, their bodies and their language use were always subjected to the heteronormative rules of the Mansion. In Chapter  5, we encountered the performance of freestyle rap battling that involved forming a circle including three emcees (Cole, Phoenix and M.D.K.), myself and two women. This freestyle rap performance occurred after the successful hosting of the Hip Hop show in Club Stones, and the analysis below continues with the freestyle rap performance with a focus on the role of female participants and their bodies. Here I illustrate how the participation of the women and the subsequent sexualization of their bodies is achieved through the remixing of multilingualism in the freestyle rap battle space. I also illustrate how the performativity of ‘No’, uttered by CC in the opening excerpt of this chapter, the reluctance of women to participate in the Hip Hop dance-​off on-​stage in the Club, and the performativity of the phrase of ‘Hou op, hou op!’ [Stop it, stop it!] by women in the freestyle rap battle space are discursively linked. Halfway through the freestyle battle, after emcees Cole and Phoenix performed, one of the women accused emcee M.D.K. of not ‘carrying his weight’ during freestyle rap battles. Surprised, MDK immediately snaps back:  ‘What

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you say I don’t carry my weight Ronelda?!’ Pressing further, Ronelda says that she wants to hear him rap clearly: ‘I wanna hear you!’ At the end of Ronelda’s turn, Leila picked up the recorder on the table and shouted into it: ‘Leila loves Suburban Menace!’ By this point, M.D.K.  was poised to respond to Ronelda when Phoenix dropped another few lines, leading M.D.K. to begin his freestyle rap against Ronelda: Extract 8.3.1 1. M.D.K.: Da’i’s gevaarlik, da’i’s gevaarlik.      That’s cool, that’s cool [lit. that’s dangerous] 2. Ronelda: Go Phoenix = = 3. M.D.K.:   = = Yor, nai, nai, nai, kykie…Watch, watch, gou = =       = = Yoh, nah, nah, nah, look…Watch, watch, quick = = 4. Cole:      = = Drop djy gou ene [looking at M.D.K.] = =          = = You drop one quick [looking at M.D.K.]= = 5. Ronelda: = = Can you wait Mikkes? = = 6. M.D.K.:      =  =  Alright, alright, alright. Hoe dai move gegaan                    nou weer?           = = Alright, alright, alright. How did those lyrics go again? 7. Ronelda: Carry your weight Mikkes? 8. M.D.K.: Watch, 9. Watch gou   Watch quickly 10. Hoe maak ek vir Ronelda, wit biene   how I lyrically turn Ronelda into bones 11. Ek hettie ‘n watch ‘ie   I don’t have a watch 12. So ek het nie tyd nie   So I don’t have time 13. Maar apparently carry ekkie my weight nie   Cause apparently I don’t carry my weight 14. Maar kykie dis nie feit nie   But look that’s not a fact 15. Djy’s in my huis in   You in my house 16. Soe ek slat jou uit amper soos Bracen = =   So, I’ll hit you out like Bracen = = 17. Everybody in the Battle Circle:  = = Oh! [Bracen Kayle walks over to the circle] = =

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18. Cole: = = Daai was heavy, rock steady = =     = = That was heavy, rock steady = = 19. Ronelda: = = Hou op, hou op! Hou op, hou op! Hou op, hou op! I’m listening.      = = Stop it, Stop it! Stop it, Stop it! Stop it, Stop it! I’m listening 20. M.D.K.: And I was just getting started 21. And you stink 22. I don’t like you farted 23. And you crazy like you retarded 24. So come one bitch… 25. Come on, don’t get me started 26. Here’s a thirty seconds 27. Daai om te reckon [with which you can reckon], 28. I give you two seconds 29. And you betta get to steppin’… 30. Cause my skill is up 31. And you shouldn’t be disrespecting… 32. So bitch 33. Sorry for calling you a bitch 34. But give me two months 35. And I’m gonna be rich 36. And then I’m gonna be like Richie Rich 37. And I’m gonna call you a bitch again 38. And then once again 39. I’m a call you my friend 40. Cause Ronelda I don’t care if you see me 41. And you can come in my house with your double Ds 42. I don’t care what the size of your bra is, but you = = 43. Cole:    = = Double Es = = 44. M.D.K.:   = = know you’re still my friend. 45. So Cola 46. Lighten an ensie en trek ‘n skyf   Light a single cigarette and take a drag 47. Want die kind is met die lyf, of lyk dit so   Cause this girl is pregnant 48. MIA 49. Maybe I’m seeing shit.

In the first few lines (1–​7) there is significant overlap and interruption between M.D.K., Ronelda and Cole. At one point (line 5) Ronelda instructs M.D.K. (also

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known as Mikkes) to wait his turn. He ignores her, and she responds by instructing him to ‘carry his weight’ (line 7). As a result, M.D.K.  changes tactics:  he begins to perform freestyle rap battle lyrics against the source of frustration, Ronelda, and not in the circle as is the convention. From lines 8 to 16, he entextualizes in Kaaps a tough discursive stance towards his opponent, saying he does not have time for her games, ironically citing her comment about his ability to ‘carry his weight’ in a freestyle rap battle. He then threatens Ronelda: she should watch what she says because she is in his house (‘in my huis in’, the Suburban Menace House); if not, he will beat her (metaphorically) just like he did emcee Bracen Kayle in a freestyle rap battle earlier that same night. The response ‘Oh!’ (line 17) confirms this, and prompts Bracen Kayle to stand up from his seat in the living area and join the freestyle rap battle space. The collective ‘oh’, however, was uttered only by the men in the circle. Although we all responded to the punchline that interpellated Emcee Bracen Kayle, nobody threw in a refrain about M.D.K.’s metaphorical attack on Ronelda. We became complicit as men. As a researcher, I was also complicit, and as a man in the circle, my response gave license to the metaphorical beat down. In that moment, we men reproduced the dominant heteronormative, patriarchal culture, and also failed to anticipate that Ronelda’s response would not be positive. Cole’s observation that M.D.K.’s initial lyrics are ‘heavy’ (line 18)  is a mild assessment of his freestyle rap battle with Ronelda, though he nevertheless expresses his approval of them with the positive assessment, ‘rock steady’. However, when Ronelda starts to insist ‘Stop it, stop it!’ (line 19), she implies that M.D.K. should perform clever battle lyrics instead of submitting to stereotypically violent ones. M.D.K. ignores Ronelda and continues with the lyrical assault, ridiculing her odour, calling her a derogatory name, and commenting on her body. He switches over to English to perform his battle lyrics, displaying his ability to remix discourses of sexualization in both English and Kaaps. However, in an effort to demonstrate that his battle lyrics should be taken in good spirit, without destroying their relationship, MDK minimizes his aggressive stance towards Ronelda, claiming that he would still call her his friend who can come over to the Menace Mansion with her ‘double Ds’ (line 41). However, this is an insincere attempt because in the very next line M.D.K.  suggests that Ronelda is fat: he compares her to the English female rapper MIA (line 48) (Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam) who appeared pregnant on stage with Lil Wayne, Jay-​ Z, T.I.  and Khanye West to perform Paper Planes/​Swagger Like Us at the 51st Grammy Awards in 2009.1

