Transcultural Voices: Narrating Hip Hop Culture in Complex Delhi 9781788928144

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Transcultural Voices

ENCOUNTERS Series Editors: Ana Deumert, University of Cape Town, South Africa, Zane Goebel, University of Queensland, Australia and Anna De Fina, Georgetown University, USA. The Encounters series sets out to explore diversity in language from a theoretical and an applied perspective. So the focus is both on the linguistic encounters, inequalities and struggles that characterise post-modern societies and on the development, within sociocultural linguistics, of theoretical instruments to explain them. The series welcomes work dealing with such topics as heterogeneity, mixing, creolization, bricolage, crossover phenomena, polylingual and polycultural practices. Another highpriority area of study is the investigation of processes through which linguistic resources are negotiated, appropriated and controlled, and the mechanisms leading to the creation and maintenance of sociocultural differences. The series welcomes ethnographically oriented work in which contexts of communication are investigated rather than assumed, as well as research that shows a clear commitment to close analysis of local meaning making processes and the semiotic organisation of texts. All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www​.multilingual​-matters​.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

ENCOUNTERS: 22

Transcultural Voices Narrating Hip Hop Culture in Complex Delhi

Jaspal Naveel Singh

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/SINGH8137 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Singh, Jaspal Naveel, author. Title: Transcultural Voices: Narrating Hip Hop Culture in Complex Delhi/ Jaspal Naveel Singh. Description: Bristol, UK; Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Multilingual Matters, 2022. | Series: Encounters: 22 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book presents the narratives and voices of young, mostly male practitioners of hip hop culture in Delhi, India. Through a combination of linguistic ethnography, sociolinguistics and discourse studies, the book addresses issues including gender and sexuality, identity construction and global culture”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021026408 (print) | LCCN 2021026409 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800413818 (paperback) | ISBN 9781788928137 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788928144 (pdf) | ISBN 9781788928151 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Hip-hop dance--Social aspects--India--Delhi. | Break dancers— India—Delhi. | Rap musicians—India—Delhi. | Rap (Music)—India—Delhi— History and criticism. | Anthropological linguistics—India—Delhi. Classification: LCC GV1796.H57 S56 2021 (print) | LCC GV1796.H57 (ebook) | DDC 793.3/195456—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021026408 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021026409 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-813-7 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-80041-381-8 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: NBN, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA. Website: www​.multilingual​-matters​.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www​.facebook​.com​/multilingualmatters Blog: www​.cha​nnel​view​publ​ications​.wordpress​.com Copyright © 2022 Jaspal Naveel Singh. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India.

Contents

Figures and Table

vii

Transcription Conventions

ix

Acknowledgementsx Glossary of Terms

xii

Prologue: Gender Everywhere

xv

1 Complex Questions: Normalising Voice in Global Narratives

1

2 Studying Transcultural Voices

26

3 Doing Linguistic Ethnography in Delhi’s Hip Hop Scene

60

4 Othering Voices: Prosodic Normalising of the Authentic Cosmopolitan Self

90

5 Translingual Voices: Remixed Language Ideologies

130

6 Synchronising Voices: Travelling the Delhi to Bronx Wormhole 159 7 Embodying Voices: Breakin Cyphers and the B-Boy Stance

186

8 Overstandin Voices: Methodologies for Hip Hop

228

9 Conclusion

253

Epilogue: Gender, Again

265

Notes271 References279 Index304 v

Für Jonathan An unsere Freundschaft

Figures and Table

Figures

Figure 1.1 Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3 Figure 3.4 Figure 3.5 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 7.1

Figure 7.2 Figure 7.3

Prabh Deep, ‘Breaking’ and ‘Grafitti’ (Photos by author, Delhi, 2013) Fieldworkers’ recording equipment: a field diary, a pen and a digital recorder (Photo by author, Cardiff, 2015) The makeshift home studio for recording music (Photo by author, Delhi, 2013) Manmeet Kaur playing the Akai MPC2000XL sampler (Photo by author, Mumbai, 2013) Jaspal setting up his recording equipment in MC Freezak’s home, Khirki Village (Screenshot, video by MC Akshay Tashan, Delhi, 2013) MC Akshay Tashan recording raps and MC Freezak doing second vocals, Khirki Village (Screenshot, video by author, Delhi, 2013) डाकू graffiti piece, Devanagari script, Okhla Industrial Estate (Photo by author, Delhi, 2013) Daku graffiti piece, Roman script, and डाकू tag, Devanagari script, Khan Market (Photo by author, Delhi, 2013) B-boy Gunjan (standing) and b-boy Rishi (posing in a freeze) practising on the 14th-century Satpula Dam ruin monument, Khirki Village (Photo by author, Delhi 2013) Sketches from author’s field diary (pp. 76–77) The figurative syntax of breakin, screenshot tracings, Chakreis Jam (Video by author, Delhi 2013) vii

2 65 66 74 75 75 146 147

192 200 205

viii Figures and Table

Figure 7.4 Freeze Figure 7.5 Smoking gesture Figure 7.6 Bhangra-style beckoning Figure 7.7 Marking negative accountability Figure 7.8 Marking positive accountability Figure 7.9 Shadow-boxing toprock Figure 7.10 Mirroring shadow-boxing Figure 7.11 Flying kung-fu kick Figure 7.12 Insinuated uppercut Figure 7.13 Watching the head fly through the air Figure 7.14 Catching ‘flying head’ from up in the air Figure 7.15 Ironic applause as marking of negative accountability Figure 7.16 Go-go dancer and crybaby Figure 7.17 Entering with a powerful flare Figure 7.18 A phallic finish-him move Figure 7.19 Indians cheer in excitement Figure 7.20 Prabh Deep and Sun-J posing in the b-boy stance for a music video shoot with Dattatreyan and a mutual friend (Photo by author, Delhi 2013)

208 208 209 210 211 212 213 213 215 216 216 218 218 219 220 221 224

Table

Table 3.1 Indexing roles in the ethnographic encounter

89

Transcription Conventions

Adapted from GAT2 (Selting et al., 2011) Sequential and segmental structure . utterance boundary/tone unit boundary “…” constructed dialogue CAPITALS prominent syllable : vowel lengthening - unfinished syllable/utterance ((style)) description of style of speech ☺ smile voice ((text)) transcriber’s comments [ ] overlapping and simultaneous talk [ ] = latching @ laughing syllable (.) micro-pause (0-0.5 sec.) (1.3) measured pause (xxx) unintelligible syllable underlined utterance in Hindi Gl. gloss (free translations) For the transcription of beatboxin (Chapter 5), I use the symbols of the International Phonetics Association (revised to 2005) Tonal movements ↗ rising → level ↘ falling ↗↘ rise-fall ↘ ↗ fall-rise ix

Acknowledgements

I might be listed as author of this book, however, this authorship is far from being my ‘own’. There is no one I can thank more than the hip hop heads who have actually written this book. I might type these letters into my computer but these young men and women own these letters. I am grateful that they trust me to represent them in this book and I invite them to critique my writing and reclaim their voices at any point. I am indebted to my PhD supervisor and intellectual mentor Dr Frances Rock for her tireless and proactive support of this project. I hope this writing can do some justice to what she has inspired me to do. I am also thankful to my second supervisor Dr Mercedes Durham and my previous supervisor Professor Srikant Sarangi for their guidance and ongoing encouragement. All three scholars have pushed me to do things I never thought I would be able to do and I thank them very much for that. I thank the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for generously funding my research under Award Number 1071087. I thank Virpi Ylänne and Kira Hall for carefully reading a previous version of this book and for providing me with critical comments and encouraging me to continue working on this topic. I also thank two anonymous reviewers for their incredibly rich and constructive critique on an earlier version of this book. I thank the editors of the Encounters book series and the entire team at Multilingual Matters for their amazing support during the publication process. I thank Nicky Runge for her tireless work on helping me with the formatting and the references and discussing with me some of the contents of my argument. Gabriel Dattatreyan, my good friend and co-incidental fieldwork collaborator, who you will meet on the pages of this book, has been x

Acknowledgements 

xi

such an incredible help that I don’t even know how to thank him and his family for supporting me. This book is half Dattatreyan’s. Shukriya bhai. My family and friends, who showed endless provision and support, even in times of mourning, crisis, disease and stress. You all enabled me to study like a true philosopher: slowly, in-depth, never satisfied. You made this whole journey possible. I love you all very much. Iona, cariad, I thank you for making me who I am today. I love you. Parts of this book were presented as a doctoral thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Language and Communication. Submitted to the Centre for Language and Communication Research, School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom.

Glossary of Terms

Hip Hop

The term ‘hip hop’ was coined in the late 1970s, possibly in New York City, to refer to a set of cultural, artistic, spiritual and intellectual practices used for self-expression and the circulation of knowledge. These practices include, among others, graffiti writin, rappin, beatboxin, deejayin, samplin, street dancin, breakin, street knowledge, informal education and entrepreneurship. These practices developed out of earlier Black and Latinx traditions, for instance Mambo dancing, playing the dozens and participation in the Nation of Islam/Nation of Gods and Earths (Five Percenters). The emergence of hip hop in the South Bronx is inextricably linked to the socioeconomic disenfranchisement and cultural abandonment that took place in the post-industrial inner-cities of North America (for historical accounts of the developments of hip hop, see Chalfant, 2006; Chang, 2005; Rose, 1994; Toop, 1991). The Bronx represents a universal myth that can be used by global hip hop practitioners to imagine old school authenticity in their local contexts. The two terms ‘hip’ and ‘hop’ are themselves important signifiers for the practitioners’ understanding of the culture (see also Seti X’s narrative in Chapter 6). One of the most famous ambassadors of hip hop, the self-proclaimed teacha of hip hop, KRS-One (2007), in his song Hip Hop Lives (featuring Marley Marl), defines ‘hip’ as ‘a form of intelligence’ and ‘hop’ as ‘a form of movement’, and therefore ‘hip hop’ as ‘intelligent movement’ (the full lyrics can be viewed here: https://genius.com/ Krs-one-and-marley-marl-hip-hop-lives-i-come-back-lyrics). Whereas the most widely circulating ‘definitions’ of hip hop derive from those organic intellectuals who were produced by US-American hip hop culture (like KRS-One), global hip hop practitioners constantly negotiate the meanings of such key cultural signifiers and transform them xii

Glossary of Terms  xiii

so they become real in the local context. Much of this book is about understanding how my Delhi-based youthful participants, as well as hip hop travellers who are engaging with Delhi’s hip hop scene, negotiate what it means to be and do hip hop in their local context. Hip Hop Heads

When referring to my ethnographic interlocutors, as well as hip hop practitioners more generally, I use the word ‘heads’ or ‘hip hop heads’. This is emic hip hop terminology that my participants often used themselves. A head is someone who is committed to hip hop culture and has a deep interest in and knowledge of the history and practices of hip hop. Similarly, Williams and Stroud (2013: 4, n2) write, that hip hop heads are ‘knowledgeable individuals in the Hip-Hop culture who are not only the core and long-term members […] but practice, transmit the knowledge and preserve the aesthetic and artistic use of deejaying, emceeing, b-boying, graffiti writing and knowledge of the self’. The term ‘heads’ also connotes a mindfulness, or headfulness, and emphasises that artistic and physical practices are always accompanied by the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, overstandin, consciousness and upliftment. Furthermore, in line with the theory of voice developed in this book, a head can be regarded as the locus or centre in which a multitude of voices are produced and understood. A head contains all the parts of the body necessary to communicate effectively (mouth and vocal tract, ears and brain, as well as facial expressions which are important to contextualise communication). The Five Elements

Hip hop heads usually describe their culture as consisting of five elements, or five pillars, although there is hardly any consensus of how these elements could be defined exactly and where their boundaries lie. Whereas the first four elements are artistic and physical practices that are acquired through informal pedagogy and mediatised circulation, the fifth element, also known as the supreme element, unites the first four elements and mythologises hip hop as a culture, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 8 (see also Gosa, 2015). The five elements are the following: (1) Breakin: The artistic, acrobatic and stylish body movements danced to the loop of a drum break (also known as breakdancing, rockin, street dancin, b-boyin and b-girlin, sometimes also includes other forms of hip hop dance like poppin, lockin, clownin and electric boogie).

xiv Glossary of Terms

(2) Graffiti writin: The painting of large, often convoluted and intricate, letters onto public walls, vehicles and trains using spray cans and other painting materials (also known as sprayin, aerosol art, sometimes also includes street art). (3) Deejayin: The dynamic playin, jugglin, scratchin and mixin of vinyl records with two turntables and a mixer (also known as DJing, turntablism, spinnin, sometimes also includes samplin, producin). (4) Emceein: The rhythmic speakin of intelligent rhymes on a beat (also known as MCing, rappin, spittin, also includes beatboxin) (5) Knowledge and overstandin: The spirited pursuit and intelligent application of reflexive thought (also known as understanding, consciousness, knowledge of self, philosophy, wisdom, respect, unity and upliftment). In this book I graphemically represent the final morpheme in the names of the five elements as , as opposed to a more standardised English representation of . This ‘dropping’ of the graphemic , of course indexes an allophonic substitution from [ɪŋ] to [ɪn] in final ‘-ing’ morphemes in multisyllabic words. With this I wish to index African American urban ways of speaking (Green, 2002) to situate and pay respect to the origins of these elements (for a use of in final morphemes in academic writing, see Alim, 2006a; Smitherman, 1977, as also discussed in Chapter 3 of this book). [ɪn] is of course also commonly used across the English-speaking world in informal speech and typically used frequently by working-class male speakers (Tagliamonte, 2012: 187; Trudgill, 1972). By recognising the indexicalities and linguistic ideologies of this well-researched sociolinguistic variable, I use it for my own codemeshing (Canagarajah, 2013) in my writin, to align my authorship with the non-standard and informal intellectualism and spirituality of hip hop, as well as index the predominance of masculine ideologies in hip hop culture more generally, and specifically in my ethnographic experiences.

Prologue: Gender Everywhere

In mid-December 2012, three weeks before I arrived in Delhi to conduct my first six months of ethnographic fieldwork in the emerging local hip hop scene, a ghastly crime was committed that went down in history as the Delhi gang rape. I find it too distressing to provide you with details about this merciless atrocity. The news media archives are full of it, should you want to take a look. Academic papers, books and BBC and Netflix documentaries, I heard, exist as well. The gang rape and the brutal murder of Jyoti Singh, who is now widely remembered as Nirbhaya, Fearless, triggered mass protests about women’s safety and social justice in the city and around the globe, which revealed and fundamentally reshuffled the complex intersections between class, gender, sexuality, age, migration and mediatisation in early 21st-century Delhi history. What’s the relevance of gender in your research? Eva asked me this question over a home-made dinner on our rooftop terrace in South Delhi. The piercing look, the gentle raising of her eyebrows, which contextualised her question, discomforted me as I was happily chewing on a mouthful of delicious okras. Eva had just completed a master’s degree in gender studies and was staying with me in Delhi during my ethnographic fieldwork for this research project in 2013. We had been together for several years already and loved each other very much and so I was very happy when Eva told me that she had secured a paid internship at a political non-governmental organisation in Delhi and was able to be with me during my ethnographic research. Throughout our relationship, Eva always took great efforts to make me aware of the pervasiveness of gender in society, and she kept pushing me to seriously think about gender in my research. So, on that night, over bhindi masala and chapattis, her voice became part of this book. It doesn’t play any role, I answered naïvely, assuming her question was just another iteration of her constant reminder that gender is generally a xv

xvi 

Transcultural Voices

pervasive category. She shot back: Why not? I said: Well, there are hardly any women in my research. My answer to her follow-up question got trapped in the same conundrum which many cis heterosexual male academic colleagues and hip hop scholars get trapped in: gender is only relevant when there are women around. Men are somewhat genderless humans. How can gender NOT play a role, when almost all of your participants are men? Boom. This hit me hard. Of course, she was right! The absence of women in a sociocultural formation does not translate into an absence of the category of gender; quite the opposite. In my unfeminist world view men were normalised and ‘without gender’. From my normative viewpoint, gender would only become a relevant analytical category in a piece of research when women (or non-men) were taking part in it. In other words, I didn’t see the wood for the trees – although this metaphor is perhaps unnecessarily phallic. Yes. What are the social and cultural conditions that blatantly exclude women, non-heterosexual males and queer people from participating in hip hop cultures wherever they emerge? From New York City to Los Angeles, from Rio de Janeiro to Cape Town, from Marseille to Moscow, from Hong Kong to Delhi: everywhere we look we find straight men dominating the local hip hop scenes. Yes, surely, there is some progress here and there and women get together to form collectives and safe spaces in which they can rap, write, break, deejay and contest knowledge. To give just one recent example, the artistic collective Ladies of Rage from South Wales and Southwest England are actively promoting female-only hip hop spaces and whenever they enter male-dominated hip hop events, they do so with their large entourage of female hip hop artists to ensure that they have enough backing to call out and fight back against any discrimination that they might experience. And, of course, we mustn’t forget that women played a key role during hip hop’s inception in the late 1970s all through the 1980s and 1990s. We think of figures such as Lady Pink, MC Lyte, Roxanne Shante, Salt-N-Pepa or Queen Latifah. However, these old school heroines of hip hop, as well as the contemporary female protagonists of the culture, while relentlessly speaking out against misogyny and hyper-heterosexuality, were not (yet) powerful enough to challenge hip hop’s hegemonic masculinity in its substance and normalise women in hip hop. My experiences in India mirrored this extreme masculine bias of hip hop. Almost everyone I met was male. After my eye-opening conversation with Eva, four months into my fieldwork, I started actively looking out for female participants, which means that the few women that feature in this book overrepresent the actual number of women in the scene. Manmeet Kaur, a musician who will feature in Chapter 4 as well as in

Prologue 

xvii

the epilogue, and Dizy, a graffiti writer who will feature in Chapter  5, were the only two women with whom I managed to conduct interviews. Apart from Manmeet and Dizy, I have met one b-girl, who, however, was not interested in becoming a participant of my research and I heard of another b-girl in Mumbai, Am-B, who, however, I never had a chance to meet personally. There were two further female graffiti writers in Delhi, who I met on collaborative painting sessions. One of them was Samsam, who you can see on the cover of this book. In 2016, when the time came for me to think about a cover image for this book, I browsed through all the pictures I had taken in Delhi with my mobile phone camera. The image that shows Samsam rockin a spray can instantly struck a chord with me and I spontaneously contacted her on a social media platform, sent her the image and asked her if she would be happy for me to use her image as the cover for my book. She answered that she would be very honoured to see herself on the cover of a book on Delhi hip hop and allowed me to go forward with my plans. I was excited and thanked her. We did not hear from each other for over two years. Then I received a message from her again just before signing the publishing contract for this book in 2018. Without any sugar-coating or phatic greetings, she got straight to the point: I just noticed that the excerpt says narrative practices of young male etc :p why did you put me on the cover! Am super honoured to be on it of course!

If Eva’s question complexified my ethnographic gaze, Samsam’s question complexified the ways I represent my research participants. I did, of course, have a specific reason for using an image that depicted a woman rather than a man for the cover of my book and this reason had to do with my deliberate overrepresentation of women in this study. My ‘own’ bias was meant to even out something of the masculinist bias of hip hop that we find across the globe wherever the culture sets foot. But, could I tell her this? I sat down and composed the following message, explaining (mansplaining?) myself: Ha! That’s such an interesting question! I thought about this a lot. So thanks for asking! Most people I hung out with in India were young heterosexual males. This category was so prevalent that I didn’t even notice the insane gender imbalance in my study! By the time I realised it, I was already back in Europe. I regretted that I had been so blind and thought back to the females I did meet. Dizy, Manmeet Kaur and you. I have interviews with Dizy and Manmeet, but regrettably I never sat down

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with you properly. That’s when I discovered this image and thought it was a) beautiful, b) flowy and therefore related to the trans theme of my writing and c) it did something to represent you. I write critically about gender and to degree sexuality in my thesis and therefore explicitly say that young men are the focus of discussion. Does that make sense? Sorry for the long explanation.

Samsam immediately wrote back. Thank you for the long explanation! It makes perfect sense.

In early 2020, I had a chance to see Samsam again and we talked at length about masculinity, politics and life. It was during this conversation that I realised how much my positions on gender have changed from when I first embarked on this research in 2013 and it was then that I decided to include a prologue and epilogue ‘on gender’ in my book. The interactions I had with Samsam and Eva, as well as with Dizy (Chapter  5) and Manmeet Kaur (Chapter  4, epilogue) were incredibly illuminating and fundamentally changed the ways I write about global hip hop. I began to rethink what it means be a cis, male, heterosexual researcher conducting ethnography in male-dominated cultural spaces. In Chapter 3, I say more about my own role as an ethnographic researcher who identifies, like most of my research participants, as well as most of my hip hop scholar colleagues, as a cis heterosexual male. I decided against writing a chapter ‘on gender’ (although Chapter 7 comes close), not because I did not have enough materials to do so, but rather because I had too many. Gender was everywhere. No transcultural voice is genderless. I do not always explicitly talk about gender, because perhaps it would become tedious and I don’t feel entitled to constantly remind ourselves of the feminist agenda, but I hope that this prologue will give readers enough food for thought to fill in the gaps for me and read gender into each and every analysis I provide in this book. I thus encourage my readers – you, whatever gender or sexuality you at times play with – to understand my ‘own’ voice on these pages also as fundamentally gendered and sexualised. Such a reading of this book’s ethnographic hip hop linguistics might contribute to plotting a vision of a more inclusive hip hop culture where not only straight men, but also women, non-hetero men and queer people in urban India can make their voices and narratives heard on their ‘own’ terms. If Nirbhaya’s death can teach us anything, then it is that we have to be more fearless when it comes to thinking, writing and talking about gender and sexuality. I hope that this book can be read with such fearlessness too.