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8.4  Conclusion Reflecting on the ‘Hip Hop and Feminism’ conference held at the University of Chicago in 2005, Jeff Chang describes how feminist scholars have succeeded in pulling apart the apparent contradictions and heteronormativity of Hip Hop culture. This leads him to conclude: ‘Fuck being hard, the women had unmasked the complications of the culture in the new postmillennial moment’ (Chang 2007: xii). Yes, fuck being hard: let our language show love and respect for women and their bodies. The data analysed in this chapter demonstrate the need to develop an approach to Hip Hop that helps us to better understand not only gender relationships between men and women in Hip Hop but also how precarious the positions are for those women who participate in Hip Hop. The women who are apprenticed into the Hip Hop culture as ‘femcees’ (female emcees) (see May 2013), b-​girls, deejays and graffiti artists understand from the outset the rules of the game, what their value is in the Hip Hop market and how to fully participate in the practice of the culture. This is one thing, but changing the terms and conditions for all women in a male-​dominated market is another thing. Women are forced to contend with an array of stereotypical discourses about their bodies, about their personalities and specifically unreasonable expectations from men, including from the Hip Hop heads they encounter. This has enormous consequences for their performance of their voice. In this chapter, I have tried to highlight how the bodies of women who participate in Hip Hop-​related activities –​specifically the ones staged by Surburban Menace during the Hip Hop show –​resemble bodily fetishizations where men exercise a form of symbolic power through the entextualization of sexualization discourses. What occurs through the performances generates knowledge of stereotypical female bodies that continue to circulate in global Hip Hop culture. In other words, the local language and registers used by male emcees –​whether it is Kaaps, English or Sabela –​continues to further marginalize female participants in Hip Hop culture through the production of lyrics that support the harmful gender discourses already prevalent in their ‘body rap’ and freestyle rap performances. A number of conclusions are thus clear: What some male emcees say and do is accompanied by a deep lack of respect for women’s bodies. The ways in which gender roles and identities are framed and articulated leaves one to ponder the origins of the idea that so many Hip Hop artists insist that women

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perform a reduced idea of their gender, given that Hip Hop artists are in many other respects operating at the avant-​garde of critical thinking about language and identity. What the analysis in this chapter makes clear is that local Hip Hop culture, and more specifically the Suburban Menace Hip Hop show, have opted for a trend that is prevalent in global Hip Hop culture: the commodification of everything (see Miller-​Young 2003:  262), and not only female bodies, at the expense of the social justice foundations of Hip Hop culture.

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Conclusion: On the Future Study of Marginalized Voices

In writing this book, I set out to explore an approach to multilingualism that treated it as a dynamic and mobile resource that enables the (re)production of voice and citizenship, a process I have called ‘remixing’ multilingualism. In investigating the Hip Hop spaces and the multilingual practices of young multilingual speakers in global Cape Town, I first took cognizance of the everyday and normative aspects of accelerated globalization (Bauman 2009), and the resultant ushering in of new conditions for practices marginalized multilingualism and of new concepts of language (Rampton 2005). I argued that, sociolinguistically speaking, globalization has in fact stripped from the notion of ‘community’ its modernist meaning of bounded and territorially closed markets of homogenous speakers, necessitating a stratified, porous and heterogeneous linguistics of contact. Furthermore, the social changes accompanying globalization mean that notions such as social class and institutions no longer predetermine speakers’ voice to the same extent. Remix Multilingualism has attempted to contribute to developing research on the social approach to multilingualism (a la Heller 2007a) by focusing on the transcultural flow of Hip Hop culture and language in Hip Hop spaces. Studying these spaces, as I  demonstrated, reveals complex multiscalar and transmodal semiotic relationships, as well as the distribution of macro-​and micro-​level multilingual practices that encompass levels of hybridity that far exceed our modernist structural-​functional frames of reference. I  chose to focus on Hip Hop spaces because they represent cultural creolization, linguistic hybridity, social structural anarchy and political economies of consumption that all figure within the complex patterning of remixing multilingualism in globalized and globalizing time/​space frames. In this closing chapter, I  will pull together the different threads that run through the analysis of remixing multilingualism in the performance of marginalized voice by, first, recapitulating the main points.

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In doing so I will draw parallels between the interlinked Hip Hop spaces I analysed with respect to the stylization, entextualization and enregisterment of multilingualism and voice, and the affordances this view provides on multilingual repertoires. I will then briefly discuss the notion of linguistic citizenship as an entry point for further research on multilingualism and voice in multilingual contexts. I will then proceed to a discussion of how future research on linguistic citizenship could benefit from being framed with reference to consumption. In this context, I touch briefly on how notions of authenticity and the body –​salient dimensions in consumption –​are important parameters for developing the idea of linguistic citizenship, and I show how they feature as significant organizing tropes in the transcultural and transidiomatic practices of Hip Hop, especially with respect to multilingualism. Finally, I draw out one implication that I believe arises from careful consideration of remixing multilingualism and the performance of marginality in the sites I studied.

9.1  Transmodal Semiotics of Hip Hop Spaces: Remixing of Multilingualism Hip Hop spaces serve as frames for multilingual practices. I  argued that spaces such as Club Stones, the Menace Mansion and social media sites could be described in terms of specific interactional routines, uses of language and the design and unfolding of infrastructures in the forms of buildings, furnishings and spatial designs. In Chapter  5, I  discussed how this assemblage of practices and processes shaped (and was shaped by) constructions of identity and locality through particular forms of multilingual practices. The aim there was to demonstrate how the emcees stylized different voices in braggadocio through varieties of language and registers in front of a local audience, and how these voices could be understood as intertextual gaps that allow for the introduction and display of a variety of languages around local social concerns and ‘keeping it real’. I suggested that the way the emcees use their language in Club Stones offers up a typical example of how youth on the Cape Flats remix multilingualism through interaction with each other in this and in other Hip Hop spaces. In Chapter 6, I demonstrated that, in the process of entextualization, a shared sense of locality emerged with respect to freestyle rap performances in Club Stones, The Menace Mansion and on Facebook, where multilingual speakers invested in Hip Hop talk about language use. In the freestyle rap performances,

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emcees used freestyle lyrics, as well as rap music and styles, to convey different levels of linguistic ability and creativity. They produced linguistic and discursive features of local languages that spoke to core issues of how forms of language use are legitimated in multilingual performance and locality. The ‘local’ established by the emcees and their audience was accomplished partly through the use of particular languages and their varieties and partly by indexical reference to spatial and non-​spatial coordinates. In this process, the audience as co-​constructor in the entextualization of locality was a significant feature in the emergence of the freestyle rap performance. Features such as situated improvisations, and references to local discourses such as the Number Gangs, figured in these processes of entextualization. What came under censure in (joint) performance was the appropriation of lyrics from global Hip Hop and the use of African-​American English (AAE) (rather than Kaaps). These features were understood by participants as evidence of insufficient ‘remixing of the flow’ (Pennycook 2007a: 117). The analyses revealed how the entextualization of locality in Club Stones was also an attempt at establishing a register (an enregisterment) of socially acceptable linguistic resources that circulated on the sociolinguistic landscape of the Cape Flats. Furthermore, the analysis of the freestyle rap performances demonstrated the continued valorization of the entextualization of locality by celebrating various rap styles in the Menace Mansion, while analysis of the discussions about freestyle rap battling on Facebook exposed that contestations about language –​the ‘proper’ language to use for freestyle battles in Club Stones –​were linked to specific language ideologies. The focus on the performance of tough masculine ideology explored in Chapter 7 illustrated how discourses and practices of femininity that circulate in Cape Town Hip Hop feed into performances of tough masculinity, and that a language variety such as Kaaps is used as a linguistic resource to enforce toughness as a dominant form of masculinity in local Hip Hop spaces. Interestingly, the data revealed that the emceeing of toughness, and the toughing up of an emcee through the use of Kaaps, AAE and Sabela, including the activity of entextualization of figures, characters and personae, is a matter of position-​ taking by emcees, with the ultimate aim of winning, of achieving a higher status in the community. For instance, in the first freestyle rap performance between emcees Chuck and Bio.has.it, we learned that the mutual display of toughness is mainly entextualized via figures and personae. The lyrical battle between Jack Denovan and Bio.has.it, on the other hand, gives us an entirely different picture. The data illustrate how Jack entextualizes homophobic sexuality discourses through chauvinistic lyrics that are meant to ritually insult and emasculate his

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opponent. Taken together, these performances of toughness and toughing up of each other in the freestyle rap space are interesting because they allow us to show how local languages not only mediate the display of toughness but are also used by emcees to reinforce the local masculine order (Evaldsson 2001; Milani and Jonsson 2011), be it through popular figures, characters or racialized social personae. In Chapter 8, I demonstrated that women play an active role in the critique of masculinity and the staging of femininity. Global Hip Hop culture has been accused ad nauseam of sexism and misogyny, its failure to take women in Hip Hop performance and culture seriously. Hip Hop scholarship has only rarely demonstrated how women engage as artists in the performance and practice of the culture and language. Chapter 8 attempts to counteract this tendency by providing an analysis of the silencing and sexualization of women’s bodies through body rap, dance battles and freestyle rap battles. I offered data which speak to how female sexuality ‘remains a commodity . . . [a]‌powerful instrument . . . for negotiating interpersonal relationships and daily discourses’ (Stephens and Phillips 2003: 39). Of course, there is a limitation to my analysis of gender and language in Hip Hop:  not many women’s voices are in the transcripts. No female voices were recorded in the on-​stage performances in that chapter, nor in the body rap facilitated by emcee Chuck. The reasons why this is the case are interesting, however, and worth revisiting. The first one is normative: global Hip Hop culture is currently dominated by male Hip Hop heads, and participants are apprenticed into the culture through the idea that they must remix discursive, semiotic and linguistic resources to compete against their male peers. This is not done to the same extent for female Hip Hop heads, who must contend with the patriarchal and heteronormative norms and ideals applied to them. Second, the female Hip Hop heads I engaged with were almost always relegated to silence, and I  observed that this is a strategy for their continued participation in Hip Hop, which would otherwise be seen as challenging the prevailing gender order. Men and women in Hip Hop have to contend with this ideology.

9.2  The Performance of Marginalized Voice in Cape Town Hip Hop The majority of the young people who participated in the research project for this book and who were active participants in the Suburban Menace crew reside