1 Complex Questions: Normalising Voice in Global Narratives

Globalisation: Complex Blessings

Every day my family and I take our blessings from hip hop, said Prabh Deep, a young breaker, graffiti writer, emcee and beat producer from Delhi, as he pointed at two small graffiti (see Figure  1.1) that he had painted with a felt-tipped pen on the wall of his family’s living room in Tilak Nagar, West Delhi. His family, like many others in this neighbourhood, were forced to flee from the side of the Punjab that is now in Pakistan during the traumatic partition in 1947/1948, which fragmented the former British crown colony into two separate nation states. The partition brought approximately 700,000 refugees to Delhi, predominantly Sikhs and Hindus, who settled in so-called Punjabi colonies in all parts of Delhi, swapping the agricultural lifestyles of their pastoral homelands for urban small-scale commerce and services. At the time of my fieldwork in 2013, Prabh Deep, a third-generation Delhiite, worked night-shifts in a call centre office assisting North American clients with their information technology problems; a job that he later quit in order to start a successful career as an emcee. I was instantly fascinated with the two small graffiti that depicted the English words ‘Breaking’ and ‘Grafitti’, referring to two of the hip hop elements that Prabh Deep had been practicing for several years (for working definitions of hip hop and the five elements, see the Glossary of Terms). For me, the interested ethnographer from the West who was searching for hip hop practices in India, these graffiti were textual manifestations – semiotic surfaces as I call them in this book – of the complexities of globalisation. I asked Prabh Deep for permission to take a picture with my mobile phone camera. He said of course and then pointed me to the opposite wall where he and other family members had painted, also with felt-tipped pens, a depiction of the Hindu god Ganesh, a swastika (a symbol of 1

2  Transcultural Voices

Figure 1.1   Prabh Deep, ‘Breaking’ and ‘Grafitti’ (Photos by author, Delhi, 2013)

luck in South Asia) and a motto in Hindi in Devanagari script, to bless the house with fortune. Next to Ganesh was a gold-framed portrayal of Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth guru of Sikhism, flanked by a quote in Punjabi from the holy book of the Sikhs, the Guru Granth Sahib, written in Gurmukhi script. As photographs are often not allowed in temples and gurdwaras in India, I refrained from taking pictures of these sacred icons. Prabh Deep told me that his family and he would touch these icons and scripts on the wall, including his own post-modern additions to the ensemble, and say quick prayers to ‘take blessings’, meaning that they ask for divine protection and fortune, a practice that I frequently observed in Indian houses. For many families in India, Sikhism and Hinduism, as well as Christianity, Islam and Jainism are not incommensurable and it seems that syncretic worshipping and extensive cross-borrowing of religious practices are quite common in Delhi and in India at large (for a critical view on the use of the term ‘syncretism’ for religious practices in India, see Sahay, 2016). How can we account for hip hop entering the pantheon of Prabh Deep’s family? Are we dealing with a genuine cultural appropriation of hip hop into Indian religiosity, or is this just an insignificant side effect of globalisation? What is the relationship between ‘sacred’ traditions like religious icons and ‘rebellious’ youth cultures like graffiti? Is this an example of bricolage (Hebdige, 1979), cut ’n’ mix (Hebdige, 1987), third space of enunciation (Bhabha, 2004) and transcultural flow (Pennycook, 2007a)? What is the role of English in indexing hip hop in these graffiti? Do these graffiti contest or reproduce English as a colonial language, a lingua franca and a symbol of modernity and middle-class aspiration in urban India? As a linguistic ethnographer, these and similar questions are of great interest to me. They probe some of the discourses at play in

Complex Questions: Normalising Voice in Global Narratives  3

what I refer to as ‘transculturation’ in this book. They acknowledge that we are dealing with complexity when we want to account for language in globalisation. However, these are also types of questions that are somewhat imposed from outside. They have been discussed under the rubrics of ‘globalisation’ and ‘multiculturalism’ in (Western) academia for decades at least. Were they also of relevance to the hip hop practitioners I met in the field? Did they think of the appropriation of hip hop in India as something complex, exceptional, noteworthy or even researchable? I will return to this issue in a moment, when I introduce the research question for this study. Normalising Voice in Narrative

For now, allow me to add another observation, which has to do with the process of normalisation that I try to understand throughout this book. When Prabh Deep showed me the graffiti in his living room and narrated their social functions for him and his family, his voice sounded somewhat ‘normal’. Just after my visit to Prabh Deep’s house on that afternoon, I wrote in my field diary (pp. 60–61) that he used falling intonation and slow rhythm when talking to me about the graffiti. At the time, I interpreted his voice quality as creating a sense of ordinariness, which was only made exceptional by my own interest in the graffiti and my request to take pictures. Arguably, therefore, Prabh Deep himself framed the presence of the graffiti in his family’s living room as somewhat ‘normal’, habitual maybe, even though he found them remarkable enough to present them to the visiting ethnographer. Prabh Deep’s ‘normal’ sounding voice reminds us of a fundamental problem with ethnographic encounters: what is normal and what is spectacular is not immediately clear and needs to be negotiated between researched and researcher. In their recent book on translinguistics, Lee and Dovchin (2020) ask a similar question: how can something such as a given linguistic practice or phenomenon be constructed by the researcher as ‘innovative’ (frequently as a euphemism for peculiar, exotic, eccentric, unconventional, or strange) but understood simultaneously by the research subject as everyday, quotidian, basic, mundane, unremarkable, banal, and, quite simply, ordinary? (Lee & Dovchin, 2020: 3, original italics)

Their answer to their question is that, rather than trying to figure out which one is the ‘correct’ interpretation, the simultaneity of both

4  Transcultural Voices

perspectives should be put front and centre in our studies: ‘the analytic potential of translinguistics can be enhanced by accounting for the simultaneities of innovation […] and ordinariness’ (Lee & Dovchin, 2020: 3). Taking inspiration from this idea, I argue in this book that such simultaneities between innovation and ordinariness (as well as other dialectic dynamics) are narratively deployed by Delhi hip hop heads to orchestrate many voices and normalise their ‘own’ voice in relation to this heteroglossia. I use the term transcultural voices as a heuristic to understand such processes of simultaneity, in-between-ness and transformation in narrative normalisations of voice. The trans- prefix gives me some queer wiggle room for making a range of subversive moves in my analysis and my writing. This is so because transcultural voices engage – rather than erase – the complexities of languaging in globalisation, even if they partially normalise complexity. On the pages that follow, I try to understand how hip hop heads in Delhi construct such transcultural voices in narratives to normalise complexity and complexify normality. I also pay critical attention to the ways in which I, as the researcher, fieldworker or analyst, normalise and complexify their, and indeed my, voices and narratives. My complex approach might make the book difficult to read because I am not always able to give clear answers to what is going on exactly; rather, my analytical focus is precisely on the tensions, the simultaneities, that arise from the complex narrative normalisation of voice. Foucault (1995, 2007) understands normalisations as social, scientific, political, legal and discursive processes by which institutions gain legitimacy and power. Patriarchy or the prison, for example, have been normalised in most societies today in the sense that these institutions of soft and/or hard power find their legitimacy in a populations’ consent and adherence to social norms, which these institutions themselves constructed with the help of modern European science. Yet, it is not only the case that large institutions, such as the nation-state or organised religion, engage in such normalisations – we all do. In our everyday encounters, in the stories we tell each other and also in our academic writing, we usually take certain truths to be true, i.e. certain ideas have become normalised, ordinary, not even worth mentioning. We do so for several reasons, to emulate others and build and maintain social relationships, for example, or simply because we don’t know all the details of what we are talking about. My participants’ ‘normal’ voice often appeared when they told me stories, or narratives, and especially in the final parts of narratives, when they resolved the tension they created and put forward their ‘own’ voices (see also Singh, 2020b). Narratives have traditionally been understood as

Complex Questions: Normalising Voice in Global Narratives  5

consisting of at least two or three parts: a beginning, a middle and an end (as in Aristotle’s classic definition) or an orientation, complicating action and resolution (Labov & Waletzky, 1967). While I work with this structural approach to narrative, I understand narratives as a social practice (De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2008). Storytelling plays an important role for all of us in maintaining interpersonal relationships, understanding and grappling with our pasts and futures and making tacit knowledge explicit and experiential. Chapter 2 provides a more detailed discussion of narrative practices. At this point, readers might ask if this book is ‘just’ about stories and not about ‘actual’ hip hop action. Yes and no. While many of the ‘linguistic data extracts’ you will see indeed come from oral narratives that I recorded in interactional interviews with participants, my analysis is deeply informed by my embodied participation in a range of hip hop practices, such as producing rap music and videos with participants, as also further detailed in Chapter 3. The relationships I built with my participants in these ethnographic encounters shaped the stories the participants would tell me, a very few of which I selected to discuss in this book. The narratives you will hear are thus not to be read as some decontextualised stories from ‘out there’, they are not authoritative narratives (Kroskrity, 2009) or cultural myths that exist in some non-ethnographic reality, but rather they are documents of my participant observation. They are co-constructed by the researcher, performed for the researcher even, and they found their ways onto audiotape and on these pages only because of the research taking place. Many interviews were outcomes of weeks and months of hanging out with participants, establishing rapport, bonding through hip hop and collaborating over artistic projects. Thus, these stories (and their interpretation in this book) are infused with the ethnographic relationships I was building with my research participants and still do today. In fact, I would even argue that storytelling, and research for that matter, are themselves hip hop practices. Telling one another stories about how hip hop shaped one’s life and will do so in the future is an essential ingredient of hip hop conviviality; stories position heads and their hoods within a global topography and chronology of hip hop. Such a perspective would allow us to understand that these stories are not only metapragmatic accounts about hip hop, but are also themselves pragmatic hip hop cultural action. In other words, the stories are not ‘just’ on hip hop, they are hip hop. To further complexify this point, I decided to include Chapter 7 which presents a multimodal analysis of interactive and competitive hip hop dance, known as breakin, in which I argue that the b-boys dance narratives in the cypher with their bodies.

6  Transcultural Voices

The young men and women you will meet on the pages of this book normalise their voices in the narratives they tell (me) to present an authentic, historically situated, cosmopolitan, spiritual and masculine hip hop identity. As you will learn when reading this book, their ‘normal’ sounding voice is always constructed in opposition to other ‘abnormal’ voices. The narrators draw on a range of linguistic, discursive and embodied strategies to orchestrate these voices in their narratives. For example, they style-shift prosodic voice qualities, such as intonation, to abnormalise the voices of the other, which in turn normalises the voices of the self (Chapter 4). They also engage in translingual remixin to simultaneously challenge and reproduce dominant linguistic ideologies and associated identities (Chapter  5), and they synchronise historicities to construct foreseeable and coherent futures for themselves (Chapter 6). They use their moving, standing and dancing bodies as somatic voices in embodied narratives to construct b-boy masculinity (Chapter 7). Finally, I show how one narrator develops methodologies for practicing, understanding and overstandin hip hop culture (Chapter 8). These narratives provide important insights into how the emerging Delhi hip hop scene grappled with what it meant to be involved with Indian hip hop at that point in time, ultimately to arrive at a deeper understanding of hip hop as knowledge of self (the fifth element) and to thereby position themselves as hip hop heads; as practitioners who ‘own’ hip hop and look into a future with or without hip hop. I hope that the narratives and the way I present them can do something to contribute to our culture’s own understanding of itself. During my years of writing my PhD and becoming an academic, I was often asked what my research was on. I mostly replied that it was on hip hop. But now I feel that my research is hip hop. The book you are reading is hip hop. Transcultural Voices

The narratives and the voices you will hear in this book do not exist in a cultural vacuum. The narrators’ ‘own’ voices are never fully their ‘own’ but rather always ‘half someone else’s’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 293). With the notion of transcultural voices, I aim to challenge beliefs that a speaker has fixed ideas in his head – having voice – that can be transformed into messages or that speakers have a biological-psychological foundation that can be analysed in linguistic terms. Instead, this book follows Bakhtinian epistemologies to understand a speaker’s voice as an achievement of her narrative dialogues with others’ voices. Therefore, the unified speaker, who utters in a synchronic, localised and clearly delineable context,

Complex Questions: Normalising Voice in Global Narratives  7

vanishes as an object of analysis and instead I focus on how speakers orchestrate many voices in dialogic narratives to ultimately normalise their ‘own’ voices. The transcultural voices you will hear in this book are thus infused with polyphonic orchestrations and indexical stylisations of the voices of other narrative figures or characters in a story. These figures ‘speak from’ different historical space-times (chronotopes) and from various local and global cultures and they do the contextual work for narrators to depict themselves and their community in the normal complexity of Delhi at the beginning of the 21st century. Thus, the main theoretical and analytical contribution of the book can be spelled out as follows. When the Delhi hip hop heads construct their ‘own’ and ‘normal’ transcultural voices in narratives, they speak through a multitude of other voices, accents, registers, styles and languages in order to transform and potentially even transgress their social positionalities. These transcultural voices do not come out of nowhere, rather they are orchestrations of many voices in narratives. The narrator reflexively aligns with some of the voices, while keeping others at a distance. This orchestration of many voices in relation to the self demonstrates the narrators’ metapragmatic awareness of the global heteroglossia in which they live. Through my analyses, I show how narrators begin to ‘own’ these other voices by engaging in discursive processes of normalisation. In the narrative resolutions, narrators seem to normalise the multitude of voices and thereby project their ‘own’ moral evaluations about the world and about their futures. This ‘ownership’ of transcultural voices creates a deontic coherence and meaningfulness for the self, and occasionally also challenges hegemonic ideas about what it means to be a young man or woman growing up in urban India. Yet, they never arrive at a full ‘ownership’ of the heteroglossia and there always remains an ambivalence as to who speaks from which positionality and for which purpose. In a word, when I use the expression transcultural voices in this book, I wish to highlight the dialogic agency with which narrators make many voices speak and simultaneously speak through them in order to transform the meanings and morals of the complexly normalised self and sometimes even transgress social normality. Transcultural voices, while normalising and reducing some forms of complexity, also promote other forms of complexity. This is why I read the transcultural voices I present in this book as imbued with a cosmopolitan orientation (Canagarajah, 2013; see also Singh, 2020b). Cosmopolitanism advocates plurality, while it reflexively acknowledges that every articulation of cosmopolitanism already contains an anti-cosmopolitan position (Beck, 2006). Complexity, taken by the word, must include

8  Transcultural Voices

the feature of simplicity. This dilemma of the cosmopolitan orientation allows transcultural voices to simultaneously promote and reduce complexity and thereby represent hip hop as both a thing and a way; as both a centripetal essence and a centrifugal practice. Complexifying Global Hip Hop Linguistics

To understand globalisation’s complexities, we need complex research. This book develops an interdisciplinary field of theoretical and analytical exploration that I call global hip hop linguistics. Global hip hop linguistics studies how key cultural practices of hip hop – such as knowledge, authenticity, mediatisation, intercultural communication, movement, languaging, technology, culturally sustaining pedagogies, dissent and peace – globalise and become locally understood as relevant for hip hop heads (for overviews see Alim et al., 2009; Androutsopoulos, 2003; Ross & Rivers, 2018; Terkourafi, 2010; Williams & Singh, forthcoming). Global hip hop linguistics uses theoretical insights and methods developed in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and linguistic ethnography to study how signs and language, in the broadest sense of these terms, are used in hip hop scenes across the world. That is to say that this approach takes language, or better languaging, to be a social practice, rather than a thing in itself. Understood from such a non-essentialist perspective, language is never purely referential in and by itself. Words are never ‘just’ words available for some imagination of neutral communication. Languaging gains its meaning only through its usage (Becker, 1991). Languaging is therefore always context-dependent and thus indexical of social categories and discourses. Sociolinguistics and its cognate disciplines discourse analysis and linguistic ethnography (or linguistic anthropology in the North American tradition) are interested in the pragmatic (usage-based) meanings of language in context rather than in the semantic meanings of a standardised ‘Language’ (such as ‘the’ English language or the ‘the’ Hindi language). However, this approach is also interested in the metapragmatic and ideological evaluations of language users, which might in fact lead to an emic essentialisation of language as a thing (on the distinction between emic and etic, see Headland, 1990). Thus, while researchers are likely to de-essentialise language and understand it as a social practice rather than a thing, our studies would be incomplete if they didn’t include an analysis of speakers’ essentialising (or de-essentialising!) ideologies that construct languages as things that belong or don’t belong to certain social groups. Despite these fruitful attentions to pragmatic usage and metapragmatic ideologies, one of the problems of global hip hop linguistics is that it remains largely logocentric, i.e. centred on language and in particular

Complex Questions: Normalising Voice in Global Narratives  9

on speech, thereby neglecting embodied and non-verbal forms of communication, affect and spirituality, as well as the once so-called paralinguistics (Bucholtz & Hall, 2016). We perhaps owe our logocentrism to the legacy of 20th-century types of structuralism and empiricism that we find difficult to jettison (Blommaert, 2013b, 2016b). There is a need to rethink global hip hop linguistics – as well as the disciplines it draws from: discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography – so that we can develop our analysis of context-bound language use to become sensitive to the complexities of the varied embodied ways in which language users negotiate social meaning with each other in contemporary globalised societies. Towards the end of the book, I make a few moves that challenge sociolinguistic’s logocentrism by means of presenting a multimodal analysis of the moving bodies of dancers in interaction (Chapter 7). I also try an affectological analysis of overstandin (Chapter 8). With its interdisciplinary arsenal, its practice-based orientation of languaging, its critical investigation of ideology and its attention to multimodality and embodiment, global hip hop linguistics can advance a sociolinguistic turn in the larger (even more interdisciplinary) field of hip hop studies. Hip hop studies emerged in the United States in the 1990s, most notably with the publication of Rose’s (1994) Black Noise. In this landmark book, Rose lays the foundations for themes that would later become pivotal to both (non-linguistic) hip hop cultural studies and hip hop linguistics in the United States, such as gender and sexuality, hip hop’s relationship to the mainstream and hip hop materialities and materialism (see e.g. Chang, 2005; Forman & Neal, 2012; Perkins, 1996; Potter, 1995; Williams, 2015a). Whereas hip hop studies continues to proliferate in the United States, Mitchell’s (2001a) volume Global Noise represents the first effort to take the study of hip hop into global contexts. Mitchell’s volume can therefore be regarded as a sequel to Rose’s book (see Mitchell, 2001b: 5–6; Pennycook, 2003b), yet its conceptual foundations are somewhat simplistic and hence cannot account for the complexities that occur when hip hop transculturates. Mitchell’s anthology of essays deals with global hip hop culture in various localities around the world, such as New Zealand, Bulgaria, the UK and Korea. These hip hop scenes are conceptualised as combining local and global musical and linguistic forms: Models and idioms derived from the peak period of hip-hop in the USA in the mid-to-late 1980s have been combined in these countries with local musical idioms and vernaculars to produce excitingly distinctive syncretic manifestations of African-American influences and local indigenous elements. (Mitchell, 2001b: 3)

10  Transcultural Voices

In this view, a given hip hop scene is understood as a variety of a globally circulating US-inspired hip hop culture. Each variety displays ‘distinctive’ features that separate it from another variety, while showing a kind of family resemblance with hip hop culture in general. The local varieties are then given national labels when researchers talk about ‘Brazilian hip hop’ or ‘the Nigerian hip hop community’, even if the findings of their case studies can hardly ever be generalisable on the national scale (on this point, see Hannerz, 1992: 12, 21–22; Merry, 2016; Singh, 2016). The nation state is often evoked, it seems, to illustrate hip hop’s international diversity: hip hop no longer has one centre (the United States), but rather multiple national centres are developing around the world, each formulating a unique vision of what hip hop means to it. This polycentricity of global hip hop, surely, emancipates national hip hop scenes as they cease to be regarded as imitations of an original, more authentic, US-American version. Yet, this polycentric perspective also awkwardly produces essentialised varieties when researchers describe local hip hop scenes as being representative of an entire nation. We see here a conceptual parallelism between the ways in which global hip hop studies understands hip hop as an internationally unfolding culture and the ways in which English as a global language has been modelled, for instance in Kachru’s (1985) well-known model of the three circles of global Englishes (this parallelism between global hip hop and global Englishes is also noted and critiqued in Omoniyi, 2006; Pennycook, 2007b; Pennycook & Mitchell, 2009). Kachru’s model pluralises global language use – it moves from English to Englishes (for similar models, see McArthur, 1987; Schneider, 2007). Kachru and followers use linguistic and sociolinguistic methods to demonstrate that the varied ways in which people from around the world use English are not incorrect or broken, rather these Englishes have full-fledged phonological, semantic, morphosyntactic and discourse-level systems and norms; or at least they are currently developing such norms. This analytical construction of varieties of Englishes is not only descriptive but it is also of political and educational relevance, especially for the outer-circle nations (typically postcolonial nations such as Nigeria, Kenya, Jamaica, India, Hong Kong and Singapore). Speakers and educators in such postcolonial nations no longer seem to have to adhere to the inner-circle norms of their previous colonisers – even though case studies, for instance among elites in India (Chand, 2009a, 2009b, 2011), in educational settings in Barbados (Van der Aa, 2012) and in transnational workplace interactions in Singapore (Park, 2014), suggest that speakers deem inner-circle Englishes (i.e. racialised approximations

Complex Questions: Normalising Voice in Global Narratives  11

of Standard British or American English) ‘better’ than local versions of Englishes. Kachru’s pluralisation of Englishes not only reproduces essentialised imaginations of the nation state, but it also overlooks sub-national scales like regional variation, spatio-temporal mediatisation and sociocultural complexity more generally. To reintroduce complexity into the study of global Englishes, Seargeant and Tagg (2011: 498) propose a ‘post-varieties approach’, which ‘is sensitive to the dynamic communicative practices which use English-related forms and connotations as one part of a wider semiotic repertoire’. This shift from variety to resource or repertoire, first articulated in Gumperz’s (1964) study of linguistic variation in Khalapur in North India and Hemnesberget in Northern Norway, has gained currency in sociolinguistic research in the last decade to more accurately describe the complex ways in which global languages are used by speakers, writers and body movers from across the world to varying degrees and for varied purposes (Benor, 2010; Blommaert, 2010, 2016b; Blommaert & Backus, 2013; Canagarajah, 2013; García & Li Wei, 2014; Jaspers, 2011; Leimgruber, 2013; Pennycook, 2007a, 2012; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015; Rymes, 2014). Can a post-varieties approach also inform our conceptualisation of global hip hop? If hip hop scenes, like the one in Delhi that I observed and participated in, are understood as dynamic expressions of transculturation, rather than as varieties of an original US hip hop, would this not help to analytically de-essentialise hip hop cultures around the world? We would understand hip hop in the various localities in which it emerges as a practice and lifestyle of humans, rather than a thing in itself (a reification or thingification). Instead of positing an essentialised variety, using a national label (such as ‘Indian hip hop’), a post-variety approach pushes us to consider how people use hip hop as a sociocultural resource to position themselves in their community and in (global) society at large. In effect, this move aims to de-essentialise pluralisation; in similar ways that Englishes have recently come to be seen as a resource rather than things in themselves that ‘travel’ or ‘develop’ norms, I analytically understand hip hop as a practice that people negotiate rather than a predefined monolithic culture or a global variety thereof. Yet, such negotiations between the hip hop heads can in fact lead to an emic reification: a normalised understanding of hip hop as a thing, accentuating oneness and unity, a Bakhtinian centripetal force. However, as this book shows, even in this reification there always seems to be an agentive, transcultural, centrifugal moment of appropriation at play, creating a remix (Chapter 5) and a dual understanding of hip hop as both a dynamic practice, a way, and a reified culture, a thing.