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in historically constructed centres of marginalization: apartheid-​era ‘townships’. In post-​apartheid South Africa, they vie for voice as a way to chart their mobility upwards and out of their challenging circumstances. On the one hand, the remixing of multilingualism, and a powerful language like English, can serve as a resource to help them out of harsh socio-​political and socio-​economic realities. On the other hand, multilingualism can ensnare them, keeping them locked in inequality, because authoritative discourses have defined the value of these practices. As Mohanty (2010: 150) argues, ‘when multilingualism is associated with inequality, it privileges few and disadvantages many’. In post-​apartheid South Africa there is still a pressing need to decouple multilingualism as inequality and exclusion and focus on multilingualism for greater voice, that is, linguistic citizenship. In more than one way, the examples in this book bring to the fore a number of issues regarding voice. I have alluded to the need to understand the multilingual practices of the young multilingual speakers that I have put a spotlight on, particularly how they draw on linguistic and non-​linguistic resources to perform and practice a Hip Hop sense of self. At the same time, a pressing issue is to understand how, through multilingualism, according to Stroud (2009: 208), citizens have to negotiate ‘new discourses of citizenship’ in globalized democracies such as South Africa. The focus on Hip Hop spaces here has yielded a number of tensions between linguistic diversity and linguistic prejudice (see Stroud and Heugh 2004, and how young multilingual citizens should behave or are framed as citizens in a post-​apartheid nation-​state. Linguistic citizenship is a perspective on language and politics suggested by Christopher Stroud (2001; see also Stroud and Heugh 2004), which ‘recognizes the manifold challenges posed by late-​modern contexts of migration and multilingualism for democracy and voice, and that takes as a central point of departure the desirability of constructing and maintaining voice across media, modalities and contexts’ (Stroud 2009:  208). It also concerns how multilingualism can be ‘both a facilitative and constraining factor in the exercise of democratic citizenship and voice’ (Stroud 2009: 208). By combining the tenets or practices of cosmopolitan citizenship and deliberative democracy, Stroud argues that linguistic citizenship could pry open those modalities and contexts where voice is contested, where certain modernist and exclusionary forms of citizenship are enforced (compare, for instance, Roth-​Gordon 2009, on the enregisterment of slang and citizenship in Brazil) and where language and multilingualism are used as a political resource in transitioning and changing societies that have today become truly diverse.

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Linguistic citizenship emphasizes that languages, varieties and registers used across modalities and contexts affirm larger democratic processes and structures to create inclusive and participatory spaces for citizens to interact. I have demonstrated how voices in Cape Town Hip Hop are carried across various modalities and contexts, and how spaces for participatory citizenship open up in the remixing of multilingualism and the enregisterment and entextualization of identity. I  have also found evidence in Hip Hop spaces of the tenuous nature of citizenry on the margins of South African society. The cultural practice of Hip Hop is not considered mainstream. Historically, the youth I worked with in these spaces are disadvantaged almost by default. This is a fact of life in post-​ apartheid South Africa. Linguistically and semiotically, they have mastered their own disadvantaged world for greater mobility, even though the community they find themselves in was created out of the forced removals of the apartheid government. They have defined their own mobility through multilingualism. Mobility is an important feature of social transformation in South Africa. Stroud has argued extensively that instead of fixating on a linguistics of localization, we should focus on multilingual mobility. We need to do this in order to deconstruct the ‘multiple encodings of discourse’ (genres, texts, repertoires and registers) that shape and are shaped by young multilingual speakers who engage in various spatial contexts. I found in Hip Hop spaces that the entextualization of the local and the concomitant enregisterment of genres allowed for the emergence of a semiotic space and gave legitimacy to multilingual practices that, in fact, created conditions favourable to the expression of marginalized voices. In general, the entextualization and enregisterment of remixed multilingualism in Hip Hop spaces offers up semiotically framed spaces where youth are able to engage with a wider set of issues relating to their positions in society in general, such as, in other contexts, sexuality, politics and social transformation. What is of interest is that the youth themselves are actively ‘working’ with an alternative sense of language, creating new norms and standards and revealing in stark clarity the micro-​processes behind the formation of registers. They are themselves exercising ‘control over their language, deciding what languages are, and what they may mean, and where language issues . . . are discursively tied to a range of social issues’ (Stroud 2001: 353). What we see here is precisely how a grassroots and polycentric practice of multilingualism is simultaneously creating the conditions and contexts for linguistic citizenship. In this book I have suggested that in the context of multilingual South Africa, generally, Hip Hop culture is an important site not only for understanding multilingualism but also for understanding how the mixing and matching of

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linguistic resources –​what I called remixing multilingualism –​creates the conditions that make it possible for multiple voices to become heard and manifested. This prompted me to examine how non-​authoritative and marginal discourses circulate in Hip Hop spaces, and how they are taken up in, and through, being linked to varieties of language in multilingual mixes in bids for linguistic voice. More specifically, I explored the potential for a notion of linguistic citizenship, and have therefore looked closely at the nature of the local multilingual practices that permit marginal voices to be heard in public arenas such as school, higher education curricula, political domains and the media. I have employed core analytical notions of stylization and entextualization to account for what features of discourse are lifted out of context and used to perform voice in Hip Hop spaces. The analyses need to be seen against my suggestion that a productive politics for a global society of mobility, and subsequent understandings of citizenship and the enregisterment of marginalized voice. A number of recent studies have covered similar ground to this study in tracking how everyday linguistic processes, such as enregisterment, contribute to shifting practices of citizenship and voice (e.g. Newell 2009 for Côte d’Ivoire; Goebel 2009 for Indonesia; Roth-​Gordon 2000 for Brazilian favelas). However, the processes examined here speak of how languages may be formed politically, as languages are not entities that ‘preexist our linguistic performances’, but are ‘the sedimented products of repeated acts of identity’ (Pennycook 2007a, 13).

9.3  Moving Forward on Marginalized Voices: Consumption in Hip Hop Spaces Given the discussion on linguistic citizenship above, I  now want to suggest a future path for research on multilingualism in Hip Hop spaces. The entextualization and stylization of multilingualism in globalization can be seen as creating temporary states of coalescence, where bits and pieces of language are enregistered, and dialects, styles and varieties arise from the multisemioticity of expression enabled by mobility in space, by transitions, contacts and the flows of texts and rhythm and people. In Hip Hop spaces we find repertoires passing through, stopping to circulate, and being ‘consumed’ (Canclini 2001) by multilingual speakers. In order for us to move beyond structural-​functional views of multilingualism, and to develop further the social approach to multilingualism, I  want to argue that we need to seriously consider that multilingualism is a special case of one semiotized feature of an assemblage of production and

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consumption structures, brought about by the enregisterment of different features such as authenticity, semiotic representations of place and normativities. Discourses of consumption should not be taken lightly, as under globalization they have made more complex our view of multilingualism, culture and citizenship. In this book, I  viewed Hip Hop spaces as nodes in globalization processes that produce products of consumption for the participants moving in those spaces (cf. Riley 2007), and not ‘mere setting[s]‌for useless expenditures and irrational impulses, but as . . . site[s] that [are] good for thinking, where a good part of economic, sociopolitical, and psychological rationality is organized in all societies’ (Canclini 2001: 5). In the process of commodifying cultures such as Hip Hop, an array of consumable products are easily appropriated and consumed through new media and porous nation-​state borders. Cultures such as Hip Hop are undoubtedly commodities, value-​laden objects that are produced in consumption structures, ‘things that at a certain phase in their careers and in particular context, meet the requirements of commodity candidacy’ (Appadurai 1986: 16, italics in the original). Canclini (2001: 17–​18) suggests that we should not underestimate the power of popular cultural objects designed for our pleasure. This implies a number of things for how we approach marginalized voices and how we understand the remixing of multilingualism to feature in an assemblage of semiotic objects in the process of enregisterment. Holston and Appadurai (1996:  189)  argue that in times of globalization, city spaces are becoming new and unpredictable disjunctive places where ‘citizens are producing new (in some cases expansive, in some restrictive) notions of membership and solidarity’. I  would likewise suggest that we have to take into consideration the discourses surrounding cultural and linguistic citizenship and consumption practices in globalization, because, as I  have argued implicitly throughout this book, Hip Hop spaces do not share the same logic in the production and consumption of linguistic and non-​linguistic products. On the one hand, following Hill and Ramsaran (2009: 142), Hip Hop is more than ‘beats now, it is a lifestyle’, and because of this it has gained ‘tremendous profit potential’ for the artists and media corporations who produce the culture as a consumable object. Thus, a future line of research on multilingualism and consumption in Hip Hop spaces would endeavour to illustrate most clearly how Hip Hop, remixing of multilingualism and marginalized voice form part of glocal commodification processes. It would be incumbent on such a research programme to demonstrate how Hip Hop spaces are places for consumption –​a liminal space –​deliberately designed to put on display interrelated value-​laden

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objects, be it a space for stylizing bodies (following Coupland and Gwyn 2003), a space for drinking (Van Wolputte and Fumanti 2011), or just purely a leisure space for the enjoyment of Hip Hop music (see Künzler 2011 on Hip Hop commodification in South Africa). The data I have presented here suggest that it is not the globalization or localization of Hip Hop cultural practices in Hip Hop spaces so much as an encountering of the commodified artefacts (language, authenticity, senses of place and space, and group acceptance) produced as popular and pre-​existing. A future focus on that which is staged, which is framed in commercial and globalized/​ localized consumption discourses, would require further research on multilingualism in Hip Hop spaces, especially given how Hip Hop spaces produce assemblages of multilingual practices. In particular, the findings of this study suggest two directions in which an exploration of consumption, multilingualism and citizenship might proceed in future work, namely looking more closely at authenticity and corporeality (Milani 2013; Peck and Stroud 2015). I explore these ideas in the next section.

9.3.1  Authenticities in Hip Hop Spaces The co-​occurrence of multiple authenticities in Hip Hop spaces that I have analysed supports the conclusions of recent sociolinguistic research on polycentricity and interactional regimes in multilingual spaces (e.g. Blommaert, Slembrouck and Collins 2005b). I demonstrated that Hip Hop spaces are organizing matrices in which multiple authenticities feature as an important node in the organization and process of remixing multilingualism. In these spaces it is overwhelmingly the rap ‘ideology of authenticity’ that emerges in performances (Pennycook 2007a). This corroborates other research on language, popular culture and authenticity (Terkourafi 2010; Wang 2010; Westinen 2007, 2010; Blommaert and Varis 2011; Varis and Wang 2017). Based on my analysis of the data, a concluding statement might be made about the existence of an economy of authenticities that multilingual youth draw on to stylize and enregister multilingualism and social categories in various ways. We saw that authenticity is tied to different language varieties set in the processes of entextualization and enregisterment in various ways and for various purposes, linked to various forms of dress style, body comportments and encounters with other young multilingual speakers who do the same. According to Wang (2010), ‘authenticity is about norms as much as innovations . . . orientating towards different orders of authenticity concurrently’. Similarly, Blommaert and Varis

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(2011) argue that ‘in different niches of our social and cultural lives, we arrange features in such a way that they enable others to identify us as “authentic”, “real” members of social groups, even if this authenticity comes with a lower rank as “apprentice” with a particular field’. In the Hip Hop spaces I  studied, I  illustrated that remixing multilingualism and Hip Hop practices figure as part of the global linguistic flows, and that authenticity is a core feature of such performances. The examples I have given in this book show that authenticity comes about in the downscaling of Hip Hop as rescaled to discursive practices and performances of rap music. I have demonstrated that local forms of rap can be understood as a struggle between how much of a local or global language to use, what to wear on stage, how to ‘keep it real’ by using a prison register, or how best to ‘represent’ place. These struggles, I argue, develop into a contest between crossing and blending language, place and space. In Remixing Multilingualism, I have tried to demonstrate how emcees entextualized different rap performance genres in local languages, varieties and registers to be acknowledged as authentic in their rap identity practices. What we can take from my analysis is that part of performing in local varieties is to revalorize the marginality of language varieties, but also to multilingually devalorize or deregister a powerful language such as English, in the process of remixing multilingualism. By deregisterment I mean not to enregister, but to relegate and/​or remove to the side a powerful language for the advancement of less powerful languages, varieties and registers. (See Section 9.4 on how this notion relates to enregisterment.) We saw that emcees deregistered aspects of English but appropriated linguistic forms from AAE to proclaim that they don’t sound like English-​speaking emcees, and yet embrace the idea that, in order to tell their stories, they needed to do so in a local language through which they were socialized. This finding corroborates other research on Hip Hop around the world (see Westinen 2010; Terkourafi 2010). In particular, in the on-​stage freestyle rap performances, emcees competed linguistically against each other in a way that devalued the use of a global language such as English (see especially Chapter 8). There was a continuous downscaling in the performance that enforced local rap genres to be expressed in local varieties and registers. These performative framings and stances resembled a resemiotization of the global Hip Hop ideologies of authenticity in Hip Hop spaces, enregistering a more local order where multiple authenticities were present. Among the emcees themselves, Kaaps features strongly in multilingual rap repertoires, and in the Hip Hop spaces, as I have described before, while Kaaps is