12  Transcultural Voices

On a conceptual level, the Global Hip Hop Nation (Alim, 2009; Morgan & Bennett, 2011) represents the first step in developing such a transcultural and post-varieties approach in global hip hop linguistics. Alim (2009: 3) describes the Global Hip Hop Nation as ‘a multilingual, multi-ethnic “nation” with an international reach, a fluid capacity to cross borders, and a reluctance to adhere to the geopolitical givens of the present’. Rather than existing outside of languaging and discourse, both Alim (2009) and Morgan and Bennett (2011) understand the Global Hip Hop Nation as an Andersonian imagined community (Anderson, 1983), which hip hop heads narrate, author and normalise into existence through semiotic action and discursive positioning practices. The concept of the Global Hip Hop Nation emphasises the transcultural flows between hip hop scenes in various localities and offers a way of understanding hip hop in Delhi and elsewhere as a practice of globally connected people and voices, not as a locally and temporally fixed or developing variety (for more on such dynamics between cultural flows and complexity, see Blommaert, 2013a; Hannerz, 1992). Transculturation: Formulas of Appropriation

The connectivity of voices in global hip hop is described as a form of transculturation in this book. Transculturation, as an analytical term, accounts for the complexity of semiotic re-significations and localisations which can occur in a scenario of cultural contact. The concept has been developed in the cultural and literary study of the aftermath of the colonial destruction of the Americas (Ortiz, 1947; Pratt, 1992; Rama, 2012; Spitta, 1995). In Ortiz’s (1947) original formulation, the term was employed to critique the then widespread anthropological understandings of cultural contacts as being ‘acculturations’ that result in ‘deculturations’. Rather than just making one group acquire the other group’s culture (acculturation) and losing its own (deculturation), Ortiz (1947: 102–103) argued that the cultural contact also involves ‘neoculturation’; the emergence of a hybrid or creole culture which becomes meaningful in the struggle for identity and decolonisation. Spitta (1995: 2) thus succinctly glosses transculturation as a ‘complex process of adjustment and re-creation – cultural, literary, linguistic, and personal – that allow for new, vital, and viable configurations to arise out of the clash of cultures and the violence of colonial and neo-colonial appropriations’. Although the hybrid neoculture that emerges from transculturation highlights the agency of the colonised in their struggle for decolonisation,

Complex Questions: Normalising Voice in Global Narratives  13

this agency is complex and thus of limited value in the epistemic regime of empirical understanding and rational logics that European colonial modernity propagates with its constant referencing of Enlightenment thought. Transculturation therefore cannot fully break with colonial hegemony, insofar as ‘subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, [yet] they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for’ (Pratt, 1992: 6). Pratt’s allusions to ‘use’ and ‘own’ are important aspects also in my conceptualisation of transculturation. I understand transculturation to be about the usage of appropriation rather than the appropriation of things – formulas of appropriation rather than appropriating forms – and this usage is never fully one’s ‘own’, yet it is not entirely the other’s either. As Welsch (1999: 4) describes it, in transculturality ‘there is no longer anything absolutely foreign. Everything is within reach. Accordingly, there is no longer anything exclusively “own” either’. Transculturation thus describes liminal pragmatic action in a contact zone (Pratt, 1991), a type of border thinking (Mignolo, 2000; see also Chapter 8), which creates an intertextual web of meaning or, better, a multitude of voices and narratives that are circulated and negotiated to make meaning of the self and the other, in unfinished ways. To be sure, the claim that transculturators construct their ‘own’ culture or identity through the affordances of voice and narrative is not new. Transculturation has been understood by its leading theorists as an enunciative, semiotic and narrative process that deals fundamentally with sign relations, articulation and representation. Bhabha’s (2004) famous anti-essentialist ‘third space’, for instance, is fundamentally a linguistic or discursive notion. Rather than a thing or an assignable identity, the third space is an enunciative positionality anchored in the pragmatic conditions of uttering or semiotics in use. It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity, that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew. (Bhabha, 2004: 55)

In his engagement with scholars such as Foucault and Bakhtin, Bhabha displaces the agency of the author and emphasises the agency of an utterance’s intertextuality with other utterances. Bakhtin (quoted in Bhabha, 2004: 271) is aware that an utterance’s intertextuality is ‘complex and multiplanar’ and can never have a ‘logical-psychological basis’. Thus, as

14  Transcultural Voices

I hope to show in this book, the third space of enunciation can never be ‘owned’ even though it can be appropriated momentarily, tactically, in interactive moments of narrative resolution. Transculturation has already garnered some attention in global hip hop studies and its potential to account for some of the complexities has been recognised (Alim et al., 2009). Dennis’s (2006: 250, 2012) work on the constructions of race, class, place and authenticity of Afro-Colombian rappers, deploys transculturation to capture the ‘dual processes – often characterized by conflict and struggle – of transformation and change in which the forces of modernity and modernization modify the traditional, while at the same time, there is an infusion of traditional elements, arts and cultures into spaces of modernity’. Dennis (2006: 249) suggests that this transformation and change of Afro-Colombian hip hop modernity is situated in the study of meaning: ‘through these emergent modes of transculturation, objects that possess one meaning (or no meaning) in the culture of origin are transformed and furnished with new and sometimes even subversive meanings in a new context’. Dennis’s move towards meaning emphasises that transculturation is a semiotic and discursive process that involves recontextualisations and transformations of meanings for both the local and the global hip hop culture. Similarly, Pennycook’s (2003a, 2007a: 6–7, 2007b; Pennycook & Mitchell, 2009) work on global hip hop understands transculturation as a flow of cultural and linguistic forms in a globalised space on the one hand and the local appropriation and refashioning of these forms on the other. Pennycook then goes one step further and highlights that hip hop not only transcends the boundaries between these forms but also challenges the ontologies (the claims for real existence) of these boundaries. For this de-essentialising reimagination of hip hop, he utilises three further ‘trans’ terms: translation, transtextuality and transmodality (Pennycook, 2007a: 36–57). Pennycook (2007a: 7) here tries to ‘escape from the debates over globalization versus localization, or neologisms such as glocalization that, by eliding the two polarities, flatten the dynamics of what is occurring here’. The transculturation of hip hop in his examples, drawn mainly from the Asia-Pacific region, as well as from Africa, then, is not understood as a process of global homogenisation, as part of a wider westernisation of the east/south, but rather as ‘part of a reorganization of the local’ (Pennycook, 2007a: 7). Instead of being a mere (inauthentic) imitation of American hip hop, an imitation of some kind of acrolectal, metropolitan variety of hip hop, ‘the identifications with American and African American culture by hip-hop artists around the world are embedded in local histories of difference, oppression, class and culture,

Complex Questions: Normalising Voice in Global Narratives  15

often rejecting American dominance while identifying with forms of local struggle’ (Pennycook, 2007a: 91). Transculturation compels us to understand global hip hop cultures as complex localising practices that are translocally connected, transgressing boundaries and challenging the ontology of these boundaries. A type of global hip hop linguistics that does not take a transcultural outlook, I would like to contend, will continue to limit itself to analysing essentialist (national) hip hop varieties around the world and perhaps study their distinctions from and comparisons with each other. The boundaries between these varieties, however, are often challenged by the hip hop heads we research. It is therefore crucial for global hip hop linguistics, especially perhaps for ethnographic approaches, to pay attention to some of the questions that are relevant to our research participants rather than only trying to fill the so-called gaps in the academic literature, the lacunae and desiderata, and respond to only those questions that we know resonate well in our ivory towers. Whose Research Questions?

As discussed in the opening vignette, the graffiti in Prabh Deep’s living room made me think about a range of questions that will direct my arguments on these pages. However, I pointed out that my questions were somewhat imposed from outside, from the ethnographic periphery of academic institutions, responding to the ‘literature’ or the ‘discipline’ rather than to what my participants themselves deemed important. As Hymes (1980, 1981) advocates with his notion of ‘ethnographic monitoring’, research questions can also be generated in collaboration with participants (for more recent applications and developments of ethnographic monitoring, see Peters, 2013; Van der Aa, 2012; Van der Aa & Blommaert, 2011, 2015). Through long-term fieldwork, cumulative rounds of feedback sessions, cooperative triangulation, mutual respect and other collaborative activities, participants and ethnographers can develop an ‘epistemic solidarity’ (Van der Aa, 2012), or an equal voice, when it comes to defining the goals of the research. In the context of hip hop scholarship, Spady (cited in Alim, 2006b) proposed a similar approach, dubbed hiphopography (see also Williams & Singh, forthcoming). This is a type of research at the crossroads of ethnography, biography and social and oral history, in which ‘[h]ierarchical divisions between “researcher” and “researched” are purposely kept to a minimum, even as they are interrogated’ (Alim, 2006b: 969). In this view, hip hop heads are seen as authors who ‘are quite capable of telling their own story’ (Alim,

16  Transcultural Voices

2006b: 970); and I would add: who are quite capable of asking their own questions. In these turns from the etic towards the emic, ethnography itself becomes social action that can address inequality and bridge the widening gap between scholars and communities in the contemporary knowledge industry (see also Appadurai, 2006). Compared to questions developed in a research plan prior to fieldwork, ethnographic monitoring during fieldwork might also result in such research questions that can address complexity more accurately (Van der Aa & Blommaert, 2015). Hymes (1980) envisions ethnographic monitoring as a research strategy while doing fieldwork. The importance of scaling back my ‘own’ research questions in this study, however, started to become clear to me only after I had returned from my fieldwork in Delhi. Sitting at my computer in Cardiff as a PhD student, I had begun to subject my data to several objectifying epistemologies (Foucault, 1970): transcription, close listening, phonetic and phonological analysis, coding of themes, classification, theorisation and other analytical exercises. While analysing, I had tried to respond to questions that were of interest to the academic field, to the ‘literature’, slowly forsaking the embodied experience as a participant observer among hip hop heads in Delhi. Much of this book reflects this objectification. In order to advance global hip hop linguistics, I focus on the analytical categories ‘voice’ and ‘narrative’ to make empirically informed interpretations about how my participants navigated positionalities in their interactions and made sense of global cultures and complexity. However, the terms ‘voice’ and ‘narrative’ and many others I use in this book (such as ‘positionality’, ‘navigate’, ‘indexicality’, ‘ideology’, ‘normalising’, ‘semiotic surface’, ‘deep structure’ and ‘ethnography’ for that matter) never directly appear in my data. This is an entirely etic set of terms which lacks ethnographic validity. I am unsure whether my research participants, the hip hop heads in Delhi, will get anything out of me developing such terminology in this book. To enrich my analysis with something emic, something relevant to my participants, I went back to the audio-recordings of the interviews that I had conducted and tried to isolate those moments in which my participants themselves expressed ideas about the goals of my research. In the following, I present four of my participants’ ideas about the goals of my research that I found in the interviews. I acknowledge that this is a post hoc strategy, from the ethnographer’s armchair so to speak, rather than an in situ strategy proposed by Hymes and his followers. In Chapter  3, I reflect on this problem and my academic bias in more detail and outline the ethical implications of my linguistic analyses and ethnographic writing projects.

Complex Questions: Normalising Voice in Global Narratives  17

MicMaster Aeke, a breaker and emcee from Delhi, who makes several appearances in this book, understands my research as a form of documentation, as he once told me: we need people like you who document the scene. In this view, my ethnography can be read as a representation of a particular historical moment of Indian hip hop, which future generations could read to find out how it had all started in Delhi, learn about the figures who shaped the scene and understand the topics with which they grappled. Zine, a graffiti writer from Delhi, thought that my work could also help popularise the Delhi scene in the Global Hip Hop Nation: your research puts delhi on the map. Zine’s comment suggests that my work is not only on hip hop but that it is also, to some degree, hip hop itself. By hearing about my work, and by reading it, hip hop practitioners from around the world would be informed about Delhi hip hop and could potentially even reach out to Delhi hip hop heads to collaborate with them, for example invite them for collaborative graffiti trips in other cities and countries. Zebster, a transnational hip hop ambassador from Germany who has worked extensively with the Indian hip hop scene, suggested in an interview that my role as a researcher could be to explain things to outsiders of hip hop culture, thereby defamiliarising the culture’s emic ordinariness: we are too influenced by hip hop. so we talk about hip hop. but I think for people like you. you have a chance to explain things to third people which are totally normal for us. Even if these accounts perhaps overstate what my, or any, academic research can achieve, I do take them seriously. This book should be read as an attempt to document and popularise the rich artistic output and the fascinating cultural practices of the young Delhi hip hop scene in 2013. It also seeks to inform audiences not familiar with global hip hop about the artistic, cultural and social value of hip hop in the Global South. For instance, my research can critique and update the institutionalisation and internationalisation of the informal types of pedagogy found in hip hop (for a first step in this direction, see Dattatreyan & Singh, 2020; Singh & Dattatreyan, 2016). Aeke, Zine and Zebster make important suggestions about the representation of culture and the circulation of ethnographic research. How do we write ethnographies about our participants and their culture and represent them in ways that are accurate and not harmful to them? This is a particularly thorny problem given anthropology’s beginnings at the height of the age of empire, and it is also a problem for the book you are reading. Inspired by the writing culture debate (Atkinson, 1990; Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Geertz, 1988; James et al., 1997), I use the problem of ethnographic representation to restrict

18  Transcultural Voices

and to expand my analysis, to inform my ethics and to make all sorts of writin moves in this book. I do this to represent rather than to sound cool; or I do both (for more on reppin, see Chapter 5). Aeke’s, Zine’s and Zebster’s calls for representation, circulation and education are important political tasks that ethnography can take on, and I do not take such tasks lightly on these pages; they are, however, not easily turned into researchable questions. During a three-hour long ethnographic interview, B-Boy Rawdr, a breaker from Delhi, spontaneously came up with this researchable question for my study: Why are people from different cultures getting down to one way/thing (i.e. hip hop)? He embedded this question in a narrative about the interview and my research itself, showcasing the reflexivity in his articulation of his transcultural voice. Before starting the interview from which the following excerpt was taken, Rawdr and I were discussing how hip hop has the potential to change society in India for the better. In Line 12, he then formulates a ‘reason’ (Lines 9, 10, 11) for conducting my research, which I use as my guiding research question in this book. Extract 1.1: Interview with B-Boy Rawdr, Delhi 2013 {34:40–35:30} 01 Rawdr: it [hip hop] is changing society. 02 Jaspal: you think so yeah? 03 Rawdr: yes. 04 you know. like er: like I’m sitting with you and I’m talking. 05 Jaspal: yeah 06 Rawdr: alright. 07 you’re more interested to do your research on hip hop. 08 why? 09 there should be a reason. 10 of course there is a reason. 11 and the reason is. 12 why people from other cultures they are getting down to ONE way- one thing? 13 you know. alright. and they’re just doing their thing. 14 and they’re meeting up and they’re talking. 15 like if you’re from germany and I’m from india. 16 and we’re having a good talk. 17 and you know we’re hanging out like good buddies. 18 you know. without any beef. 19 or you know. “oh man I’m white” and “I’m brown”. 20 leaving all this fucking shit behind.

Complex Questions: Normalising Voice in Global Narratives  19

In this narrative, Rawdr asks about the reason (Lines 9, 10, 11) for conducting my research. He responds to his own question in Line  12 by asking a research question for me. His proposal presents me with a concise, yet not simple, emic research question from which I wish to start my analytical journey in this book. But what exactly is Rawdr asking in Line 12? For the sake of clarity, allow me to reword his utterance slightly: Why are people from different cultures getting down to one way/thing (i.e. hip hop)? This rewording (Jakobson, 1957), of course, already begins the academic recontextualisation of emic accounts. We can see here that I find it hard to resist introjecting my ‘own’ etic academic voice into my ethnography. Accepting this state of affairs, we can observe a number of details in Rawdr’s question that inform the ways in which I approach my analysis of normalisations of voice in narrative on these pages. On the most basic level, let me say, generally, I think he poses a really good question. Why are people from different cultures getting down to hip hop? What is this unifying force of hip hop? How do people of different cultures use it to their own ends? Apart from this general relevance of Rawdr’s question, it also suggests four further points. (1) Cultural unification: Rawdr’s question assumes that there exists cultural difference in the world. While this seems obvious, it is an important presupposition for Rawdr to imagine hip hop as a unifying way/thing that supersedes cultural difference. If the world is culturally fragmented, hip hop has the power to unify people. Hip hop is transculturation. (2) Thing/way: Although perhaps not intended by Rawdr, his repair in Line  12, ONE way- one thing, can inspire an analysis of the ideological processes that allow hip hop to be understood as both a dynamic practice (way) and a reified culture (thing); a local practice and a global culture (to echo the title of Androutsopoulos’s 2003 volume). Likewise, the subsequent utterance and they’re just doing their thing (Line 13) simultaneously points to a practice (doing) and an essence (thing). Essence and practice are here connected effortlessly (affective just) through appropriation (possessive their). The dialectics between way and thing allow for an ambiguity of meaning, which is utilised by the narrator to normalise his ‘own’ transcultural voices vis-à-vis the many voices in his narrative. (3) Indexicality: Hip hop languaging and speech styles such as getting down to seem to play an important role in indexing and making

20  Transcultural Voices

socially meaningful cultural aesthetics and moral logics that allow practitioners to understand the world through hip hop. The phrase getting down derives from ‘getting down to the floor’, an essential skill for breakers in a cypher, and therefore loosely indexical of the authenticating figure of the breaker (see also my discussion of the b-boy stance in Chapter  7). More broadly conceived, getting down represents the hop, the movement, participation, action and creativity (see the Glossary of Terms for the meanings of ‘hip’ and ‘hop’). Membership in hip hop, at least in its idealised imagination, is open to anyone with the skills to get down on the floor or get down with tha decks, roc da mic or write their name on the wall. Race, sex, class, caste and nationality are said to be unimportant in hip hop. Social hierarchies and other fixed categories are thus often destabilised and renegotiated in this idealised and mediatised moral cosmos of hip hop, as also shown in Netflix’s reimagination of the birth of hip hop in the Bronx, The Get Down (Luhrmann & Guirgis, 2016). To use getting down as a phrase is more than trying to sound like a hip hop head, it is central to articulating the philosophies and morals of hip hop as a transculturally unifying force and a type of social transformation towards cosmopolitan authenticity. ( 4) Narrativisation: Finally, we see in Extract  1.1 that Rawdr’s question in Line 12 is situated within a narrative. In fact, he narrativises the interview context itself (see also Perrino, 2011), showcasing his reflexive awareness of the interview as a particular speech event that is part of an academic piece of research. This already becomes evident in the opening of his narrative: like I’m sitting with you and I’m talking (Line 4). This is an orientation to formulate his more general argument that hip hop is a globally unifying force for people of all cultures. After formulating his research question for me (Line 12), he again narrativises the interview context (Lines  15–19) to exemplify his argument: in the same way that hip hop connects people from all cultures, it also connects researcher with researched. Eventually, the interviewee and interviewer themselves become narrative figures, as evident in the change in pronoun deixis from they (Lines 13, 14), to you, I and we (Lines 15, 16, 17), to refer to the interview duo, as well as in the hypothetical dialogue between him and me (Line 19). Rawdr seems to say that despite our different national and racial identities, which could potentially have led to conflict, beef (Line 18), our mutual commitment to and interest in hip hop offer us an opportunity to have a good talk (Line 16) and experience friendship, we’re

Complex Questions: Normalising Voice in Global Narratives  21

hanging out like good buddies (Line 17). Ethically, this includes me, the researcher, in the in-group of hip hop heads. My interviews and my ethnographic research in general are thus not only on hip hop (Line  7), but they also are hip hop, since my participants actively reflect on my research and thus become something like co-researchers of this project. My ‘own’ voice is half theirs. This realisation is an important moment of reflexivity that I develop in Chapter  3. It informs my style of writing in this book and broadens, as well as restricts, my analytical possibilities. Corresponding to these four points, I ask four questions in this book: ( 1) How can hip hop overcome cultural difference in globalised Delhi? (2) Why is hip hop understood as both a thing and a way? (3) To what extent can hip hop languaging normalise social positionalities and understandings of the world? (4) How are the above three questions narrativised by the participants themselves? I respond to the four research question through my diverse analyses in Chapters 4–8 and I summarise and develop my responses in Chapter 9. By formulating these four research questions, I attempt to operationalise Rawdr’s larger question Why are people from different cultures getting down to one way/thing? I hope that by the end of the book, readers will be able to answer this question for themselves. Surely, not just one answer to this question will be valid and I invite readers, and in particular B-Boy Rawdr himself, to come up with their ‘own’ answers, perhaps challenging my answers, perhaps expanding on them. Rawdr’s narrative ends with a resolution that negatively evaluates essentialised national or racialised differentiation and proclaims that hip hop heads, like researched and researcher, can leave such difference behind (Line  20). Rawdr first voices himself and me as narrative figures and then claims full ownership over his ‘own’ voice by evaluating: leaving all this fucking shit behind. This evaluation, I would like to argue, is Rawdr’s ‘own’ voice – a transcultural voice – that resolves the complicating action of the story world and normalises a hip hop-inflected cosmopolitan stance, a b-boy stance, in which national and racialised identities are superseded by a shared commitment to global hip hop. This hip hop cosmopolitan commitment can change society (Line 01).