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enregistered, English is deregistered (marginalized) for the purpose of downscaling the discursive-​linguistic aspects of global Hip Hop, in the local context. At the level of linguistic forms, for instance, we find emcees uttering names of famous rappers or famous rap places to keep it real in English by expressing their cultural authenticity tied discursively to global Hip Hop practices. English serves other purposes as well. In the performance of braggadocio, for instance, local varieties of English were enregistered to keep it real culturally and represent one’s place in Cape Town Hip Hop. We saw in Chapter 5 how in the on-​stage performance of the MobCoW rap group, only two emcees used English to brag about their sexual exploits, financial worth and physical prowess. In one case, some of the English lyrics were meta-​commentary on swagger as a particular rap style that has been linguistically localized. Even though a variety of English was performed, the majority of the braggadocio performance was dominated by the use of Kaaps, an urban form of isiXhosa and prison registers such as Sabela and Tsotsitaal. We also saw that, besides the overall cohesion of MobCoW as a rap group, the remixing of multilingualism became an important feature of that group’s authenticity (see Chapter 4). Multilingualism is important for the emcees in the MobCoW rap group who understand the value of local languages to demonstrate their linguistic virtuosity as ‘a crystallization of the situation choices and combinations of possibilities provided by the varieties fully or partially available to them’ (Watkins 2000: 107). As such, by being defined as a multilingual group, MobCoW emcees were protected from rival monolingual crews (cf. Watkins 2000: 108). What this inevitably meant was that the various languages and registers used by MobCoW emcees on-​and off-​stage created co-​occurring authenticities based on everyday multilingual practices. MobCoW emcees challenge monolingual assumptions and censorious voices, whether they mean to or not, that seek to exclude multilingual practices on the periphery from the centre, by emphasizing the polycentric and transmodal design of multilingual spaces in South African society, as an additional way to bring forth the very conditions that make possible the heterogeneity of voices.

9.3.2  The Performativity of the Body in Hip Hop Spaces Of the many experiences of young people in Hip Hop spaces I  observed, meaning-​making through the body, and/​or what the body denotes and indexes, was especially interesting, because ‘when language is combined with music and bodily movement, it can take on a very different set of meanings’ (Pennycook 2007: 118). Performances of the body offer up new dimensions of understanding

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the conditions within which language is set: that is, ‘a range of ways of thinking about language performance, not as the unregulated by-​product of competence, but as the socially embedded and culturally embodied use of language’ (Pennycook 2007: 63; cf. Coupland and Gwyn 2003). In my analysis I highlighted the dimensions of culturally and socially embodied uses of language in the process of remixing multilingualism. I demonstrated how different body stances in the Hip Hop spaces are framed around the idea of being ‘tough’ and/​or ‘toughness’, body rap and the performance of sexuality as bodily resistance. In Chapters  5 and 6 we saw how tough body stances were indexed in Kaaps and the prison registers Sabela and Tsotsitaal. This also featured strongly in the body rap and freestyle rap performances analysed in Chapters 7 and 8. In the performance of braggadocio, for example, most of the emcees used Kaaps and the prison registers to denigrate their opponents physically. By using forms from those registers and language varieties, they attempted to contextually deregister rival rap artists’ use of English in their performances, which did not link up strongly to a tough body stance. The use of local varieties and registers as indexical of ‘tough men’ were enregistered in their performances and demonstrated that when an emcee starts to use forms such as ‘pikinini’ (boy), ‘gazi’ (blood, or brother) and ‘kapettos’ (axing), he makes specific reference to body stance as a way of framing toughness. In other instances we saw that when rappers and emcees use Kaaps to perform beef, they physically pointed into the crowd at an emcee or moved towards other emcees to intimidate them. The use of Sabela, in particular, was a way to intimidate your opponent on-​stage and enregistered through the ‘tough’ body stance by using words such as ‘dala’, ‘tsais’ or ‘hosh’. In a similar way, we discovered in the freestyle rap performances that a tough body stance emerged in the use of local words from Kaaps and the prison registers by emcee Keaton in Chapter 6. This was done not only to enforce the localness of rap music but also to emphasize the transmodal practices of Hip Hop spaces and, most importantly, the significance of the words appropriated by the performers as being representative of the daily multilingual practices of youth on the Cape Flats.

9.4  Note on Enregisterment and Deregisterment of English The notion of enregisterment has been useful to discover the ways in which young multilingual speakers use linguistic forms to index transgressive meaning

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and establish new social categories of authentic selves as they remix multilingualism. However, enregisterment is about much more than language. In the use of particular language varieties, registers and styles, I hope to have demonstrated the usefulness of Agha’s semiotic theory as a powerful resource for understanding multilingualism, authenticity and corporeal practices in the transmodal design of Hip Hop spaces. In particular, enregisterment is a useful concept to demonstrate the way in which a more mainstream language such as English is used alongside marginalized languages such as Kaaps, isiXhosa and prison registers such as Sabela and Tsotsitaal. As a complementary phenomenon to capture the simultaneity of enregisterment, I have suggested that the way English is disappropriated or disowned forms part of the process of deregisterment. This term is useful for introducing a perspective on multilingualism where the interplay and status of interacting languages are subject to questioning:  Should this English be used in our Hip Hop space? Is it African-​American English? Should we ignore it? Should we throw it out? Nevertheless, the types of multilingualism that we have discovered in the preceding chapters occurs because of the practices of language that takes place on the margins of South Africa. There is a marginal and peripheral normativity ascribed to such multilingual practices because when enregisterment occurs, it indexes not only identities and social categories but also a rather particular variety of English, that is to say, a peripheral variety of English in a transmodal environment. Precisely because of that environment the process of deregisterment is possible. This has significant implications for how English is used in multilingual communication, not only inside Hip Hop spaces but outside of them also. I have argued that the process of enregisterment in performance and practice provides strong evidence of linguistic bids for voice. I have also demonstrated how registers are always emerging and not static, and that this carries significant implications for how we understand multilingualism. As such, much work still remains for us to further open up perspectives on multilingualism that provide more than a window into the sociolinguistic conditions in the global South.