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The Book’s Narrative

Based on eight months of linguistic ethnographic fieldwork, the book tells a story of hip hop cultural production in Delhi. It provides a case study that advances our understandings of how voice and narrative, concepts that have significant currency both in linguistics and in ethnography, can be employed as analytical vantage points to explore transcultural processes in complex global cultural formations. The majority of the materials that are used in this book were collected between early January and late September 2013 in Delhi. During the eight months of ethnographic fieldwork, I interacted with research participants, mostly male breakers, b-boys (see Glossary of Terms), in their late teens and early twenties. As I outline more fully in Chapter  3, I conducted participant observation and recorded ethnographic interviews and informal interactions, but several other types of data were also collected, such as recordings of public performances at jams, photographs and audio-visual materials circulating online. I also participated in hip hop cultural practice such as (legal) graffiti writin, emceein and producin beats. I attended events, socialised informally and wrote extensive field notes. All these materials inform the story I tell in this book about a culture in the making. Most of my research participants grew up during Delhi’s phenomenal rise in population and its spatial expansion in the last 25  years. Delhi is India’s capital and second-largest and fastest-growing urban agglomeration. The National Capital Territory (NCT) is an urban sprawl of approximately 600 square miles and home to over 20 million people, half of whom migrated to the city or were born in the two decades after India’s economic liberalisation in 1991 (India, Government of, 2011). Delhi conjures up metaphors typical of the urban: modernity, prosperity, worldliness and liberal lifestyles on the one hand and corruption, crime, violence, ignorance and racial conflict on the other (for studies on Delhi’s contemporary urbanity, see Dasgupta, 2014; Dattatreyan, 2020; DuPont, 2011; Ghertner, 2011; McDuie-Ra, 2012a; Sundaram, 2010). In the last two decades, Delhi has become a complex and superdiverse (Vertovec, 2007) metropolis. The city has seen multiple layers of migration, striking changes in social and physical mobility, foreign and domestic investment and increased racial, communal and political unrest, especially after the brutal gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh on 16 December 2012, three weeks before my fieldwork began, which was followed by national and international outcry and unprecedented protests. The mediatisation and public imagination of this event fundamentally restructured gender, class and age relations in Delhi (Atluri, 2013; Dattatreyan, 2020; McLoughlin, 2019).

Complex Questions: Normalising Voice in Global Narratives  23

Delhi’s urban complexity is an important characteristic of the city’s hip hop scene in which I participated in 2013. On the most basic level, this complexity becomes relevant because all of my research participants are domestic or international migrants. They either migrated to Delhi, like B-Boy Rawdr who was born in a small village in Uttar Pradesh, or were born into migrant families, like Prabh Deep, whose grandparents fled the partition of the Punjab. On a more granular level, my participants reflexively engage with Delhi’s complexity on various scales. For example, in and through Delhi’s complex urbanity, they find ways with which they can transform their marginalised positionalities as migrants and begin to imagine themselves as part of a globally unfolding urban hip hop culture, which challenges this urban complexity as much as relies on it. Much of this book attempts to account for my participants’ strategic use of this complexity, rather than analytically reduce such complexity for the sake of my own analytical clarity and coherence – following Blommaert’s (2016b) call. The young b-boys, graffiti writers and emcees who you will meet on these pages were mostly in their late teens and early twenties during my fieldwork in 2013. They came from diverse social backgrounds. Some of them lived in gated communities in comfortable houses and went to colleges and universities abroad, while others came from disrupted families and lived in small multigenerational houses in informal settlements or refugee colonies and worked manual, service and precarious part-time jobs to support their families and were thus limited in their mobility. A few were women and their opportunities were severely regulated by hip hop’s hyper-heterosexual regimes, which I discuss throughout this book and in particular in Chapter 7, in the prologue and in the epilogue. What all my participants shared with each other – and indeed what they shared with me – was love for hip hop culture. For all of us, hip hop is more than a fad. It is a way of life, a perspective for understanding the world and a set of moral and aesthetic values that shape our futures and connect us with each other across differences in class, caste, ethnicity and nationality – but not so much across gender and sexuality. Hip hop is a cosmopolitan culture, yes, yet it has to do a lot of catching up to become more inclusive of female, non-heterosexual and queer heads. Readers might miss a ‘chapter on gender’ in this book. It is missing not because I was only able to meet three females in the scene, Dizy (Chapter 5), Samsam (on the cover of this book, prologue) and Manmeet Kaur (Chapter 4, epilogue), but rather because gender was everywhere. As I describe in the prologue of the book, gender was so pervasive, indeed, that I did not even recognise gender to be relevant at all at the

24  Transcultural Voices

beginning of my fieldwork. So, throughout this book I try to reveal – and reflexively critique – the gendered cosmos of hip hop in Delhi, which culminates in my discussion of the b-boy stance in Chapter 7, a particularly embodied urban, cool and focused masculine positionality. While I describe the b-boy stance as part of an analysis of the moving and standing bodies of dancers, I would make the more general argument that the transcultural voices you will hear in this book are permeated with the hyper-heterosexual, hip hop-inflected attitude and positionality indexed by the b-boy stance. I thus evoke the b-boy stance not to celebrate hegemonic hip hop masculinity but rather to expose some of the semiotic and discursive features that construct and reproduce this hegemony of the heterosexual male body in hip hop cultural representation. This book, together with the work of the anthropologist Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan, with whom I conducted co-incidental collaborative fieldwork in Delhi and became good friends with thereafter (discussed in Chapter  3), represents a first academic account of hip hop in India. I make frequent references to Dattatreyan’s and our collaborative writing in this book to provide interested readers with an alternative story of hip hop in Delhi, one that does not focus on voice, narrative and transculturation, but rather demonstrates complexity by means of investigating the digital practices of our participants and delves deeper than I can into the ethnic and racial dimensions of Delhi’s hip hop. It is important to note in this context that the story I tell on these pages is unique to my ethnographic experiences, yet it has undoubtedly been shaped by the many long conversations I had with Dattatreyan during our co-incidental collaborative fieldwork in 2013 and also in the years that followed. Readers should therefore appreciate that my ‘own’ voice in this monograph is half Dattatreyan’s. The narrative plot of this book emulates the typical genre of the ethnographic monograph, necessary for a young researcher like me to find recognition and paid work in academia. Chapter 2 reviews the literature on ethnography, voice and narrative to theoretically develop the analytical approach that I take in this book. I argue that a voice-in-narrative approach allows us to study how hip hop heads orchestrate a multitude of voices and, in the narrative resolutions, begin to appropriate certain voices as their ‘own’ in order to imagine themselves as future members of the Global Hip Hop Nation. In Chapter  3, I critically reflect on my fieldwork and my positionality as a foreign researcher and I describe the different types of data used in this book. In the five analytical chapters (Chapters 4–8), I empirically show how narrators orchestrate a multitude of voices in their narratives (Level  1) and eventually appropriate and

Complex Questions: Normalising Voice in Global Narratives  25

normalise their ‘own’ transcultural voices (Level  2), which might also play into their construction of identities and inform our understanding of the larger processes of globalisation in India (Level 3). Thus, as suggested by Bamberg (1997) and many others (e.g. Benveniste, 1971; Jakobson, 1957; see also Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008; De Fina, 2013), I differentiate between three levels of narrative positioning: on Level 1, the narrators position different voices in the story world; on Level 2, the narrators’ ‘own’ voices emerge vis-à-vis their audiences in the interactive world; and on Level 3, they make claims about their identities in the cultures they envision for their futures. Chapter  9 summarises some of the findings by responding to the four research questions I posed above. This book tries to draw attention, generally, to normalisation and ‘ownership’ of voice in narrative. I show how transculturation can be understood as a process by which narrators orchestrate a multitude of voices in their narratives in ways that allow them to articulate their ‘own’ normalised voices. Thus, transculturation can be understood as a formula of voice appropriation, of making voices one’s ‘own’ while the processes of normalisation also point to narrators’ reflexive awareness that these voices are never fully their ‘own’, in the sense of Bakhtin (1981: 293): ‘The word in language is half someone else’s’. The transcultural voices that the young hip hop practitioners you will meet on these pages project in their polyphonic narratives are normalised or made appropriate to the context in which they appear. Appropriation is thus also always a normalisation of appropriateness (Singh, 2020a). Whether or not this normalisation is successful depends on the listener’s evaluations of the ethnographic encounter, and you will see many instances in this book where the listener, in most cases, I, the interviewing ethnographer, had trouble fully appreciating the articulation of my participants’ ‘own’ voices; even though I always tried to be an empathetic and cooperative listener to my participants, many of whom became friends. Transcultural voices always remain in an ‘in-between’ time-space and thereby resist our total analysis. In this sense, my ‘own’ narrative in this book is no different from the research participants’ narratives that I chose to represent. I, too, engage in an orchestration of many voices and I, too, appropriate these voices to make them seem appropriate and normal in the context of a scholarly book – all with the hope to put across my ‘own’ voice as a young academic. Whether or not my orchestration, appropriation and normalisation are successful depends on you, the reader of this book. I hope that those of you who will continue reading this book will appropriate elements of it in your ‘own’ narratives as transcultural citizens in this complex heteroglossia that makes our current globalised moment.

2 Studying Transcultural Voices

Introduction

In this chapter, I develop a dope methodological and theoretical approach to the study of transcultural voices. The chapter predominantly presents my ‘own’ voice as a young scholar seeking to situate myself, through my research, within the profitable academic field of voices. To construct my voice, I use the space of this chapter to tell a narrative about some of the theoretical advances of the study of voice and narrative developed in sociolinguistics, discourse studies and linguistic ethnography. You will hear the voices of Bakhtin, Silverstein, Bucholtz, Irvine, De Fina, Rampton, Agha, Blommaert, Canagarajah, Alim, Tannen, Vološinov and many others. This review of the literature aims to arrive at a programme for an interdisciplinary field of scholarship that we could call global hip hop linguistics. As highlighted in Chapter  1, global hip hop linguistics is concerned with language use, in its broadest sense, in global hip hop cultural production and sociality. Global hip hop linguistics critically investigates how key notions of hip hop culture – such as knowledge, authenticity, mediatisation, embodiment, intercultural communication, languaging, culturally sustainable pedagogies, dissent and peace – globalise and undergo processes of transculturation. Global hip hop linguists are interested in understanding how these hip hop ideological formations are discursively and semiotically (i.e. ‘linguistically’) circulated, appropriated, sampled and remixed by practitioners of the culture, as well as by us hip hop scholars. Global hip hop linguists are confident with their reflexivity. Check yourself before you wreck yourself. I begin this chapter by theorising the linguistic ethnographic methodology – my hiphopography (Spady, cited in Alim, 2006b) – used in this book. Linguistic ethnography is a powerful type of embodied, affective and empirical qualitative research strategy that helped me to 26

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27

understand something of the cultural richness and complexities of the global flows I was encountering in the hip hop scene in Delhi. Linguistic ethnography also pushes researchers, at least me, to reflect on their ‘own’ positionality in the field and make sincere and ethical decisions while collecting and analysing data and writing about culture. The second section of the chapter moves on to develop a heuristic approach to voice and the third section explains how speakers formulate their ‘own’ voices by orchestrating many voices in narrative. The ethnographic linguistic voice-in-narrative approach that I develop in this chapter promises to generate important analytical opportunities to study the construction of identities in complex global cultures, while also being sensitive to the role of the researcher in the co-construction of such identities during the process of doing research (as further developed in Chapter 3). This sensitivity pushes me to take seriously the principle of reflexivity in my ethnographic analysis and writing. To advance such reflexivity, I close this chapter with a reflection on authorship. Here, I discuss ownership, subjectivity and identity and highlight hip hop’s practices of appropriation and samplin as foundational moral frameworks for (the dope study of) transcultural voices. Theorising Ethnography

Ethnography can be roughly understood as the writing (Greek: graphein) about a people/culture (Greek: ethnos), but it could also be conceptualised as writing by a people/culture. Ethnography usually requires the ethnographer to immerse herself in the culture under investigation over the course of several months or even years, in order to learn to participate in some of the cultural practices of the people who chose to take part in her research project. Ethnography is sometimes described as a ‘messy’ type of research that problematises simplistic and a priori correlations between cultural practices and identity and highlights instead the complexity of social and cultural life. Ethnography can inform the global hip hop linguistic approach I develop in this chapter in at least two ways. First, by encouraging thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973) of the social and cultural contexts from which I lifted linguistic materials, ethnography affords a non-predetermined analysis of context (Blommaert, 2007). That is to say, I make efforts in this book to investigate contexts rather than assume them before analysis. Ethnography is thus used to situate the analysis of interactional fragments within a sociocultural description of the speech event and to provide the necessary cultural background knowledge to be better

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able to interpret the complexities of language in use and understand the categories and concepts that matter to the speakers themselves (see e.g. Blommaert, 2005; Eckert, 2000; Gumperz, 1982; Hymes, 1974; Rampton, 2007; Saville-Troike, 2003; Silverstein, 1976). Secondly, an ethnographic perspective helps recognise hip hop as a culture and not merely as a musical genre or a fashionable trend. It acknowledges that hip hop practitioners, including, often, the ethnographers who choose to study hip hop, are heads that are committed to and socialised into the cultural dictates, values, ideologies, affects and lifestyles of global hip hop. In this vein, Harrison (2015) regrets that ethnography has largely been overlooked as a methodology to research hip hop culture: Considering the extent to which hip-hop has been represented and discussed – in both the academy and everyday discourse – as a culture, it is surprising that the research methodology traditionally most associated with the study of culture [i.e. ethnography] has been utilized so sparingly within the history of hip-hop scholarship. (Harrison, 2015: 155)

In Harrison’s research among hip hop heads in the California Bay Area, ethnography, the long-term immersion and participation in a community, proved to be a powerful research strategy to understand patterns of racial identification in what ostensibly is a colour-blind scene. His ethnographic account reflexively emphasises his own racial identity as an African American man with dreadlocks and donning hip hop-style clothing within the Bay Area scene. His appearance and race led his research participants to misrecognise him as a participant rather than a participant observer; an emcee rather than an ethnographer. Such misrecognition, what I discuss as role ambiguity in Chapter  3, was also prevalent in my own research in Delhi. There, I was ambiguously positioned as both a practitioner and a researcher. In other words, it wasn’t always clear to me whether my role was to represent sympathetically or critique in a detached way (Duranti, 1997). This role ambiguity almost forces me to reflect sincerely about what it means to do research ethically and affectively (as further discussed in Chapter 3). Taking this to a whole notha level (Alim, 2009; Ibrahim, 2009), this ethnographic monograph is not merely about hip hop, rather it is hip hop itself. It is the culture. I am hip hop. Jackson’s (2010) discussion of what he calls ‘ethnographic sincerity’ helps to problematise my affective positionality as a researcher in this study. Jackson (2010: 285) writes that ethnographic encounters are always imbued with ‘inescapable doubt […], fears of betrayal, uneasiness, and

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confusion’ between the ethnographer and her informants and these fears are ‘only retroactively coated with too-easy certainties (a self-delusional reading of the other’s purported insides/intentions)’ (Jackson, 2010, see also Fine’s 1993 candid account of self-deceptions and lying in ethnography). Ethnographic sincerity, in Jackson’s (2010: 286) argument, is a category that aims to counteract this ethnographic self-delusion and begins to treat informants as ‘fully embodied and affective interlocutors’ – as hip hop heads in the terminology of this book – which in turn requires ethnographers to become ‘scholar-activists’. For such scholar-activists ‘the personal is political – not a personalized way out of the fray, but the only safe and ethical space from which to fire off substantive ethnographic salvos’ (Jackson, 2010: 286). In Jackson’s (2010) conceptualisation of ethnographic sincerity, the ethnographer’s positionality as objectivist, as ‘postracial, asexual, and universal’, needs to give way to a type of authorship that appreciates the ‘gunk of ethnographic practice and that will not finesse its manipulations and machinations with antiquatedly nonreflexive rhetoric about rapport […]’. These careful theorisations of the reflexive, the political, the affective and the sincere of such African American cultural anthropologists as Jackson and Harrison are perhaps only beginning to surface in the ethnographically turned sociolinguistics of the European academy (see Rampton, 2016). We Europeans are generally still really invested in, at least, semi-objectivist epistemologies of ‘data analysis’ and ‘methodological reliability’. I was trained in precisely such an economic environment. While I do not intend to fully break with this tradition in this book, I find it hard to resist my ethnographic acumens of hip hop as a culture, which turns me into something like a hiphopographic scholar-activist, a kind of university-trained Gramscian organic intellectual head, whose ethical, political and cultural commitments are not satisfied with the types of tick-box ethics of written consent and the apolitical reasoning of the objectivist social sciences. I will try to capture my sincere and affective commitments to hip hop culture with the notions of ‘role ambiguity’ and ‘analytical ethics’ in Chapter  3, not in order to cold-shoulder objectivism but to brush some dirt off its shoulder. How can we bring together ethnography and linguistics in a transdisciplinary field, where both disciplines inform and transform each other? Linguistic ethnography

In the last decade, researchers in the UK have formulated an ethnographic approach to the study of language and culture, dubbed

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linguistic ethnography (for overviews see Copland & Creese, 2015a; Copland et  al., 2015). Linguistic ethnography is committed to a poststructuralist and anti-essentialist epistemology (Creese, 2008: 229). It sees language, and semiosis in general, as social practice and not as an essentialised and autonomous system. Linguistic ethnography is a powerful research strategy that is capable of integrating diverse methods that allow researchers to collect and analyse data and write about language and culture. But this is not to say that there is only one way of doing this. Linguistic ethnography proved to be a useful approach for my study precisely because it opens up a methodological pluralism, an eclecticism even, that is needed to account for the complexities of globally transculturating hip hop in Delhi. In Britain, linguistic ethnography is institutionally linked to linguistics departments rather than to social anthropology departments (Rampton, 2007: 586, 602, n8), which perhaps leads linguistic ethnographic researchers to design their research projects within empiricist and objectivist epistemologies developed in linguistics. However, this is not to say that linguistic ethnography is not open to a multidisciplinary outlook. According to Creese (2008), Rampton et  al. (2004, 2015) and Tusting and Maybin (2007), linguistic ethnography takes inspiration from a number of research traditions, which inform both its theory and its methodology. These traditions include the Hymesian ethnography of communication and Gumperzian interactional sociolinguistics, North American linguistic anthropology, sociocultural linguistics, as well as UK-based ethnographies, micro-ethnography, new literacy studies, critical discourse analysis, neo-Vygotskian approaches to language and cognition in the classroom, applied linguistics and the linguistic anthropology of education. Linguistic ethnography flags up these multiple research traditions in an ‘attempt to negotiate and articulate a distinctiveness’ and ‘to build a community and extend dialogue’ (Creese, 2008: 238). This establishes linguistic ethnography as a comprehensive transdisciplinary research programme with historical traditions, future directions, typical tools and research settings as well as mutual challenges. In a foundational positioning paper, Rampton et  al. (2004) suggest that the transdisciplinary kernel of linguistic ethnography lies in its attempt to combine ethnographic methods and linguistic methods to overcome the ‘fundamental tension between openness and systematicity that is inherent in integrating the two disciplines’ (Shaw et al., 2015: 8). Copland and Creese (2015b: 173–176) argue that while linguistic methods are required to facilitate the micro-analyses (Rampton, 2013) of audio and video recordings and transcripts, ethnographic methods can work

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in the opposite direction and unravel rigid scientism, objectivism and empiricism through thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973) of the social and cultural contexts in which our data were produced. Thick description can best be achieved through reflexive and sincere writing tactics that account for complexity, rather than reduce complexity (Blommaert, 2013a, 2016b; De Fina, 2015). So, while most of this chapter is about ‘linguistic’ methodologies, allow me to say a few words about ethnographic writing. Writin

Sometimes, sociolinguistic researchers use the term ‘ethnography’ to refer solely to the fieldwork or data collection processes: the observing, the participating and the interviewing (for overviews of such a conceptualisation, see Levon, 2013; Schilling, 2013). Yet, ethnography is more than that. Ethnography is a compound after all, pushing us to reflect on writing itself. Writing takes place at all stages during the research process and it has various purposes that each require particular writing styles: field notes, vignettes, transcriptions, sketches, consent forms, emails to colleagues and supervisors, draft chapters, conference posters and papers, research notes and reports, journal publications, book chapters, finished theses, revised theses and published monographs. And all these writings have a tremendous effect on how and where one’s research (career) goes. Thus, as Bucholtz (2000: 1440) puts it in her discussion of the politics of transcribing oral discourse, ethnographies ‘are not transparent and unproblematic records of scientific research but are instead creative and politicised documents in which the researcher as author is fully implicated’. To critically reflect on my writing as named author of this book, therefore, appears to me as inevitable in this ethnography. I will try to achieve this reflexivity by pluralising my locus of enunciation (discussed below). In highly idealised ways, linguistic ethnography distinguishes between three areas in the processes of doing research: fieldwork, data analysis and writing (see also Copland & Creese, 2015a). For linguistic ethnography, data analysis seems to be an epistemological necessity situated ‘in-between’ ethnography-as-fieldwork and ethnography-as-writing. In non-linguistic social and cultural anthropology, the fieldwork engagement and the writing are themselves analytical. This means that anthropologists often do not necessarily see ‘analysis’ as a separate step in the research process (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007: 158). We linguists, however, at desks, in libraries and in front of computers, like to sketch out a way to subject our data to several analytical filters, extracting structures and patterns that help us formulate hypotheses and metaphorical

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concepts that can explain the nature of the discourse we have collected. Linguistic ethnography, then, inserts a linguistic analysis ‘in-between’ the fieldwork and the writing up (we could therefore also paradigmatically call it ethno-linguistic-graphy). Of course, there is a vast, by now canonical literature on writing in ethnography (Atkinson, 1990; Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Geertz, 1988; James et  al., 1997; Mignolo, 2000; for discussions within linguistics, see Blommaert, 2013b; Canagarajah, 2013). Rather than attempting to further theorise writing, in this book I will reflect on writing while writin; a metapragmatic tactic that Canagarajah (2013) calls codemeshing. Let me briefly discuss how I plan to achieve this in this book. Pluralising my locus of enunciation

Linguistic ethnographic research is generally written for several different audiences (see also Rock, 2015: 139–140). Linguists (or sociolinguists and discourse analysts) might give in to our disciplines’ logocentrism (Bucholtz & Hall, 2016) and show themselves interested in my study to find out about language use ‘itself’, e.g. some features of Indian English, the transmutations of global hip hop-inflected Englishes or the poetic dimensions of narrative. Social science scholars, anthropologists, funders and the interested general public may engage with my writing to learn about the cultural production of hip hop around the world or about the formation of youth cultures in times of dramatic social, spatial and digital transformations in early 21st-century Delhi. Research participants and their friends and their families, who have made the study possible and whose voices are represented here, are likely to be interested in working out what the visiting ethnographer, who in some cases has become a friend, has done with all the material they have collaboratively created during their encounters. Some of my participants, for instance, expressed an interest in viewing interview transcripts and photos I took, and critiqued me for the ways in which I represented them. The different audiences of this project and linguistic ethnography’s transdisciplinary methodology require me to pluralise my writing strategies in this book (Copland & Creese, 2015c: 209–225; Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007: 191–208). In this sense, my ‘own’ voice as the author of this book must be understood as polyphonic, reflecting what Duranti (1997: 94) characterises as a ‘sympathetic but detached’ ethnographer. This pluralisation invites readers to construct for themselves multiple reading positions (Fowler, 1996; Hodge & Kress, 1993) and to look at the data and the interpretations I will present from various angles.