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Notes 1  Introduction: Remixing Multilingualism in a Globalized World 1  ‘Coloured’ designates a racial group defined under apartheid South Africa as a broad group including many people not easily defined as ‘Black’, ‘Indian’ or ‘White’. 2  Core and long-​term members (cf. Morgan 2009) of Hip Hop communities who practise Hip Hop culture, transmit knowledge to others and preserve the aesthetic and artistic use of the elements (DJing, rap, B-​boying/​B-​girling, graffiti, and ‘Knowledge of the Self ’).

5  Multilingual Braggadocio and Intertextuality 1  Club Stones management at times insisted on marketing the events with names that excluded any reference to Hip Hop. 2  Smitherman states that call and response is ‘spontaneous verbal and nonverbal interaction between speaker and listener in which all the speaker’s statements (“call”) are punctuated by expressions (“responses”) from the listener’ (1977: 104). 3  A local term for the Eid festivities at the end of Ramadan. 4  The word Emcee Cole utters here is pikinini (meaning, boy, not adult) used in Bantu languages, the prison register Sabela and Kaaps. 5  The form gazi is used in African languages across the sociolinguistic landscape of South Africa. The form is mostly present in the urban landscape. Gazi translates as blood and is present in the register of Sabela and Tsotsitaal used by the Number Gangs in South African prisons (cf. Hurst 2008). Gazi also has a closely related meaning; when used in a phrase such as, my gazi (in Afrikaans or English) or gazilam (isiXhosa), it means my brother. In the townships of Cape Town where it is most commonly used, the form circulates and recurs with ambiguous meanings. Emcee Cole’s use of the form relates to the second meaning, with positive connotations. 6  This quote was transcribed from the following link: http://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=JpgpS3ogvMM (accessed 20 November 2013).

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6  Multilingual Freestyle Rap and Performing Locality 1  The name Suburban Menace is itself indicative of what is happening in performing locality. 2  ‘Kuila’ is the Kaaps reference to the community and location of Kuilsriver.

8  Precarious Femininity: The Performativity of Sexualized Bodies 1  See the performance here: www.dailymotion.com/​video/​x8d5zp_​t-​i-​jay-​z-​lil-​wayne-​ kanye-​west-​m-​i_​music

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232

Discography Eminem. (1999), The Slim Shady LP, USA: Aftermath Entertainment, Interscope.

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Index African languages 5, 8, 71, 78, 79, 119, 205 isiXhosa xii, xvi, 19, 45, 58, 61, 71, 79, 86, 89, 93, 113, 119, 120, 129, 142, 144, 145, 146, 201, 203, 206 isiZulu xii, 79, 86, 89, 193, 142 Sesotho xii, 86, 89, 93 Afrikaans xi, xiv, xv, xvi, 1, 8, 9, 32, 45, 58, 61, 78, 79, 83, 87, 89, 106, 117, 125, 127, 132, 134, 143, 144, 145, 146, 159, 160, 162, 205 Kaaps xiv, 1, 32, 34, 55, 68, 70, 77, 78, 80, 83, 86, 88, 89, 90, 93, 106, 107, 109, 113, 116, 117, 119, 123, 124, 125, 126, 129, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 139, 141, 145, 157, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 168, 169, 172, 174, 177, 180, 181, 182, 183, 187, 193, 188, 193, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206 Authenticity 46, 13, 18, 20, 22, 32, 57, 70, 71, 73, 86, 92, 93, 97, 111, 112, 113, 121, 131, 142, 144, 151, 169, 174, 192, 198, 199, 200, 203 authentic 72, 92, 105, 169, 200 authentic selves 203 authenticities 2, 11, 17, 56, 199, 200, 201 economy of authenticities 199 inauthentic 72 (see also inauthenticity) body xv, 4, 9, 13, 22, 26, 86, 104, 134, 141, 162, 166, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 183, 184, 187, 188, 192, 194, 199, 201, 202 bodies xv, 7, 13, 22, 141, 155, 157, 161, 171, 172, 173, 174, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 188, 189, 194, 199, 206 bodily resistance 184, 202 body stance 134, 202 corporeal xi, 57, 199, 203 embodied 4, 66, 71, 202 female bodies 22, 173, 177, 181, 184, 188, 189

female body 183 tough body 202 English xi, xvi, 11, 19, 32, 34, 36, 37, 55, 58, 61, 68, 72, 77, 78, 79, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93, 102, 104, 105, 106, 109, 111, 112, 113, 119, 123, 124, 125, 126, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 151, 177, 187, 188, 195, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205 African-​American English (AAE) 21, 32, 34, 45, 58, 96, 100, 111, 123, 127, 157, 172, 193, 202 AAE 1, 90, 96, 105, 108, 112, 113, 121, 129, 131, 132, 134, 157, 168, 169, 193, 200 South African English xii, xvi, 21, 45, 90, 113, 119, 144 enregisterment xi, xx, 4, 20, 22, 24, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 49, 56, 57, 109, 169, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202, 203 deregisterment 200, 202, 203 entextualization xx, 4, 21, 22, 24, 39, 40, 41, 43, 49, 57, 117, 121, 124, 127, 129, 157, 160, 160, 163, 169, 188, 192, 193, 196, 197, 199 ethnographer 49, 50, 51, 55, 63, 64, 68, 178 ethnography xix, 2, 13, 20, 30, 31, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 58, 59, 63, 64 femininity xv, 22, 93, 162, 163, 172, 184, 193, 194, 206 gender x, xi, xii, 4, 22, 45, 47, 59, 64, 65, 67, 92, 105, 109, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 163, 168, 169, 172, 173, 174, 177, 178, 181, 182, 188, 189, 194 genres xi, 16, 18, 20, 22, 39, 41, 45, 49, 56, 69, 71, 72, 77, 84, 86, 92, 93, 95, 98, 100, 101, 102, 109, 163, 196, 200 beef 116, 117, 119, 202 braggadocio 21, 22, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109