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The pluralisation of my writing is an attempt to complicate my ‘own’ locus of enunciation (Mignolo, 2000). A locus of enunciation is a positionality from which one speaks, argues and persuades. The institutional locus that constrains and structures this piece of writing requires a specific academic language of precision and formality to be recognised as part of the genre ‘scholarly monograph’. It uses an objectifying language, as Foucault (1970) finds, which attempts to erase subjectivity and normalise empiricism, patterns, laws and coherence. Without abandoning this genre entirely, postcolonial and decolonial scholarship begins to expose and subvert the rigidity of scientific language that is part and parcel of a continued hegemony of Eurocentrism and begins to develop tactics to reinsert affect and feelin back into ‘our’ writin projects. Canagarajah (2013) proposes to pluralise academic writing through codemeshing, a writing tactic of textual lamination that invites academics to follow their own translingual orientations. This translingual orientation requires mastering academic registers, while also opening up alternative discourses (Canagarajah, 2013: 113). Canagarajah exemplifies this by discussing the academic writing of the African American scholar Geneva Smitherman, who is also the academic mentor of Samy Alim, one of hip hop scholarship’s most prolific sociolinguists. While Smitherman’s articles, which appear in top-ranking, peer-reviewed academic journals, are mostly written in a standard English academic register, she codemeshes by inserting linguistic resources associated with African American English, for example lexical items such as ‘dissin’, ‘doggin’ and ‘blessed out’ (Canagarajah, 2013: 117) and morphosyntactical structures such as ‘what else we gon do while we was waitin’ (Canagarajah, 2013: 119). Canagarajah argues that such codemeshing pluralises and perhaps ultimately transforms academic writing by injecting a ‘community ethos’ or a ‘minority community voice’ into what is usually regarded as a conservative genre (see also Bartlett, 2012, in press). Importantly, in order to be considered legit in the academy and publication industry, minority scholars have to use codemeshing carefully. As Canagarajah stresses throughout his discussion, to simply use the community voice wholesale and completely abandon standard academic registers would mean that codemeshing scholars would not be taken seriously as academics, their writing would be read as a parody and their articles and monographs would be turned down by ‘serious’ academic publishers. Smitherman, as well as her student Alim, drastically change their loci of enunciation by incorporating what is at first sight a non-objective language in their writing (Alim, 2007; on ill-literacies as a critical

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pedagogical opportunity, see Alim, 2011). Through their codemeshing tactics, they subvert scientific and mutatis mutandis Eurocentric writing strategies. Their writing is, in this sense, more accurate for the project of decolonising sociolinguistics. As explained in this book’s Glossary of Terms, in my own writing I gesture at hip hop-inflected ways of knowin and feelin by using alternative spellings for the hip hop elements breakin, deejayin, graffiti writin, emceein and knowledge and overstandin. I also use ethnographic vignettes and autobiographical narrative to give readers some sense of my lived experiences as a hiphopographic scholar-activist, to locate myself as an affective and fully embodied polyphonic author in this piece of writing (for an illuminating discussion of ‘writing the self’ in ethnography, see Coffey, 1999: 115–133). These writing tactics, I hope, begin to pluralise my ‘own’ voice and perhaps begin to balance out my otherwise overly intellectualised strategies of writing about culture, voice and narrative with which I hope to extract cultural as well as financial capital from the academic community. I will return to the pluralisation of my positionality, my dope voice, as a researcher in Chapter 3. Voice as a Heuristic

The term ‘voice’ is central in linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, discourse analysis and literary analysis and even in clinical and biological research. The term has been used to study both the physical aspects of the human voice with which we produce sounds and language and the social aspects of voice with which we position ourselves and others in interaction and in society at large. Bertau therefore proposes to use voice as a heuristic in our research. A heuristic can be thought of as a ‘good-enough’ shortcut to investigating a complex phenomenon. Bertau (2011: 170) envisions that such a heuristic for voice can be put to work in many different research paradigms, such as in the biology of communication, anthropology, linguistics and psychology. Therefore, she sees ‘voice as an excellent point of entry for the investigation and understanding of the psycho-physical reality of human beings’ (Bertau, 2011: 170). (For a somewhat different conceptualisation of ‘voice as an ethnographic heuristic’, one that is situated entirely in the social voice, see Van der Aa, 2012: 16–22.) However, the physical and the social voice have largely been studied separately. I will begin this section by briefly outlining how the physical and the social voice can be studied together by turning our attention to indexicality. In the contemporary globalised moment, this indexicality

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has to be understood as drawing on mobile resources and to generally show high levels of complexity. I will then discuss how speakers make this complexity meaningful by means of constructing the voices of the other and orchestrating them to position themselves in interaction and narrative. The positioning practice is not a simple reflex to accommodate different contexts, but rather a complex metapragmatic dialectics with which speakers can attend to given contexts and bring about new contexts, thereby potentially transforming social situations and identities. The physical and social voice

The physical voice refers to the articulatory and auditory qualities of human speech produced in our lungs, vocal tracts and head. The physical voice is studied in phonetics (Laver, 1980), clinical phonetics (Brockman et al., 2008; see also the Journal of Voice 1988–2016) and sociophonetics (Foulkes & Docherty, 1999; Pittam, 1994). Much of this work is concerned with analysing the physical qualities of the sound waves of speech and the biological ability of humans to produce and perceive sounds as meaningful communicative resources in a sociolinguistic or socio-semiotic system. But there exists an entirely different understanding of voice too. Metaphorically, we use the term ‘voice’ to mean a social, discursive and ideological positionality from which one speaks, writes, and languages. This social voice has been investigated in ethnography, discourse studies and sociolinguistics (e.g. Agha, 2005; Angermuller, 2014; Bartlett, 2012; Blommaert, 2005; Ducrot, 1984; Heyd & Schneider, 2019; Hymes, 1996; Maybin, 2006, 2008, 2012; Tannen, 2007; Van der Aa, 2012) and it was this social voice that was of concern also to Bakhtin (1981, 1984, 1986). The study of the social voice is inherently linked to the study of inequality (Blommaert, 2005; Hymes, 1996), that is to say that certain social groups are thought to ‘have’ a social voice, whereas others ‘don’t have’ a social voice and perhaps need to be ‘given’1 a social voice, and again other social groups are entirely silenced and cannot speak at all (Spivak, 1988). Are we talking about two completely different understandings of voice? Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean that the social and the physical sides of voice cannot be studied together (see Bertau, 2012; Harkness, 2014; Heffer, 2013b; Podesva, 2007; Sicoli, 2015; Singh, 2020b; Weidman, 2014). Attention to indexicality can help us in this project to bring together the physical and the social voice. Harkness’s (2014) linguistic anthropological study among Christian singers of classical Western music in Seoul, investigates the interconnections between the physical

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and the social voice. Harkness asks how specific physical voice qualities such as ‘cleanliness’ become indexical of a modern Christian persona that has specific sociocultural value in modern South Korea. To explore this indexicality, Harkness (2014: 12) considers both the ‘literal’, i.e. physical, qualities of voice and the more ‘tropic’, i.e. social, meaning of voice as a sociocultural positionality. He thus proposes to distinguish between two analytical areas of voice: the ‘phonosonic nexus’ and the ‘semiotic alignment’. In the realm of the phonosonic nexus, we analyse the physical production and reception of voice: the ‘ongoing intersection between the phonic production, shaping, and organization of sound, on the one hand, and the sonic uptake and categorization of sound in the world, on the other’ (Harkness, 2014: 12). For us researchers to say something about the social meaningfulness of the phonosonic nexus, we have to expand our analytical view to investigate the processes of indexicality (more on indexicality below). The social analysis of voice investigates, as Harkness (2014: 19) writes, the physical voice’s ‘semiotic alignment to perspective within an immanent narrative structure’ (more on narrative below). Podesva’s (2007) sociophonetic study of falsetto (high-pitched) voice in the interactive style-shifting of one speaker, Heath, a gay medical student in California, provides further insights into the complex indexical relationships between the physical and the social voice. Podesva’s (2007: 480) focus on intraspeaker style-shifting, he claims, has been absent in sociophonetics, which studies voice quality across speakers of a population, thereby implicitly approaching voice quality as ‘a static characteristic of individuals’. Podesva shows how the physical voice quality of falsetto is used as a semiotic resource by Heath for his intraspeaker style-shifting which positions him differently across interactions and social contexts. At a barbecue with friends, he uses falsetto more frequently than during a phone conversation with his father or a medical consultation with a patient. At the barbecue, through the use of falsetto, Heath positions himself as affectively expressive, thereby indexing a persona of a gay diva. In his professional or private talk, Heath does not seem to make this diva persona relevant and he uses falsetto less frequently and for other social and communicative purposes (Podesva, 2007: 499, n.7). Podesva speculates that these various positioning practices that a falsetto voice can index across interactions and social situations may contribute to Heath’s complex construction of his identity as a homosexual man in contemporary US society. In interaction, speakers thus seem to engage in momentary style-shifts to construct a multitude of physical voices that, in turn, index a multitude of social voices, some with which speakers align and others that they keep

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at a distance (see also Du Bois, 2007). In their indexical orchestration of many voices, speakers find opportunities to articulate their ‘own’ voices vis-à-vis their interactants and perhaps make claims about their identities. Yet, this is not a simple but rather a complex process. Narrative, as I will argue in a moment, is a prevalent genre of speech that allows us to position ourselves within a complex multitude of voices. But first, allow me to theorise the interconnection between the physical and social voice a little more by reviewing some aspects of one of the most productive – yet also impenetrable and ambivalent2 – concepts that sociolinguistics has developed: indexicality. The dialogic indexicality of voice

Indexicality can be understood as a type of (ideo)logical contingency between the physical and the social voice. Drawing from Peirce’s (1931– 1936) semiotic legacy, sociolinguistics conceptualises indexicality as a process whereby physical signs point to, or leave traces of, or mark or contextualise social categories, identities and frames of understanding. The sociolinguistically relevant indexicalities are indirect rather than direct. As also discussed in relation to Podesva’s (2007) study of Heath’s use of a falsetto voice above, signs do not directly represent social identities, rather signs index stances and qualities (such as ‘lazy’, ‘arrogant’, ‘proper’, ‘nice’, ‘prissy’, ‘sweet’, ‘dominant’, ‘knowledgeable’) which are then, in a second step as it were, ideologically connected to social categories and identities (such as ‘teacher’, ‘woman’, ‘gay diva’, ‘businessman’, ‘foreigner’). I will take these theorisations of indirect indexicality as given in this book, as they have been discussed at length in the canonical sociolinguistic literature (Blommaert, 2005; Eckert, 2008; Ochs, 1996; Silverstein, 1976, 2003; for a brilliant discussion, see Jaffe, 2016). In order to advance my ‘own’ analytical framework for an analysis of transcultural voice, I will now discuss indexicality primarily as a process of dialogic responsiveness that allows narrators to orchestrate a multitude of voices and position themselves within this orchestration. In an influential article, Silverstein (2003) theorises the metapragmatic dialectics of indexicality. He says that indexicality responds to two forces of contextual appropriateness: presupposition and entailment. Silverstein (2003: 195), somewhat cryptically, describes presuppositions as ‘“appropriateness to” at-that-point autonomously known or contextual parameters’. When we use language, we always readily index presupposed contexts. These are contexts in which the signs we use in our languaging have been frequently and typically used; or in Bakhtin’s

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(1981: 293) phrasing, ‘each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life’. These contexts have historicity (Silverstein & Urban, 1996) and they are scalar (Blommaert, 2005, 2007, 2010, 2015, in press; Blommaert et al., 2015) and generally complex, yet signs can be used in such a way that they are recognised by participants as ‘appropriate’ to the contexts in which they appear, what Silverstein calls an nth indexical order. Silverstein (2003: 195) then describes what he calls n + 1st indexical orders as entailments or as the ‘“effectiveness in” context: how contextual parameters seem to be brought into being’. Whenever we use language, the entailment of new contexts is ‘always imminent’ (Silverstein, 2003: 212). This is so because each instance of using language is unique, or in Foucault’s (1972: 100–101) phrasing, ‘[a] statement exists outside any possibility of reappearing; […] if in these conditions an identical formulation reappears, with the same words, substantially the same names – in fact, exactly the same sentence – it is not necessarily the same statement’. So, whenever we use signs in the meaning of their nth indexical orders, we also reproduce these meanings. For example, the phrase Ladies and Gentlemen, commonly and typically heard at the beginning of English-language speeches, does not merely innocently index an appropriate opening of a speech, but it also reproduces the cultural practice of using this phrase as an appropriate opening of speeches – and it therefore also further propagates mainstream cultural gender binarism. Even more obviously, when a sign is used in a context that is recognised as not appropriate for some reason, the sign’s meaning will be negotiated and reformulated and, with enough ideological force, a new meaning for the sign might eventually be enregistered (Agha, 2003) and create new connotations, myths or even a semantic shift (Agha, 2007b; Barthes, 2000; Flores & Rosa, 2015; Silverstein & Urban, 1996). This metapragmatic process can, of course, be repeated, potentially producing an infinite number of indexical orders in a linguistic community and making sociolinguistic life fundamentally polycentric (Blommaert, 2010). Silverstein’s indexical dialectics – presuppositions and entailments – allow us to understand the dialogic responsiveness of voice. Any voice-in-use seems to respond to context in two directions: ‘backwards’ to presupposed contexts in which this voice has already been used in the speech community of the past, and ‘forwards’ to entailed contexts in which this voice is being used at the moment and might be used with a new meaning in the future. In this play of dialectics, a voice receives its social meaningfulness. This meaning can be achieved in three ways. Firstly, if the entailed context is the same as the presupposed

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context, the meaning of the voice is reproduced. Secondly, if the entailed context is new, the voice challenges the presupposed context. And, finally, with enough circulation and ideological energy, this new entailed context might become enregistered (Agha, 2003) or normalised (Foucault, 1995) and create semantic shifts and neocultural connotations. However, Silverstein cautions us not to read presuppositions and entailments as linearly related, in the sense of a temporal before and after. Rather, their relationship is a ‘complex and mediated one […] and they end, i.e., result, in a conceptual object called a text-in-context’ (Silverstein, 2003: 196, original italics). Texts-in-contexts could be regarded as documents, or archives, of metapragmatic evaluation and ideological selection, through which ‘the sociocultural reality manifested in-and-by discursive interaction becomes analytically visible’ (Silverstein, 2003: 227, see also Vološinov, 1973: 117, quoted below); although, as Silverstein (2003: 227) also writes, ‘[t]here is, of course, no ultimate absolute of validity for even semiotically sophisticated accounts of indexicality’. It thus seems important for an analysis of the indexicality of voice not only to grasp what can be empirically observed on the semiotic surface, but also to investigate meanings in the heteroglossic deep structure,3 in which presupposition, preconstruction, entailment, implicitness, implication and iconic evocations contextualise ‘our’ voices. The semiotic surface largely overlaps with the physical voice. That is to say, semiotic surfaces find representation through the physical voice, the voice that is described as phonosonic or biological in the literature. A semiotic surface could come in the form of a writing on a wall, a tattoo on a body, a letter, a sound wave travelling through the air or a dancing body. The term ‘semiotic surface’ is here used analogous to the more commonplace term ‘text surface’, merely replacing ‘text’ with ‘semiotic’ to stress that a ‘text’ can find form in a range of semiotic modalities, which often occur in combination with each other: sounds, speech, writing, bodies, clothes, movements, gestures among other modes of semiosis (Nakassis, 2016a). The semiotic surface represents voice in all its empirico-physical reality because it can be perceived directly by audiences’ senses or by machines that measure, for instance, sound waves or scan large text corpora. In contrast to the semiotic surface, the heteroglossic deep structure is not perceivable or empirically recordable in any way, but rather it is an imaginary metaphor for describing people’s metapragmatic ventures into a voice’s ‘thickness’, or put differently, into a voice’s heteroglossia. These metapragmatic evaluations, selections and circulations are not right or wrong, likely or unlikely, objective or subjective; rather, they

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are the analytical enactments and discursive possibilities of the dialogic responsiveness of the indexicalities of the many voices that speak in an utterance and that help participants as well as analysts understand the constructions of meaning, culture and identity in language use. Such an analysis of the heteroglossic deep structure cannot be strictly empirical, in the sense of relying only on phenomenological observations of the physical voice, but we must have the audacity to delve into the realms of hermeneutic interpretation, speculation even, reasoning perhaps and active reception and to reflect on our audacity as well. Such a dual analysis – empirical and interpretative, linguistic and ethnographic – is well equipped to detect some of the sociocultural complexities of the dialogic indexicality of voice. However, this does not mean that such an analysis can ever reveal the ‘actual’ meaning of a voice-in-use. The complexity of voice

Blommaert (2005) critically investigates how voices can be misunderstood. Misunderstanding seems to become increasingly important in globalised settings where the global inequality of voice leads to mobile and complex polycentric orders of indexicality (Blommaert, 2008, 2010, 2013a, 2015; Blommaert & Rampton, 2011; see also Hall, 2014 on hypersubjectivity, a new intensity of linguistic anxiety caused by the globalisation of neoliberal language ideologies). Blommaert’s focus on globalisation and the Wallersteinian world system analysis highlights that the communicative resources that are available to a speaker for articulating a voice, as well as the sociocultural structures in which these voices occur, are fundamentally mobile (see also Canagarajah, 2013; Pennycook, 2013). Building on Hymes’s (1996) definition of voice as making oneself understood on one’s own terms, Blommaert (2005: 69) updates the conceptualisation of voice as the capacity to make oneself understood in and through semiotic mobility. Yet, it is precisely this mobility that also restricts what can be meaningfully contextualised on semiotic surfaces (cf. Blommaert’s notion of ‘truncated repertoires’). Mobility, we can say, constructs semiotic systems that display sociolinguistic complexity (Blommaert, 2013a, 2016b). Blommaert (2005: 45) therefore concisely describes voice as the ‘capacity to cause an uptake close enough to one’s desired contextualisation’. This definition highlights that voices are dependent on uptake, or recognition by an audience, and crucially it further suggests that this recognition does not have to be ‘functional’ (Jakobson, 1960), in the sense of a oneto-one correlation (this voice indexes that social context), but uptake in

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globalisation can remain approximate or ‘close enough’ (Blommaert, 2005: 45). Such complex sociolinguistic realities have been grasped, somewhat optimistically, with the notion of translanguaging (Canagarajah, 2013; Creese & Blackledge, 2010; García, 2009; García & Li Wei, 2014; for a survey of ‘translanguaging’ and related concepts, see Jaspers & Madsen, 2016; Pennycook, 2016). Translanguaging highlights that multilingual speakers shuttle between linguistic norms, thereby also challenging the ontologies of the boundaries that are said to exist between languages (see also Chapter  5). The focus on translanguaging represents a shift from variety to resource, a post-varieties approach that I outlined in relation to global hip hop in Chapter  1. Translanguaging further emphasises communicative practice and process and speakers’ agency. In this vein, Canagarajah (2013) traces how translinguals develop a ‘cooperative disposition’, a term he borrows from Tomasello, which allows them to become competent translinguals and to develop a cosmopolitan orientation. The cooperative disposition involves, for example, openness to diversity, adaptive skills, an ethic of collaboration and a reflective sense of voice (Canagarajah, 2013: 180–184). I will say more about hip hop cosmopolitanism in Chapter 4. Hence, whereas Blommaert’s work highlights that voices in the contemporary globalised world are likely to fail intended uptake, which squarely situates the study of voice in discussions involving power asymmetries and social inequality, Canagarajah and other translanguaging scholars highlight speakers’ agency over voice, which squarely links voice to notions of authorship and the appropriation of voice. In metapragmatic terms, Blommaert’s ‘failed intended uptake’ is a matter of indexical presupposition, whereas Canagarajah’s ‘agency’ is a matter of indexical entailment. Both are important for understanding the relevance of voice in transculturation. Failed intended uptake, an audience’s unsuccessful recognition of a speaker’s voice, shows how speakers and audiences in the polycentric settings of the contemporary globalised world might have differing cultural expectations, or they contextualise presuppositions and preconstructs differently, or what Blommaert (2008) also calls pretexts. Audiences fail to understand the desired contextualisation of meaning of a speaker, since meaning is mobile. Put differently, interactants might have diverging ideas of what it means to produce language appropriate to a specific context. However, as Silverstein (2003: 194) shows, indexicality can also entail contexts and, with ‘sufficient ideological oomph’, such entailments can

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become enregistered (Agha, 2003) and create new translingual norms and expectations to develop a cooperative disposition or a ‘goodenough’ understanding of contextualisation-in-process (Canagarajah, 2013). Thus, mobility and complexity, while potentially leading to failed uptake, can give rise to claiming agency through appropriation and transcending ontologies by confusing and subverting, in the sense of Butler (1990), established indexical orders. This dialectic understanding of voice also inspires my ‘own’ response to the overarching research question of this book, which builds on my participants’ dual understanding of hip hop as both a thing and a way. The hip is the thing, the presuppositions, the knowledge and the understanding of cultural resources, language and history, whereas the hop is the way, the entailment, the practice, the movement and the overstandin to creatively engage with the semiotic and social world. Together, hip and hop create the conditions for the articulation of transcultural voices. Constructing the voice of the other

When Bakhtin (1986: 89) says that ‘our speech … is filled with others’ words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of “ourown-ness”, varying degrees of awareness and detachment’, he points to the fact that languaging is a complex social practice rather than just a complex cognitive effort. By situating our ‘own’ voice within the many other voices of society, we are able to respond to real or imagined dialogues with each other, understand each other, align or misalign with styles, stances and statements we have heard or seen, reject or promote political ideas and do all sorts of other indexical and intertextual work in the natural history of discourse (Silverstein & Urban, 1996). We could push this argument polemically and say that in much of our everyday languaging, we are, in fact, not at all so much concerned with ‘expressing the self’. Rather, we seem to use language in its indexical function of dialogic responsiveness. This means that we are constantly engaged in constructing dialogues with the voices of the other, in relation to which our ‘own’ voice appears as normal and becomes socially meaningful and morally acceptable (Hastings & Manning, 2004; Irvine, 2001; Johnstone, 2009; Levon, 2012; Rampton, 1999; Singh, 2020b). In the narratives collected in this book, you will discover several, often co-occurring, reflexive voicing tactics that narrators use to construct dialogues with such voices of the other. In Chapter  4, I specifically investigate such othering voices.

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Voice contrasts

Crucially, in order to successfully construct the voice of the other, speakers have to rely on ideologies that make voices socially recognisable. We have to know what counts as a formal voice in a society, what counts as an informal voice, what counts as a friendly voice, what counts as a strict voice, what counts as a gay voice, etc. The recognition of voice, Agha (2005: 39, original italics) argues, is contingent on a ‘typifiability of voices’, which again ‘presupposes the perceivability of voicing contrasts, or the differentiability of one voice from another’. If such voice contrasts are widely recognised to belong to a specific register of speech, Agha (2003: 232, 231, 2005, 2007a) speaks of enregisterment, which he defines as ‘processes of valorization and circulation’ and ‘processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms’. I will discuss enregisterment further in Chapter 4. These recognisable voice contrasts can be indexically exploited by speakers for their style-shifting and their momentary positioning towards their interactants and emerging topics in the conversation. The enregisterment or recognisability of voice contrasts relies on an ideological field of sociocultural difference; a type of Bourdieuan distinction in the social world (Irvine, 2001: 22; see also Bucholtz & Hall, 2005; Gal, 2016; Gal & Irvine, 2019). Images of persons considered typical of those groups – and the personalities, moods, behavior, activities, and settings, characteristically associated with them – are rationalized and organized in a cultural/ ideological system, so that those images become available as a frame of reference within which speakers create performances and within which audiences interpret them. This system informs the style-switching in which all speakers engage. To put this another way: one of the many methods people have for differentiating situations and displaying attitudes is to draw on (or carefully avoid) the ‘voices’ of others, or what they assume those voices to be. (Irvine, 2001: 31)

Here, Irvine suggests that the intraspeaker style-switching in which we all engage is informed by ideologies about how certain social groups are imagined to speak, act, dress, behave, etc., and a recognition that there exists a notable difference in styles across groups. Speakers draw on such sociocultural ideologies of differentiation to ‘inform’ (Irvine, 2001: 31) a system of voice contrasts. Therefore, the differentiation

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experienced in social life, the non-equal distribution of resources and the aesthetic qualities of this world correspond to a counterpart system in the semiotic that is similarly non-equally distributed, ideologically valued and aesthetically iconised. The two systems, the semiotically physical and the ideologically social, are interconnected through indexicality and they are therefore mutually constitutive of each other; in fact, they seem to be ‘scalar relations of the same thing’ (Harkness, 2014: 12). Style-shifting

This idea was articulated already in early research on style4 and style-shifting (Bell, 1984; Coupland, 1980). This strand of research critiqued the Labovian conceptualisation of style, where style-shifting is regarded as a reflex to a range of interview tasks (Labov, 1966, 1972a, 2001; for overviews of style as a sociolinguistic category, see Auer, 2007; Bucholtz, 2015; Coupland, 2007; Eckert & Rickford, 2001). Similar to Irvine (2001), Bell (1984), in his famous ‘Style Axiom’, hypothesises that the intraspeaker style variation in one individual echoes the interspeaker style variation across a population: Variation on the style dimension within the speech of a single speaker derives from and echoes the variation which exists between speakers on the ‘social’ dimension. (Bell, 1984: 151)

Bell (1984) regards the social dimension of interspeaker variation as the origin of variation in the intraspeaker style dimension: If style variation derives from social variation, social variation comes first. So we can expect that, qualitatively, some linguistic variables will have both social and style variation [Labovian stereotypes and markers], some only social variation [Labovian indicators], but none style variation only, because style presupposes the social. (Bell, 1984: 151)

Thus, in Bell’s view a style is meaningless, and in fact not a style at all, without it being indexical of a social group who is perceived to usually use this style. By evoking the style of a particular social group, speakers associate themselves with or disassociate themselves from this social group, as also maintained by Irvine (2001) (see quote above) and famously articulated by Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985: 181): ‘the individual creates for himself the patterns of his linguistic behaviour so as to resemble those of the group or groups with which from time to time he wishes

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to be identified, or so as to be unlike those from whom he wishes to be distinguished’. Stylistic agency

Coupland (1980) highlights that style-shifting is not merely a reflex to social situations or interview tasks, but can be agentively deployed by speakers to construct new contexts, thereby changing specific social situations (see also Kiesling, 2009). Coupland (1980: 10–12) shows that his participant Sue, a travel agent from Cardiff, shifts styles when she wishes to change footing and role relationships, when she negotiates attitudes towards her interlocutors and when she engages in repair work and, more generally, in local acts of identity. Coupland (1980: 10) forecasts: ‘We are beginning to see the dynamic potential of style-shifting, where manipulation of style carries social meaning and contributes to the speaker’s control and the hearer’s interpretation of the encounter’. Style-switching is thus an agentive social act, a statement and a positioning in and to the world, and he speculates that the switch itself carries social meaning: ‘Meaning is perhaps conveyed as much by the fact of shifting as by the frequencies of linguistic variants themselves’ (Coupland, 1980: 8). Rampton’s (1995) notion of crossing drives home this point about stylistic agency. The language crossings between versions of Punjabi, Creole and Stylised Indian English among multi-ethnic British youths reported in Rampton’s study exhibit a disparity between speaker and voice, and it is precisely this disparity which makes such double-voiced speech socially meaningful. In crossing situations, the ethnic identity of the speaker does not seem to ‘belong’ to the ethnolinguistic style of the utterance, creating a split between speaker and utterance, and thus leading interactants to ‘attend simultaneously to two interpretative contexts when trying to infer the significance of the switch’ (Rampton, 1995: 278, original italics). By activating these two contexts simultaneously, crossers agentively transcend ethnic boundaries and they negotiate their legitimacy to do so. (For an extension of this discussion, which includes social class and gender, alongside ethnicity, see Rampton’s 2006 analysis of the stylised performances of posh English and Cockney in a London secondary school.) The stylistic agency of speakers highlights their ability to orchestrate (Angermuller, 2014) a multitude of voices in their narratives, as I will show throughout this book. In their stories, they morally align with some voices (heroes) and distance themselves from others (villains), while they

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also stay neutral towards another set of voices (extras). In the narrative orchestration of voices, their ‘own’ voice as narrator is thus constructed and normalised in complex dialogic relationship to other voices. Narrative Affordances

The so-called narrative turn in the social sciences and linguistics has by now firmly established that narratives play a crucial role in constructing a stance for the self, a voice, a positionality, an identity, a history and even a reality for the narrators and their audiences (e.g. Bruner, 1991; Deppermann, 2013a; Hymes, 1996; Linde, 1993; McIntosh, 2009; Wortham, 2001). The interactive genre of storytelling, oral narrative and small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2006; Labov & Waletzky, 1967; Wortham, 2001) can be regarded as an affordance that allows speakers to put forward complex orchestrations of polyphony. Narrators order voices and events in time and space (Perrino, 2015) and construct dialogues (Tannen, 2007) with many voices and position these voices in relation to one another; often in moral terms as villains and heroes. In this orchestration of voices in the story world, narrators eventually find ways to put forward their ‘own’ voices in the storytelling world (Bamberg, 1997; De Fina, 2013), i.e. in the ethnographic encounter of the interview (De Fina, 2009). Thus, the voice-in-narrative approach can provide not only important empirical insights into the ways in which narrators orchestrate many voices, and how they articulate their identities in relation to global cultures, morals and capital-D Discourses, but also some opportunities for understanding the role of the researcher in the co-construction of such identities, and pushes for a more sensitive reflexivity in ethnographic analysis and writing. With De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2008), I thus understand narrative as a social practice that emerges in interaction, rather than a decontextualised retelling of past events. I chose to work with the analytical unit of narrative for four reasons. First, narrative can be regarded as a rather well-defined and established analytical concept in sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography and discourse studies (e.g. Bamberg, 1997; De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2008, 2011, 2015; De Fina & Perrino, 2011; Deppermann, 2013a; Hymes, 1996; Labov, 1972b; Labov & Waletzky, 1967; Thornborrow & Coates, 2005). Secondly, narrative has also been theorised – in rather abstract and general ways – in postcolonial scholarship on transculturation (Bhabha, 1990, 2004; Rama, 2012; Spitta, 1995). My study will inform cultural theorists and non-linguists who work with concepts such

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as transculturation and contact zones about the empirical details of oral narrative. Thirdly, narrative, as I hope to show, can be seen as a discursive means, a genre of speech, which constructs meaning for interactants because of its recognisable structure as a narrative (Bamberg, 1997: 335) and affords them with possibilities to make themselves understood in their ‘own’ terms; in other words, narratives present possibilities for voice (Blommaert, 2009; Hymes, 1996). Finally, upon listening to my recordings, I noticed that narratives are a prime site in which reported speech, or constructed dialogue, occurs and it is therefore in narrative that we find most plain-spoken manifestations of dialogism and the orchestration of many voices and the narrators’ subsequent normalisation of their ‘own’ transcultural voices. Narrative structure

Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) classic account of narrative structure provides a useful entry point into analysing narrative. Labov and Waletzky define a narrative as minimally consisting of a complicating action and a resolution, but it could also include an abstract, an orientation, an evaluation and a coda. In narratives in which an explicit evaluation is missing, the complicating action and the resolution will still contain elements of implicit metapragmatic evaluation which positions the narrator in relation to the narrative. In the narratives I present in this book, such parts were more or less clearly demarcated and it is this structural well-formedness that makes narratives stand out from the turn-by-turn interaction of the interview (Labov, 1972b; Thornborrow & Coates, 2005). The structural well-formedness allowed me to select passages of interview speech and label them ‘narratives’, which in turn provided me with a somewhat neat unit of analysis for my study of transcultural voices. I mostly investigate oral narratives in this book; however, in Chapter  7, I also use the structured well-formedness of narratives to turn my attention to the orchestration of embodied voices and danced narratives in breakin cyphers. The structural well-formedness was not only a convenient way of drawing boundaries around chunks of texts for the analysts’ inspection, but it also seemed to be a discursive tactic for my interview partners to hold the floor as narrators for several turns and relay complex arguments to me and other audiences. When interlocutors recognised an orientation or a beginning of a complicating action (indexed often through the expression for example and some kind of temporal past deictics), narrative roles were established. Now interviewer and interviewee would assume

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the roles of narrator and audience and the narrator was interactively legitimised to hold the floor until a resolution was recognised. In this space between orientation and resolution, they could make complex statements about who they are in relation to the narrated events (Level 1) and what relevance this has in relation to the interview interaction (Level 2) and perhaps the macrocontext more generally (Level 3). Evaluation and the narrator’s ‘own’ voice

While the complicating action, which consists of a constructed ordering of past (and sometimes future) events, represents the complexity of the narrators’ experiences, the resolution allows the narrators to reduce this complexity and bring forward their ‘own’ voices. In their classic and still widely cited structural account of narrative, Labov and Waletzky (1967: 35) claim that analysts ‘can establish the break between complicating and resolving action by locating the placement of the evaluation’. By evaluating the narrative, the narrators resolve the narrative tension and provide the raison d’être for telling the story, thereby warding off the ‘So what?’ question vis-à-vis her interactants (Labov, 1972b: 366). In the resolution, narrators move from a complex story world (Level 1) to a meaningful interactive world (Level 2). The resolution can therefore be described as a ‘story-exit device’ (Jefferson, 1978). As shown in the stories collected in this book, the evaluation occurs most clearly in moments of narrative resolutions in which the narrators begin to ‘own’ the many voices that they have orchestrated in their story worlds, thereby normalising their ‘own’ transcultural voices. Constructed dialogues

When interactants tell each other stories in their everyday lives, we often hear the voices of others. Narrators make frequent use of direct reported speech to animate voices in the story world (for overviews of reported speech, see Holt & Clift, 2007; Lucy, 1993; Tannen, 2007). Direct reported speech allows us to empirically study, rather straightforwardly, the use of many voices on the semiotic surface. When speakers quote the speech of others in interaction, they represent the voice of someone else or an abstract other. Although they are using their own voice (in the phonosonic sense), someone else (in the social sense) speaks through them. Narrators can use direct indexes, such as citing the proper names of speakers to be quoted, or simply shift personal pronoun deictics in combination with verba dicendi or quotatives, to mark a stretch of speech as direct reported speech and associate it with a speaker other

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than themselves. Also, indirect indexes such as specific voice qualities, accents, styles and registers can establish a voice contrast and mark an utterance as reported speech and associate this speech with a particular person or a general persona (e.g. an exaggeratedly low-pitch voice quality to quote a big, strong man). Such voicing of the other has been reported in the literature on style-shifting, stylisation and dialogism more generally (Coupland, 2001, 2007; Creese & Blackledge, 2020; Hill, 1995; Maybin, 2006; Rampton, 1995, 1999, 2006; Singh, 2020b; for overviews, see Tannen, 2007; chapters in Holt & Clift, 2007; Lucy, 1993). Although there are certainly particularly talented storytellers who are able to deploy a wide range of stylistic accent repertoires and poetic linguistic tactics, all speakers seem to engage in reporting the speech of others, no matter how ‘good’ or authentic this quoting is. In fact, as Tannen (2007: 104–105) argues, when reporting the direct speech of others, speakers hardly ever actually use verbatim ‘quotes’, rather they articulate what Tannen calls ‘constructed dialogues’. Tannen (2007: 3) writes that constructed dialogues ‘create scenes peopled by characters in relation to each other, scenes which hearers and readers recreate upon hearing, resulting in both understanding and involvement’. I follow Tannen to highlight my participants’ constructivist agency while quoting many voices that speak in dialogues in narratives. The dialogues do not constitute verbatim or somewhat ‘objective’ quotes, rather they are constructed in ways that they become resources for narrators to evaluate voices and thereby position themselves towards narrative figures and social types. Dialogism

In order to construct quotes, and to recognise quotes, speakers and hearers have to have had dialogic access to the linguistic stereotypes and markers of the social group or the individual they wish to quote, or as Bell (1984: 151) puts it more paradigmatically: ‘style presupposes the social’ (as discussed above). Interactants have to have learned what people sound like and what qualities and stances can be indexed through quoting specifically sounding voices of people. This extrapolation of the mechanisms of reported speech to the general workings of languaging is what I understand as dialogism in this book. As also discussed in Goodwin (2007: 30–31), Vološinov, perhaps Bakhtin’s pseudonym, notes that the analysis of reported speech can reveal the dialogism of language use in general. Here is a longer citation by Vološinov:

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What we have in the forms of reported speech is precisely an objective document of [active] reception. Once we have learned to decipher it, this document provides us with information, not about accidental and mercurial subjective psychological processes in the ‘soul’ of the recipient, but about steadfast social tendencies in an active reception of other speakers’ speech, tendencies that have crystallized into language forms. The mechanism of this process is located not in the individual soul, but in society. It is the function of society to select and to make grammatical (adapt to the grammatical structure of its language) just those factors in the active and evaluative reception of utterances that are socially vital and constant and, hence, that are grounded in the economic existence of the particular community of speakers. (Vološinov, 1973: 117)

Vološinov proposes that reported speech provides us with a semiotic surface-level ‘objective document’ about the ‘steadfast social tendencies’ in a given community of speakers. By seeing the mechanisms of ‘active reception’, what Agha (2005) called ‘recognition’ of voicing contrasts, situated in society rather than in the individual speaker, Vološinov foreshadows, as also observed by Bell (2007: 95–96), the study of language in society that developed in the second half of the 20th century of which my ‘own’ book is evidently a document too. This sociolinguistics is interested in the social processes that occasion the selection and evaluation of appropriate linguistic forms and practices in specific contexts. It is not an analysis of ‘souls’, or of ‘how it really is’, but of ideology; it is an analysis of the active receptions that underlie linguistic selection and evaluation processes. Perhaps more important for my line of argument here, Vološinov (1973: 117) emphasises that active reception might materialise (‘audibly’) on the semiotic surface through reported speech, but that active reception exists in any kind of language use in society (see also Bakhtin, 1986: 91; Blackledge & Creese, 2014: 10; Holquist, 2002: 39–64). Whether monologic, interactional, reported, constructed or narrated, language in use becomes meaningful only because of dialogism or the introjection of the voices of the other, even if these voices of the other remain somewhat hidden or murmur ‘inaudibly’ in some nebulous heteroglossic deep structure. If reported speech constitutes constructed dialogues in narratives, dialogism constitutes inner dialogues. This is suggested by Authier-Revuz (2014: 156, original italics), who writes: ‘The “dialogism” of the Bakhtin circle, as we know, does not feature, as a nucleus, the conversational face to face of the dialogue, but constitutes, through multiform reflections,

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semiotic as well as literary, a theory of internal dialogization of the discourse’. (I say more about constructed and inner dialogues in Chapter 4.) By utilising Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, we acknowledge that every discursive instance is ‘defined by its relationship to other instances both past, to which it responds, and future, whose response it anticipates’ (Sheppherd, 2011: 2). Similarly, Maybin uses the term ‘dialogic’ to refer to the way in which speakers’ utterances are always simultaneously orientated, in terms of their structure and context, in two directions: backwards towards previous utterances, both within the current conversation and through memory in past conversations, and forwards, towards an audience (and possibly future audiences). (Maybin, 2006: 39)

Or, as Wortham (2001: 22) puts it: ‘There is an indefinite number of prior and future speakers that the current speaker might be responding to or anticipating, and the speaker’s position with respect to these others can change as different speakers become relevant’. From a metapragmatic perspective, these ‘prior’ and ‘future’ dialogues are not simply made up of those voices that the speaker has actually heard or anticipates to actually hear in their lifetime. Agha (2005: 43) warns that ‘voices are not attributes of persons but entextualized figures of personhood whose recognition depends on distinct metasemiotic processes’. This entextualisation and recognition is contingent on the axiom of style (Bell, 1984), namely it is contingent on the active reception of the voices of the other as belonging either to real individuals or to imagined social types. Underlining this metapragmatic viewpoint on voice, the ‘prior’ and ‘future’ voices and dialogues to which speakers always attend are more accurately described with the concepts of indexical ‘presuppositions’ on the one hand and indexical ‘entailments’ on the other (Silverstein, 2003). Presuppositions and entailments are a document of the ideological evaluation of voices by speakers themselves and their enactment in interaction results in a complex and mediated dialogic text-in-context. Stancetaking

By means of such dialogic orchestration of indexical orders, or the moral evaluation of voice as villains and heroes, interactants take stances5 towards other interactants and towards emerging topics, thereby constructing their ‘own’ voices in interaction (Du Bois, 2007; Deppermann,

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2013a: 8–9; Wortham, 2001: xii). As argued in Ochs (1996), stancetaking constructs social identities through indirect indexicality. More tentatively formulated, stancetaking constructs momentary subject positions in interactions. This subjectivity – or ‘hypersubjectivity’, as Hall (2014) recently updated it for the linguistic anxieties bourgeoning in globalisation’s neoliberal regimes of superdiversity and semiotic mobility – is always ruptured, or split, because under the metapragmatic lens of style, reported speech and dialogism, as outlined above, voices cannot be neatly assigned to one soul, one essential atomic individual. Thus, evaluations and stancetaking are always imbued with multiple sociocultural and historical layers; a complexity that speakers have to forcefully normalise so as to make their subject positions appropriate to the cultural context for which they have constructed them. Stancetaking is often studied by investigating discourse markers, or so-called stance markers. These are linguistic features on the semiotic surface that contextualise how a speaker is positioned towards what is being said, both in epistemic and in affective ways. Biber and Finegan (1989) conducted large-scale corpus analyses and considered lexico-grammatical stance markers, such as adverbs, hedges, verbs, adjectives and nouns. On a more granular scale, Kiesling (2004) showed that the lexical marker ‘dude’ can construct a stance of cool solidarity for young North American men’s homosocial relations. Noteworthy also is Kärkkäinen’s (2003) book-length study of the English discourse marker ‘I think’, which combines a corpus-based approach and an interactional approach to analyse epistemic stancetaking (for more on epistemic and affective stancetaking, see Chapter  8). Apart from the lexico-grammatical stance markers, research also points to non-referential strategies for stancetaking, for example intonation and other prosodic means, as I show in Chapter 4. Moreover, in Chapter 7, I provide an analysis of the b-boy stance; an embodied stance that evaluates and constructs alignments with masculinity and authentic hip hop culture. Much in line with my own argument here, Du Bois’s (2007: 140) sketch of a stance theory begins with Bakhtinian dialogism (for a ‘dialogic syntax’, see also Du Bois, 2014): speakers’ utterances derive from and further engage with previous utterances in the turn-by-turn context and in the wider sociohistorical context. Whereas Dubois and many other researchers investigate stancetaking in single utterances, or brief interactional units (Kärkkäinen, 2003; Keisanen, 2007; Kiesling, 2004), the linguistic ethnographic approach that I take in this book calls for an analysis of stancetaking in larger chunks of texts. Narrative offers a conceptual analytical framework to conduct such analyses of stance (for studies of stance within narratives, see McIntosh, 2009; Mushin, 2001).