234

234

Index

freestyle rap 21, 22, 34, 61, 62, 63, 67, 70, 82, 85, 87, 88, 93, 98, 115, 117, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131, 132, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 151, 156, 158, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 173, 177, 178, 184, 185, 188, 192, 194, 200, 202 verbal cue 21 globalization 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 59, 99, 191, 197, 198, 199 glocal 8, 58, 92, 145, 198 Hip Hop x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 115, 117, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125, 126, 129, 131, 132, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 177, 178, 181, 182, 184, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205 inauthenticity 112 intertextuality 21, 95, 96, 99, 100, 115 linguistic citizenship xvii, xx, 1, 5, 14, 15, 16, 22, 124, 192, 195, 196, 197 local xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xix, xxi, 1, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 30, 31, 32, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 51, 54, 55, 57, 58, 63, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 121, 124, 129, 131, 132, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 152, 153, 156, 157, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 168, 169, 172, 174, 176, 177, 182, 188, 189, 192, 193, 194, 197, 200, 201, 202, 205

extreme locality xx, 123–​124, 137, 139, 141, 147 marginality 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 22, 41, 49, 71, 192, 200 Masculinity xv, 19, 22, 66, 93, 104, 117, 119, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 161, 162, 163, 166, 168, 169, 170, 172, 180, 193, 194 heteronormative 104, 162, 177, 184, 187, 194 heterosexual masculinity 172, 187 homosexual 129, 165 masculine ideology 156, 157, 193 masculine order 161, 194 ouens 52, 54, 68, 160, 161, 163, 179, 182, 183 patriarchal 154, 155, 172, 187, 194 tough xv, 22, 65, 66, 114, 116, 117, 119, 149, 151, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 172, 187, 193, 194, 202 multilingualism xi, xii, xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 56, 58, 59, 65, 68, 73, 83, 84, 90, 93, 92, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 105, 109, 113, 117, 121, 123, 124, 141, 142, 144, 146, 147, 149, 169, 191, 192, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203 multi-​sited ethnography 20, 46, 47, 48, 49, 58, 59 fieldwork 20, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 72, 79, 83, 149 performance xiii, xvi, xix, xx, 2, 3, 4, 10, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 47, 49, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 67, 72, 73, 75, 80, 83, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 134, 136, 137, 138, 141, 142, 146, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 181, 184, 188, 191,

235

Index 192, 193, 194, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 206 performativity xx, 4, 10, 24, 31, 35, 36, 56, 92, 93, 137, 152, 171, 173, 174, 177, 184, 201, 206 persona xx, 119, 120, 160 personae xx, 4, 21, 32, 44, 85, 93, 97, 99, 100, 101, 111, 121, 123, 156, 157, 158, 162, 168, 193, 194 place xvii, xix, xx, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 44, 45, 50, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 82, 83, 90, 91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 108, 109, 111, 116, 119, 120, 123, 124, 131, 143, 153, 154, 157, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203 race x, xi, xvi, 4, 38, 45, 59, 63, 64, 67, 123, 144, 150, 152, 157 Black xi, xii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, 1, 18, 21, 22, 23, 47, 65, 66, 113, 119, 125, 142, 144, 145, 156, 157, 159, 161, 165, 172, 181, 182, 205 Coloured x, xi, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, 1, 18, 21, 22, 23, 64, 65, 66, 68, 78, 87, 88, 93, 125, 142, 157, 160, 181, 182, 205 White x, xiv, xvii, 18, 19, 64, 65, 66, 87, 142, 160, 181, 182, 205 rap braggadocio 21, 97, 105, 117 rap genres 22, 69, 72, 92, 93, 95, 100, 200 (see also Zef Rap 18, 43; Spaza Rap 18, 19, 119, 145; Body rap 173, 174, 177, 188, 194, 202) rap styles 70, 87, 90, 96, 97 register xix, 1, 4, 16, 17, 20, 21, 24, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 55, 58, 59, 61, 68, 72, 83, 86, 88, 90, 96, 97, 98, 101, 102, 108, 109, 116, 117, 121, 123, 124, 125, 132, 134, 136, 137, 141, 157, 169, 172, 184, 188, 193, 196, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205 Sabela xii, 1, 61, 68, 83, 86, 90, 109, 113, 116, 117, 125, 126, 129, 133, 134, 136, 141, 157, 168, 169, 177, 188, 193, 201, 202, 203, 205 repertoire 4, 16, 17, 22, 28, 37, 39, 42, 43, 59, 69, 73, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85,

235 86, 88, 90, 91, 93, 97, 129, 192, 196, 197, 200 language biographies 2 linguistic biographies 84, 88

sample 40, 100, 101, 107, 115, 116, 119, 144 sampling 63, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 111, 112, 116, 117, 121, 123, 128, 131 scale xiv, xix, xx, xxi, 5, 6, 20, 24, 27, 29, 30, 39, 40, 41, 50, 56, 57, 58, 59, 72, 73, 93, 95, 98, 100, 120, 129, 132, 141, 169, 200 sexuality x, xii, 19, 64, 150, 158, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 174, 177, 184, 193, 194, 196, 202 oversexualization 174 sexism xv, 194 sexualization 22, 172, 173, 174, 177, 178, 180, 187, 194 sexualized 166, 172, 177, 184 sexual 96, 106, 109, 128, 160, 162, 173, 174, 177, 201 space x, xi, xii, xiii, xvi, xvii, xix, xx, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 75, 77, 79, 80, 83, 84, 86, 91, 93, 95, 98, 101, 104, 112, 113, 117, 120, 123, 124, 131, 132, 139, 141, 144, 145, 146, 150, 154, 155, 156, 157, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 180, 184, 187, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203 mobility xvi, xvii, xviii, 9, 13, 16, 23, 39, 57, 58, 84, 196, 197 spatial discrimination xvii, 66 style xi, xix, 2, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 56, 70, 71, 72, 82, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 96, 97, 98, 99, 102, 104, 105, 106, 109, 113, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 123, 125, 137, 161, 162, 168, 201, 203 (see also Tsotsitaal xii, 1, 19, 61, 83, 86, 89, 90, 93, 109, 142, 201, 202, 203, 205) style community 18, 35, 85

236

236

Index

stylization xi, xix, 4, 13, 20, 21, 22, 24, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 49, 56, 57, 86, 90, 93, 96, 97, 99, 101, 111, 174, 192, 197 transmodal xix, 20, 21, 22, 84, 90, 100, 124, 147, 191, 192, 201, 202, 203 transidiomatic practices 22, 192

voice xii, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 28, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 59, 65, 70, 73, 83, 84, 91, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 112, 113, 117, 120, 121, 123, 124, 149, 169, 170, 177, 188, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 201, 203

237

238

239

240