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Three levels of narrative positioning

Bamberg (1997, 2004; Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008) provides a useful analytical framework for understanding how narrators construct their ‘own’ positionalities through evaluating the many voices that appear in their narratives. According to Bamberg’s framework, we can distinguish between three positioning levels: (i) how characters are positioned within the story (level 1); (ii) how the speaker/narrator positions himself (and is positioned) within the interactive situation (level 2); and (iii) how the speaker/narrator positions a sense of self/identity with regard to dominant discourses or master narratives (level 3). (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008: 385, original italics)

Distinguishing between the three positioning levels helped me as an analyst to investigate how story worlds connect to storytelling worlds and how both might play into the construction of the interactants’ identities. On Level 1, I analyse the story world in which the voice of narrative figures speaks in a specific sequence orchestrated by the narrator. Here, narrators order past events and populate these events with narrative figures, or ‘entextualized figures of personhood’ (Agha, 2005: 43). Narrative figures can be recognised by investigating the different voices constructed through, for instance, discourse markers, such as pronoun deixis, quotatives or prosodic style-shifting, as well as polyphonic markers such as logico-semantic presuppositions and preconstructs that construct ‘inaudible voices’ murmuring in the heteroglossic deep structure. On Level  1, narrators are animators (Goffman, 1981) who let narrative figures speak independently of any ostensible intervention of their ‘own’ intentionality or subjectivity (see also Crapanzano, 1996), what Benveniste (1971: 208) calls histoire, where ‘the event seems to narrate itself’ (as I also discuss in Chapter 6 in more detail). By explicitly or implicitly evaluating these Level  1 voices, the narrator also positions herself vis-à-vis the interviewing ethnographer and other audiences on Level  2 (Benveniste’s discours). On Level  2, narrators are authors (Goffman, 1981) who show degrees of agency over the orchestration of many voices. As authors, narrators can keep the various narrative figures at a distance, or associate with them or evaluate them in other ways. The narrators’ authorship transpires most unambiguously in the resolution of the narrative, when narrators evaluate the many

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voices, thereby inserting their ‘own’ voices vis-à-vis their audiences in the interactive world. The narrators’ transcultural voices you will hear in this book are positioned on Level 2. A Level  2 evaluation might also play into Level  3 positioning, namely the construction of the narrators’ identities. However, an analysis of the narrators’ identities remains a ‘project of limited range’ (Bamberg, 1997: 337) that can only be partially accounted for empirically (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005). In her discussion on Level  3 positioning, De Fina (2013) notes that, by developing the analytical notion of indexicality, sociolinguistics has already consistently described how linguistic forms index social categories. Analysing Level 3 positioning in narrative research therefore appears to be ‘not necessary’ (De Fina, 2013: 43). She argues, however, that speakers, apart from indexing their interactional roles and positions through the linguistic forms they choose, also draw on ‘more portable identities’ (De Fina, 2013: 43), which are not indexed directly or indirectly on the semiotic surface. Here, she has in mind membership in social or moral identities, habitus, cultures, which are organised under capital-D Discourses and language ideologies that do not necessarily feature in the empirical materials we researchers call our data. Therefore, De Fina (2013: 45) argues, including Level  3 positioning in the narrative analysis allows for an analytical ‘middle ground’ between strictly interactional and empirical approaches such as interactional sociolinguistics or conversation analysis and more macro-social and interpretative approaches such as discursive psychology or critical discourse analysis. She also notes that ethnography can support the interpretation of Level 3 positionings (De Fina, 2013: 45). Authorial Voices

If narrators construct their subjectivities and even identities by evaluating others’ voices, is their authorship nothing more than a postmodern pastiche; a patchwork of stolen-voices-made-one’s-‘own’ without fully understanding what these voices were originally meant to mean and with little control over how these voices will be understood in the moment of narrating and in the future? In other words, do we need to proclaim the death of the author (Barthes, 1977; Foucault, 1984) to analyse narrative? The narrating authors you will meet in this book are only half dead though. Transcultural hip hop gives them a sense of agency over orchestrating a range of cultural voices to express their ‘own’ voices. The polyphonic orchestrations that you will hear in the stories collected

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in this book, thus reveal something of the dialogically complex authorship of narrators, whose subjectivity is, saying it with poststructuralist elegance, split. The French enunciative pragmatician Ducrot (2014: 167–168), similar to Goffman’s (1981) participation framework and Bamberg’s (1997) three levels of narrative positioning, proposes three properties for subjectivity, ‘the psycho-physiological activity necessary for the production of the utterance’, the ‘markers of the first person’ and ‘the author’. According to Ducrot, these three properties enter a dialogic relation with one another. In the heteroglossic deep structure many voices perform a polyphonic play. Through styles, registers or other semiotic-surface phenomena these voices are then evaluated and orchestrated by the author, who takes stances towards these voices and morally aligns with the heroes (locuteurs) and dissociates herself from the villains (allocuteurs). These narrative figures are finally ideologically linked to the ‘extra-linguistic’ world of the self and the other, to demographic groups, social personae and certain people and things that ‘have’ a specific voice or represent a certain point of view (see also Angermuller, 2014: 141–142). Even if authors attempt to orchestrate these processes meaningfully and force their own intentions on the appropriation to make their ‘own’ voices heard in their own terms, Authier-Revuz (2014) argues that the subject operates under a Freudian ‘illusion’ of its agency. She concisely states that ‘any speech is determined outside the control of the subject, and that it [i.e. the subject] “is spoken rather than speaking”’ (Authier-Revuz, 2014: 156, original italics). The kind of deep-structure heteroglossia and the displacement of the unity of the subject that enunciative pragmatics promises to reveal is also valuable for the linguistically turned social sciences at large, where the notion of ‘identity’ has come under the critique of anti-essentialism (e.g. Brubaker & Cooper, 2000). In an introduction to the enunciative pragmatic approach, Angermuller et al. (2014: 137) note: ‘Besides rather than speaking of multiple “identities”, researchers use enunciative concepts and methods in order to avoid using psychological or sociological categories independently of linguistic forms’. By turning towards these poststructuralist enunciative pragmatic approaches, I would like to emphasise that the analyses in this book are not primarily about the extralinguistic, the social or psychological identities of my participants, but about their construction of voices in narratives. As Vološinov (1973: 117) notes, linguistic analysis is ‘not about accidental and mercurial subjective psychological processes in the “soul”’ but rather about the ‘steadfast social tendencies […] that have crystallized into language forms’. Thus,

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a study of voice, or rather a study of the orchestration of many voices that emerge in narratives, does not aim to describe a sample of speakers in order to make assumptions about how a specific population speaks, but rather it analyses how individual speakers themselves, through intraspeaker style variation, through constructed dialogues and through other dialogic orchestrations, actively receive, i.e. sample the voices of others. The epistemology of this kind of metapragmatic study of voice is thus inverted to epistemologies found in variationist sociolinguistics: it finds its quantitative reliability not in systematically sampling many speakers that then represent a demographic category (such as ‘women’ or ‘working class’), but in studying a few speakers’ own systematic sampling of many speakers in their narratives, which provides us with a semiotic-surface level document of their linguistic ideologies. Samplin and appropriation

The idea that speakers sample many voices is inspired by the hip hop practice of samplin (Bartlett, 2004; Schloss, 2004; Swiboda, 2014). Samplin is the appropriation of sound-snippets (mostly taken from old records) and their intelligent recontextualisation in one’s own musical piece (on polyphony in samplin, see Williams, 2015b; on the copyright and ownership disputes of samplin, see Schumacher, 2004; for an example from my fieldwork, see also Figure 3.3). In the same way as hip hop deejays and producers – and human beatboxers (Singh & Campbell, forthcoming) – skilfully and intelligently orchestrate musical samples, a hiphopographic perspective (Spady, quoted in Alim, 2006b, discussed in the Introduction and in Chapter 3) requires us to understand narrators as skilful and intelligent orchestrators of many voices, who compose coherent narratives to make their ‘own’ voices heard. Something similar has, in fact, already been suggested in RothGordon’s (2009) study of ‘conversational sampling’ among politically conscious rap fans from the favelas in Rio de Janeiro. She shows how these favela youth insert into their everyday conversations, snippets of lyrics from Brazilian rap songs that make reference to the North American, First World ghetto. Through this samplin practice, the youthful rap fans in Rio invoke an African American positionality that they regard as a more powerful confrontational stance compared to their own (Roth-Gordon, 2009: 64–70). Even though Roth-Gordon understands conversational sampling primarily as a surface-structure phenomenon, i.e. she analyses the actual quoting of lyrics, the communicative presuppositions of African American positionalities and the

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entailments of stancetaking are recognised by Roth-Gordon through a number of deep-structure interpretations informed by her ethnographic participation, her familiarity with Brazilian rap lyrics and her mediated historical knowledge of the North American ghetto. Samplin, or what I call appropriation more generally, I argue thus exists both on the semiotic surface (constructed dialogue and stylisation) and in the heteroglossic deep structure (presupposition, entailment, dialogism). On a more general level, samplin is inspired by Bakhtin’s (1981: 293) famous dictum: ‘The word in language is half someone else’s’. This dictum rejects the Humboldtian, Saussurean, Chomskyan, Cartesian idea of an inherent origo of the speaking subject with messages in his head that are transmitted through language to a receiver. A speaker does not ‘own’ any utterance but she can populate and appropriate utterances, as Bakhtin (1981: 293–294) notes: ‘It [the word] becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention’. Thus, we can understand authorship in language use not as the speaker’s innate creativity of forming language or language’s forms, but as her creativity in the ‘process of appropriation [… of the …] formal apparatus of the language’ (Benveniste, 2014: 143). The idea that one can orchestrate many voices and make them one’s ‘own’ is old news for hip hop. The deejays who created hip hop music by using two vinyl records creatively – jugglin them, scratchin them, samplin them – demonstrated in powerful ways that in the age of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin, 1969), the question of individuality and originality relates to the practice of appropriation, not to the practice of creation. I interviewed two deejays, Grizzly Adams from Berlin and DJ Uri from Birmingham/London/Mumbai, in Mumbai and asked them what hip hop means to them. For them, hip hop is not a clearly definable musical genre but rather a mindset with which you can take whatever you find and make it your ‘own’. Interview with DJ Uri and Grizzly Adams, Mumbai, 2013 {47:28–48:15} 01 Grizzly: for me there is also not a clear definition what is hip hop music. 02 for me the definition of hip hop is. 03 take whatEVER music you like (.) and (.) do it in (.) your way. 04 present it in a special way.

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05 06

this is kind of hip hop. its not like the music must be like that or it’s 50 Cent or is that. 07 when I play house music. 08 it’s hip hop. 09 Jaspal: hahahah 10 Grizzly: when I play jungle or when I play drum ‘n’ bass. 11 it’s hip hop. 12 because of the way I I took little bits of everything and make it my own. 13 so basically it’s not one genre. 14 it’s just a (.) a mindset. 15 DJ Uri: hip hop is when you break it down. 16 it’s putting your own spin on things. 17 your own way you know. 18 if you (.) if took one word out of the english language. 19 and replace it with hip hop. 20 that word would be individuality. 21 take that out for hip hop. 22 it still means the same thing. Because Grizzly Adams is hip hop, everything he touches seems to become hip hop (see also Scientik’s narrative in Chapter 8). Hip hop is you – you are hip hop. According to DJ Uri, hip hop is therefore a synonym for individuality (Lines  18–22). In similar ways in which B-Boy Rawdr has conceptualised hip hop as both a thing and a way in Chapter 1, here DJ Uri says that hip hop is about putting your own spin on things; your own way you know (Lines 16–17). Hip hop is a formula of appropriation. Essence and practice, hip and hop, knowledge and movement. Here, then, we discover a potentially productive link to the study of transculturation, where appropriation is understood as constructing a postcolonial sense of identity: ‘while subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for’ (Pratt, 1992: 6). The use of language, analogous to the use of culture, or vinyl records for that matter, affords creativity in the ways in which it is appropriated by the self or the group. To certain degrees, narrators control which voices they appropriate and how they use these appropriations appropriately (as also discussed in Singh, 2020a). Thus, when I am referring to the narrator’s ‘own’ voice, I mean a transcultural voice that

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appropriates voices from various personas, cultures and historicities and populates these with the narrator’s ‘own’ intentions. So, instead of trying to determine ‘the’ meaning of a voice or ‘the’ identity of an author, I found it more helpful for the purposes of this book to analyse how narrators draw on semiotic and discursive resources in order to make voices meaningful in narratives and construct their ‘own’ identities as narrators. These are not effortless semiotic and discursive processes, writes Bakhtin (1981: 294): ‘Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process’. Yet, the hip hop heads I met in Delhi and elsewhere in India and across the world make this appropriation look easy, normal and stylish. Conclusion

This chapter has identified and developed the necessary theoretical tools to analyse voice and the orchestration of multivoicedness in the narratives I have collected. I pointed to a range of theoretical concepts that will allow me to make scholarly arguments on these pages, such as indexicality, style, dialogism, stance and authorship among others. However, I started the chapter by spelling out my sincere commitment to my ethnographic interlocutors, which will restrict the power such scholarly concepts can have in my analysis. In Chapter 3, I further discuss my positionality and voice as an ethnographer and the complex ways in which I elicited data in the Delhi hip hop scene. It will become clear that the neatness of analysis implied in this chapter will have to be jumbled and subverted to a certain degree. This is so because the linguistic ethnographic approach that I am taking firstly puts human experience over machines, patterns and structures. Secondly, it emphasises a heightened awareness of research ethics. Thirdly, it pushes researchers to reflect on their own positionality, which at times sits ambiguously in between the roles of the fieldworker, the analyst and the writer.

3 Doing Linguistic Ethnography in Delhi’s Hip Hop Scene

Introduction

This chapter aims to give readers a feel for what it was like to conduct linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi in 2013. It introduces the sociocultural positionalities of the hip hop heads who participated in the study and the types of materials I collected: conversational interviews, recordings of events, photographs, videos, online communication and field notes. I take a reflexive and sincere stance in order to inform readers about my own positionality in the field and reveal some of the shortcomings and limitations of my engagements with the hip hop-affiliated youth in Delhi. I also critically discuss how my own biography, as a diasporic Indian hip hop head growing up in Germany in the 1990s, opened up several methodological, analytical and ethical opportunities for linguistic ethnographic research into Delhi’s hip hop scene. Collecting Empirical Data

The majority of the empirical data discussed in this book were elicited during an eight-month field trip to Delhi in 2013. However, before writing up this book in 2020, I made several follow-up visits to Delhi and other cities in India. I also did research on Indian hip hop outside of India; for instance, the first interview I conducted for this project took place in Berlin in 2012 (interview with Zebster and DJ Uri). I conducted other interviews in Leipzig (Bond), Zurich (Rane) and Mumbai (Enkore, A-List, Manmeet Kaur). Furthermore, during my time as a PhD student and novice professor, I had the opportunity to briefly glimpse the hip hop communities in London, Berne, Belgrade, Bremen, Budapest, Washington DC, New York City, Hong Kong and Heidelberg and build relationships with the hip hop and breakin scene in Cardiff. I also occasionally returned to visit the hip hop scene in the Rhein-Main area of Germany, 60

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the region where I grew up. All of this situated my thinking about the Delhi hip hop scene in a global context. I also stayed in close contact with some of my research participants in Delhi over social networking sites, exchanging pictures, opinions, songs, videos, comments, etc., often on a daily basis. Therefore, the ethnographic fieldwork did not have a definite beginning or end, it was simply marked by two long-distance flights between Europe and India. What counts as ‘data’, ‘evidence’ and ‘empirical support’ in a linguistic ethnographic project is often unclear in actual practice. Is it merely spoken interaction, and interviews that we can use to make informed statements about a given sociocultural context, or are we also including an analysis of moving bodies, pictures and computer-mediated communication? What is the status of field notes? What do I do with non-entextualised or non-entextualisable experiences, such as emotions, friendships, confusions and mistrust? While I have felt some discomfort with the terms ‘data’ and ‘empirical data’ throughout my research, I will use them occasionally in this book to simply mean a recording of a contextualised semiotic surface; some material (a photo, a text, an interaction) that I recorded during my fieldwork. This recording is contextualised because I have ethnographic information about the sociocultural setting in which it occurred and I also have some understanding about its processes of production. With this in mind, I acknowledge that I heavily co-constructed these recordings and therefore the data presented in this book are highly non-replicable and may not be considered reliable from a positivistic social science perspective. Acknowledging this, the ethnographic perspective I take here interprets data to support ‘theoretical statements’ (Blommaert, 2006: 19) about the complexity of sociocultural life. I will first describe some general characteristics of my research participants. I then move on to describe the ways in which I recorded data in my field diary, in recorded interactions and on public performances. I focus on narratives in the interview interactions I recorded, since these represent the main source of empirical evidence for the interpretative analysis in this book. I also discuss recordings I made of hip hop music in India, even if these did not enter the data analysis in this book. Participants: Local hip hop heads and hip hop travellers

The people I worked with while researching for this book can be roughly divided into two groups. One group of study participants are practitioners of hip hop who lived in India at the time of my fieldwork (four lived in Mumbai and the rest lived in Delhi). While I must have

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interacted with about 80–100  people over the course of my fieldwork, I interviewed only 25. At the time of the fieldwork in 2013, they were between 18 and 35 years old and all practiced at least one of hip hop’s four core elements (breakin, writin, emceein, deejayin), yet nearly all were (also) breakers and almost all were straight men. And all were migrants from other parts of India or the world, or children of migrants (see also Dattatreyan, 2020; Singh, 2020b, 2021). I refer to these young men as hip hop heads, that is they are ‘knowledgeable individuals in the Hip-Hop culture who are not only the core and long-term members […] but practice, transmit the knowledge and preserve the aesthetic and artistic use of deejaying, emceeing, b-boying, graffiti writing and knowledge of the self’ (Williams & Stroud, 2013: 4, n2). These hip hop heads are generally thought to represent the Delhi scene. However, my selection of interviewees was restricted by time constraints and limited resources, as well as by my incompetence to reasonably interview people in Hindi. I also did not ask my university for ethical clearance to conduct research with under 18-year-olds. I conducted interviews both with more visible practitioners of hip hop, those who organise jams, perform at shows, host workshops, etc., and with those who are more invisible in the public sphere such as breakers who had just recently begun to dance or emcees who had just begun to experiment with recording music. Another group of participants are international hip hop heads, who I refer to as hip hop travellers. I conducted semi-formal interviews with six participants from this group of hip hop travellers. Rather than local hip hop heads, these participants are foreigners, visitors, non-residential Indians (NRIs)1 and hip hop ambassadors who travel to India to practice and promote the hip hop culture, sometimes with the help of formal cultural organisations such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and embassies (see also Singh & Dattatreyan, 2016). Dattatreyan (2020) traces how these international actors validate hip hop cultural production in Delhi, as they offer the local heads an embodied experience to imagine themselves as being part of a globally unfolding culture. My own identity as a Westerner with parental roots in the subcontinent links me somewhat to this group of participants. For instance, I could talk about shared experiences of engaging with hip hop transnationally with these travellers, sometimes even in my own native language of German, but most importantly the shared or similar socialisation in a Western country made us, the travellers, believe that we shared cultural values, which were now in some ways recontextualised within Indian culture. An analysis of the travellers’ intercultural positioning practices in narratives explicitly problematises the role and presence of the researcher, me, in the field

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and creates opportunities for moments of reflexivity in this book (as also discussed towards the end of this chapter). Gaining access

Social networking websites proved incredibly helpful for reaching out to potential participants and interview partners. Many hip hop artists in India run their own artist page on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Soundcloud and Bandcamp to circulate their artwork among their fans and friends. I started following some Indian artists on social media and, as soon as I felt I knew a little about their online selves and deemed them ‘interesting’ for my project, I contacted them via the messaging function on Facebook. Generally, people responded positively, and many agreed to meet me offline. Some asked how I found them and felt honoured to take part in the research, others were more reluctant and seemed to wonder what it was all about. I was not persistent in my requests to meet them and as soon as I felt some hesitation, I made it clear in a message that it was entirely up to them and they should not feel obliged to participate. If I did not receive any reply to this, I stopped messaging them. Facebook, nevertheless, proved to be a powerful tool to get to know people and their work and to stay in contact with them over the course of my fieldwork and thereafter, especially because people tend to change their telephone numbers every few years. Today, I regularly exchange messages, photos, music, etc., with some of my research participants and we use Facebook (and more recently Instagram) to plan meetings for follow-up visits and update each other on how we are and where we are. However, not all contacts were established online. An event that took place right at the beginning of my fieldwork proved to be incredibly helpful in getting to know some of Delhi’s hip hop heads. Just 10 days after my arrival, in early January 2013, the legendary US hip hop star Snoop Lion gave a concert in Gurgaon, now renamed Gurugram, Delhi’s sprawling neighbouring city in the state of Haryana. The artist, formerly (and now again) known as Snoop Dogg, had recently taken on the new stage name Snoop Lion and had released the reggae album Reincarnation and a documentary of the same name – a consequence of Snoop’s conversion to Rastafarianism during an extended visit to Jamaica in 2012. Excited about what to expect, in the early afternoon I took a 40-minute ride to Gurgaon in Delhi’s ‘world-class’, decade-old metro. When I arrived at IFFCO Chowk in Gurgaon, the station was filled with hip hop heads. Groups of young men and women, Indians and foreigners, dressed in variations of the global hip hop uniform: loose trousers, print

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T-shirts and caps, laughing, huggin and walkin with attitude. From the elevated metro station, the huge open-air concert area was visible in the scenic distance of the winter mist/smog. It was about half a mile away, stretching over a few fields and empty plots, cars parked around it, hip hop heads lining the street that led to the event, and here and there the smoke of food stalls and burning rubbish. The organisers had fenced off a rectangular space and erected a stage at one end. It reminded me of the shape of a Roman fort. Tickets could be bought online or at the venue for 1500 Indian rupees, approximately 15 British pounds, quite expensive for many young Indians; in fact, I didn’t get a ticket for myself – I wanted to decide on the spot. A few days prior to the event, Bunty, who you will meet in Chapter 4, had linked me up with four young b-boys who practised under his mentorship. They told me that they were also going to the Snoop Lion concert and agreed to meet me there. I reached out to them via mobile phone and soon found them in the crowd in front of the venue. I approached them and we gave each other pounds, i.e. we clapped our hands and gave each other a half hug, a globally recognised hip hop greeting ritual. We chatted and then some of their friends and b-boy crew mates joined us and we were introduced to one another. I ended up talking to about 20–30 young b-boys, emcees and graffiti writers, including Prabh Deep, who you met in the introduction and who will make further appearances in Chapters 5 and 7, as well as BabaAbna, a German graffiti artist and volunteer on his year abroad who accompanied me to Mumbai to meet Manmeet Kaur, as described in Chapter 4, and many others. I ended up not buying a ticket. But after the afternoon in Gurgaon in front of the Snoop Lion concert, my mobile phone was full of new contacts, many of whom I would follow up in the months to follow. Recording field notes and interview talk

I kept a field diary to record my experiences of participant observation (see Figure 3.1), perhaps the most essential, widely used and reflexive writing strategy of an ethnographer (for exhaustive discussions of field notes in anthropology, see papers in Sanjek, 1990). Almost every night, after arriving home from meeting with participants, I handwrote notes into this diary. Sometimes, I used other sheets of paper, or hurriedly bought a notepad when I did not have my field diary with me, but needed to jot down a few notes in situ, apprehensive about forgetting them. I later inserted these sheets of paper into my diary. Reading sections of this diary following my return home and my writing of this thesis

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Figure 3.1 Fieldworkers’ recording equipment: a field diary, a pen and a digital recorder (Photo by author, Cardiff, 2015)

and this book, proved to be a powerful strategy to ‘re-experience’ my fieldwork and contextualise the interviews and other sound recordings that I am using as data examples in this book. The handwritten, at times sloppily scribbled, notes conveyed something of my mood and sensation while ‘being there’ (Geertz, 1988), to the degree that this notebook even absorbed the smells of Delhi’s polluted, hot air. To record sounds and voices, I used a simple voice recorder (Olympus VN-711PC; see Figure 3.1). It is an entry-level (I paid approximately £40), digital, small-sized recording device that is common in the administration/business world. The device allowed me to record sound with an inbuilt dynamic microphone (frequency response 70–16,000 Hz) and create Windows Media Audio (wma) files (sampling frequency 44.1 kHz at 32 kB per second), which I could conveniently drag onto my computer via a USB after I came home from a field trip. The small size and low weight of the recorder made it easy to carry around in my pocket and have it available when a situation caught my attention. I used the recorder for recording interviews, performances and other interactions and also to record memos on my way home or in a quiet moment. I decided against a more professional recording device as is generally used in linguistic fieldwork, because I felt that the physical appearance of a professional device would unnecessarily disrupt the social encounters

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that I had with my research participants. In the particular setting of the hip hop scene in 21st-century Delhi, human–machine relationships acquire a specific semiotics that ideologically shapes social relations (on Delhi’s ‘media urbanism’ and ‘pirate modernity’, see also Dattatreyan, 2020; Sundaram, 2010). The technological awareness, prevalent among the community with which I interacted, coupled with India’s relative poverty and unequal access to technology, I thought, would make a more professional recording device too visible and perhaps desirable among my participants – a type of contextualisation that I wished to avoid due to the notorious observer’s paradox (Labov, 1972a). The Olympus recorder, unimpressive as it looks, blended in with the participants’ mobile phones and was almost concealed from the attention of the interactants – although I never attempted to record them covertly. Hardly anyone showed any interest in knowing more about the Olympus recorder, as opposed to the more expensive and powerful devices I brought with me to produce music (see Figure 3.2, see also Dattatreyan & Singh, 2020) or Dattatreyan’s professional camera equipment, which, he writes, ‘promised the exciting possibility for what our interlocutors

Figure 3.2  The makeshift home studio for recording music (Photo by author, Delhi, 2013)

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perceived as a paraprofessional opportunity for self-production and circulation’ (Dattatreyan, 2020: 15; I will discuss Dattatreyan’s role in my research in more detail towards the end of this chapter). This is not to say that I was necessarily able to record more ‘naturally occurring’ speech with the Olympus than with another recorder, but I felt that my interlocutors interacted with me, rather than with the machine – and the same holds true for me, who interacted with them, rather than with the machine. The voice recorder was perhaps outside of the desirable cosmos of technical gadgets, and therefore the interactants were less likely to squarely perform for the machine. It was also less of a ceremony when pulling out the Olympus and switching it on. This was completely different from some of the video recordings that Dattatreyan and I have made, when it took several minutes to unpack, gear-up, connect and position the camera – minutes that would situate the interactants into a mode of audio-visual production and high performativity. The Olympus recordings yield a quite different type of data, a more interactive and perhaps less performative type of speech. Sometimes, however, the Olympus was placed centre stage by the participants, when they used it to record their freestyles or lyrics in spontaneous rap cyphers. In these instances, the Olympus was held like a stage microphone and the performers would pass it around to take turns. Interviews and conversations

I conducted 23 ethnographic research interviews with 25 hip hop heads in Delhi and elsewhere to elicit their narratives about their lives and the local and global hip hop scene. These interviews lasted from approximately 50  minutes to over 3  hours (on average 1  hour 28  minutes), yielding approximately 37  hours of interview talk. Some readers might be under the impression that 23 interviews are not ‘enough’ data to support the rather ambitious claims that I make in this book. But I would claim the opposite: I have collected ‘too much’ data. Taken together, the narratives I selected from the interviews to become empirical data available for analysis in this book barely add up to 20 minutes of talk. What happened to the remaining 36 hours and 40 minutes? Well, they remain unrepresented in this book, yet they are not necessarily forgotten by me or by my research participants. These unrepresented interactions play a role as hidden contexts (Blommaert, 2005) in my analytical moves and writin strategies and their interpretation by the Delhi hip hop heads. It is thus important to emphasise that the narratives I elicited do not exist outside of the interview interaction, rather they were jointly

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produced by the physical and interactive co-presence of the interviewee, the interviewer and the recording device. I thus share Briggs’s (1986) and Mishler’s (1986) constructivist critique that interview data are never a ‘resource’ independent of the interactional interview context itself (see also Rapley, 2001; Wortham et  al., 2011). The analysis of interview-generated talk thus has to be sensitive to this interactive context rather than taking the views expressed in interviews as ‘facts’ that exist in some kind of decontextualised reality outside of the interview context (De Fina & Perrino, 2011). My research is designed to take the interactional context into account by attending to Bamberg’s (1997) Level  2 positioning, in which narrators take positions vis-à-vis their audiences in the interactive world. Of course, the participant roles as well as the ways of communicating in a speech event that all participants recognise as the genre of ‘interview’ also change over the course of any interview, producing several chronotopes, styles of speech, ranging from formal to conversational talk (Labov, 1972a: 85–94). Furthermore, participants might have differing expectations about what constitutes an ‘interview’ and what communicative rules are appropriate in this genre (Atkinson & Silverman, 1997). My ways of asking questions differed across and within interviews, depending on my rapport with the interviewee, the physical surroundings in which the interview took place, the topic of interaction and the general talkativeness (on the day of the interview) of both me and the interviewee. Sometimes (parts of) interviews resembled what the literature describes as semi-structured interviews, where the interviewer makes use of prepared questions and prompts to elicit reactions from the interviewee (Copland & Creese, 2015b: 30–34). Other (parts of) interviews were more open-ended and conversational (Rapley, 2001). Here, rather than posing a question prepared before the interview, the interviewer employed and developed a ‘repertoire of question-asking strategies’ (Agar, 1980: 96) that allowed for the organic progression of the interaction. To initiate an interview, I used semi-structured questions such as: When did you first come into contact with hip hop?’; ‘Tell me something about your involvement with hip hop in India?’; ‘When did you first notice that India had a hip hop scene? The interviews thus often began with a section on the history of hip hop in Delhi, where brief narratives about first contacts with hip hop or other past experiences were temporally ordered (often by referring to exact dates). Once these historical details had been narrated, longer narratives about specific people or specific events were told. These narratives provided me with detailed

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accounts of my participants’ understandings of hip hop’s relevance in Delhi and in the world. The end of an interview was often marked by communicating some kind of future plans of how interviewer and interviewee could continue working together. When the interviews moved into more conversation-like, open-ended formats, the interviewees sometimes also asked questions or told stories and introduced concepts without being directly prompted by me. This was especially the case when we changed our physical surroundings. For instance, when I asked for permission to keep the recorder running after our interviews, during mutual journeys, on foot, on motorbikes, in the metro, in auto-rickshaws, passing through the city, having meals, reacting to our environment and building rapport. The recordings thus also vary in quality. Whereas most of the interview-like interactions in participants’ homes are clearly audible, the conversation-like interactions on the street are often relatively difficult to hear and therefore almost impossible to transcribe and analyse in full. Sometimes, I conveniently put the running recorder into my shirt pocket, accepting that it recorded the loud rustling of the textile against the microphone, in addition to the street noise, and captured my own voice much more loudly compared to my interlocutor’s. Yet, some of these recordings yielded data that were incredibly valuable for understanding the context of my relationships with my research participants and the circumstances of our interactions, even if I decided not to present them as transcribed extracts in this book. Narratives in interviews

Such interviewing techniques are perhaps the reason why narrative (or storytelling) is such a prevalent genre in the materials I recorded. This wasn’t something I had anticipated before or even during my fieldwork. It was only when I started listening to the interview recordings back home, that I noticed that narrative is a frequently recurring genre in my interviewees’ talk. We told each other stories all the time. Although I did not intend to elicit narratives and therefore did not use targeted prompts like Labov’s danger-of-death question (Hill, 1995; Labov, 1966, 1972b; Labov & Waletzky, 1967), all interviewees produced substantial amounts of narratives. I selected narratives that appeared ‘interesting’ to me, either as I remembered them straight after the interview or while listening to the approximately 37 hours of interview recordings in the years that followed. The narratives I selected for this book range from approximately 40 seconds to approximately 3 minutes. Yet, many narratives took much

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longer and were interrupted, postponed, called off or reformulated. Most narratives were also co-constructed by the interviewer or by other participants present. These co-constructions were often accomplished by minimal responses like laughter, mh or okay as well as non-verbal communication such as facial expressions, hand gestures and body posture, of which I have no empirical record because I did not film the interviews. Relatedly, and more generally, the interview context, the interaction that emerged out of the physical co-presence of researched, researcher and the audio recorder, is something to which readers of this book have only very limited access. The semiotic and cultural richness, the subversion and reproduction of discourses that took place over these long ethnographic interviews are hardly adequately represented in the brief narrative extracts I present here. While such decontextualised presentation of narrative is certainly problematic (as also argued in De Fina & Perrino, 2011; Holliday, 2016), the narrative fragments serve to support my exploration of my participants’ polyphonic orchestration on the one hand and their positioning vis-à-vis their audiences on the other (see my discussion of Bamberg’s Level 1 and Level 2 positioning in Chapter 2). In this sense, the analysis of polyphony both within the story worlds and in the interactive storytelling worlds serves as a way to re-complexify the de-contextualised presentation of transcripts in this book. As proposed by De Fina (2009), this complexification of the analysis of narratives involves an attention to participants’ negotiations of genre expectations. Both the interview genre and the narrative genre are interactively negotiated between the interactants. In this book, I attempt to carve out how the narrative itself leaves traces of these negotiations of genre expectations, rather than providing readers with transcribed cotextual interaction that preceded and followed the narratives I selected for analysis. I argue that such re-complexification can be achieved by attending to the narrators’ dialogism: their orchestration of the many voices in the story world (Level  1) and their evaluative appropriation of these voices through stancetaking in the interactive storytelling world (Level  2). I am interested in how the narrators themselves sample others’ voices; i.e. how these other voices are semiotically constructed through narrativisation and discursively employed momentarily in the ethnographic encounter. This means that while the transcribed fragments of narrative talk cannot be understood as representative of the entire corpus of recorded interviews that I conducted with my participants (and surely it is not representative of a population of speakers), these narratives represent ‘culturally rich points’ (Coupland et  al., 2005: 72) through which we

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can understand the active reception of others’ voices and the interactive positioning between researcher and researched. I therefore do not consider these narratives to be generalisable but rather particularisable (Erickson, 1986: 130), i.e. significant moments of reflection in and of the cultural production of hip hop in India. In order to do such particularisable research, I argue, we need a detailed analysis of the semiotic surface, what linguistic ethnography calls micro-analysis (Rampton, 2006, 2013). Micro-analysis takes its time to ‘take a close empirical look at both hegemony and creative practice in everyday activity’ (Rampton, 2013: 4). Micro-analysis explores brief passages of interaction, narratives or a few lines of transcript, which, despite their brevity, are understood as windows into the construction of participants’ stylistic practices, their polyphonic orchestration, stancetaking and identity work. The interview fragments that I selected direct our attention to the richness, the depths of the subtle stylistic moves speakers make when narrating in their interviews with the visiting ethnographer and the recording device. Recording public performances

When I visited hip hop jams, I would occasionally pull out my Olympus and record announcements and ‘speeches’ (for examples, see MC Eucalips’s and Seti X’s narratives in Chapter 6). Here, the Olympus would blend in with the many mobile phone cameras that were held up by members of the audience to capture the spectacle. Every time I thought I had recorded something exciting, I would approach the person who had been recorded and ask for consent to use the recording for my research. No one refused to give me spoken and written consent to analyse these public performances of speech. During my fieldwork, I realised that breakin was the element that was perhaps most important for understanding hip hop cultural production in Delhi. As explained in Chapter 7, breakin, a form of hip hop dance, is performed almost entirely non-verbally. Therefore, I started to use my mobile phone camera and a small digital camera I brought with me to videorecord and photograph dancers on jams. The images I captured with these inexpensive hand-held devices were often blurry, too dark, too light, not in focus or shaky as I had no prior experience with filming. The inexpensive equipment I used to visually capture these spectacles blended in with the devices that members of the audience would hold up to videorecord for their private use or for online circulation. Dattatreyan used his digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera for his visual anthropological research project, but I felt it would have taken too much

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of his time and effort to systematically videorecord breakin cyphers for me; therefore, I never asked him to and instead later conducted online ethnography to analyse videos that my participants themselves uploaded onto the internet. In the recordings I made at jams, the speakers – or dancers – did not directly address the ethnographer. The addressees of the narratives produced at these public events were the audiences present at the event. This disguises the ethnographer’s presence, who becomes a lurking overhearer; a ‘fly on the wall’. I decided to include such materials to make available a few episodes that illustrate the Delhi hip hop scene beyond interview realities. This gives readers an impression of how participants negotiate meanings and orchestrate voices to make arguments about the transculturation of hip hop in India, without the researcher’s prompts or addresseeship. These public performance data help to provide a more nuanced picture of the complexity of Delhi’s hip hop scene. Recording hip hop music

An entirely different set of recordings, which I, however, do not use as empirical support or data in this book, were the music production sessions I had with participants and friends in my home do-it-yourself (DIY) music recording studio (for a discussion of DIY studios in Delhi, see Dattatreyan & Singh, 2020). As mentioned, I took my private music production equipment to India. This consisted of a Boss BR-8 digital eight-track recorder, a T-bone condenser microphone, an Akai MPC2000XL music sampler, a Korg Kaoss Pad Mini effect processor, headphones and several cables. With this set of gear, I was able to produce beats and record voices to make full songs. The value of this equipment was approximately £3,000. Beyond its monetary value, this equipment had symbolic value as it travelled from one part of the world to another and seemed to come from a bygone era of analogue music production, which nowadays has been largely replaced by software packages. The DIY studio I set up in Delhi thus represented a specific chronotope of analogue music production. Many of my participants were interested in learning how to operate this antiquated equipment, how to connect the machines with one another and what tricks to use to generate certain properties of sound. Inspired by the DIY practices of a Sudanese rap group in Sidney that I had encountered in a research article (Wilson, 2011), I converted a cupboard in my furnished flat in Malviya Nagar into a recording station, using some styrofoam packing to function as a microphone rack and a thin silk scarf to function as a pop filter (see Figure 3.2). I envisioned this

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approach to recording to also hold pedagogical value: I wanted to show my participants that hip hop music production had always been rough and ready, and that the beauty of hip hop lies in improvisation and technological bricolage. The participants and their friends soon found out about my makeshift studio and some expressed interest in working on songs with me, which sometimes led to music video shoots with Dattatreyan. I first imagined that I could record these music and video production sessions with my Olympus recorder to elicit contextualised interactive data for my research. When a few young musicians came to visit me in my flat for the first time, however, I instantly gave up on this idea. I found it awkward to ask them to sign a consent form and make recordings of our interactions when their reason for coming was to record raps (I discuss the use of consent forms further down). I also sensed they were already nervous about showcasing their musical talent to Dattatreyan and me, the travelling, slightly older, hip hop heads from abroad, so that signing a document would have probably jeopardised the rapport we were trying to build. After several months in the field, I did eventually record one music production session in Prabh Deep’s house, when we recorded a song with the emcee Zan. In this instance, I felt much more comfortable asking to record the session, as I had already built cordial relationships and conducted interviews with both Zan and Prabh Deep (and had them sign consent forms), as well as because we were recording in Prabh Deep’s house rather than in my own. Even if I did not record most of these music production sessions, they were incredibly valuable for my positioning as a scholar-activist (Jackson, 2010) in the field. These sessions emphasised my ‘expert’ status in the community I sought to explore and provided opportunities to get to know would-be participants and to give back something to this community. The equipment that I brought with me from Europe to India was portable enough to carry with me to people’s homes. For instance, I took my Akai MPC2000XL, a professional music sampler that has emblematic value in the hip hop world, on a train to Mumbai. There, I met up with A-List, Enkore and Manmeet Kaur, three English-language emcees who I had contacted via Facebook and who had agreed to meet me. After samplin a loop from an old Motown record that A-List had purchased in central Mumbai a few days prior to our meeting, Manmeet Kaur composed a beat on the MPC (see Figure 3.3) on which we later recorded our raps. We never finalised this song. However, the session itself proved to be a bonding experience and I later interviewed all three artists on different occasions.

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Figure 3.3  Manmeet Kaur playing the Akai MPC2000XL sampler (Photo by author, Mumbai, 2013)

In another instance, I was asked to record a song and shoot a video for two young breakers who wanted to experiment with emceein in Hindi. I offered to take my equipment to Khirki Village, their informal settlement in South Delhi, and set it up in the young artists’ small room (see Figure 3.4). As no microphone stand was available, we improvised and used a handbag to fit the microphone on the wall (as can be seen in the top right corner of Figure  3.5), again emphasising improvisation in hip hop. The two emcees recorded their raps and then they invited a young lady from the neighbourhood, Deepmala, to sing a chorus. We video-recorded this recording session with my digital camera and then went outside to make video-recordings of their neighbourhood and of some of their

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Figure 3.4  Jaspal setting up his recording equipment in MC Freezak’s home, Khirki Village (Screenshot, video by MC Akshay Tashan, Delhi, 2013)

friends, which I then edited into a music video and shared with the young artists online and also circulated in my own online networks. Elsewhere (Singh, 2021), I discuss how MC Freezak and MC Akshay Tahsan, with the help of three Somalian hip hop heads who also live in Khirki Village, translated the lyrics of this song into English for me.

Figure 3.5  MC Akshay Tashan recording raps and MC Freezak doing second vocals, Khirki Village (Screenshot, video by author, Delhi, 2013)

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Research Ethics

Throughout the fieldwork, I came to appreciate the efforts that people made in helping me with my research. Furthermore, our music production projects at times positioned me more as a hip hop collaborator and friend rather than a researcher. This compels me to represent their voices in this ethnography in a way that is committed not only to the highest possible standards of ethics as defined by the university structures, but also to the principles of hip hop culture, which involve love, respect, upliftment, peace and critique. Informed consent

The materials presented in this book were collected as part of an academic fulfilment to obtain a degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Cardiff University, Wales. British universities expect researchers to obtain informed consent from their research participants. The consent form informs participants about the ways the recorded data will be processed, about their rights to withdraw at any time and about anonymity and confidentiality. I usually handed a form to a participant before an interview and asked them to read it. I would then ask the participant to sign the document and choose a pseudonym. Subsequently, I would give them a debriefing form, which reproduces the consent form and provides additional information, including my and my supervisor’s full names and institutional addresses. Anonymity

The question of anonymity and pseudonyms was not as straightforward as I had initially expected. Over the years of my academic training to become a researcher, I developed a sensitivity towards the importance of protecting the identities of research participants. However, I found that participants were hardly aware of this importance and, as they told me on several occasions, even found it odd not to disclose their real names, their nicknames and stage names or the localities in which they acted. Many of my participants had already started, more or less successfully, to utilise the practices of hip hop and the media flows of the World Wide Web to give themselves a voice and garner recognition beyond their immediate friendship groups. For many of my participants, my research seemed to be another medium for this recognition and the circulation of their names (see also Aeke’s, Zine’s and Zebster’s accounts of the goals of my research in Chapter 1). Hip hop, including my research, was thus a way to enhance their cultural capital and to grapple with social

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inequalities prevalent in 21st-century urban India. My own political disposition as a scholar-activist supports this standpoint and I am therefore inclined to accentuate my participants’ socio-transformative ambitions by disclosing their self-chosen stage names in this book, rather than anonymising them as a general rule. This does not mean, however, that I am uncritical of this practice. Discussions of the politics of anonymity (Coffey et al., 2012; Guenther, 2009; Nespor, 2000; Rock, 2001; Vainio, 2013) highlight that the social sciences put forward multiple, often contradictory, ideas of dealing with anonymity (i.e. not naming). Guenther (2009: 412) claims that even though ‘the decision to name or not to name is rife with overlapping ethical, political, methodological, and personal dilemmas’, anonymity is taken for granted in the social sciences. She also notes that there is a ‘relative absence of published discussions’ (Guenther, 2009: 412) on this complex decision of using or not using real names in research reports. In a survey, Vainio (2013: 686) identifies two broad standpoints in social science research: first, anonymisation is possible and desirable, and secondly, anonymisation is practically unachievable and even unethical. According to the first standpoint, anonymisation gives researchers more freedom ‘to report findings that may appear both as favourable and unfavourable to the participants or [research] funders’ (Vainio, 2013: 691) while not causing any personal danger to them. Similarly, Nespor (2000: 555) notes that ‘anonymisation is an engine of detachment’. In this view, researchers who anonymise would be ethically freer to subject the collected data to a vision of rigorous and critical scientific analysis and write about and publish this in an independent fashion. This, it is assumed, upholds academia’s autonomy. Guenther (2009: 413), however, taking the second standpoint, highlights that non-anonymisation forces ethnographers to write ‘more careful accounts’ of their experiences in the field, in order to protect their research participants’ integrity. Using real names, or names that can be identified as belonging to a certain individual, place or organisation, thus becomes a constant reminder of the importance of ethical writing. Furthermore, through non-anonymisation individuals and groups of individuals can bring their artistic and socio-transformative voices to bear. Not using their actual or recognisable names in such a setting would unjustly take away their right to represent themselves in the study that represents them. In Guenther’s (2009: 419) research with local women’s organisations in Eastern Germany, she hoped that ‘using the actual names of organizations and cities will bring voices, places, and histories that are too often forgotten back into view’.

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I believe that this second standpoint is an important contribution that academia can make to materialise the mantra of social impact. The prestige and the perceived importance of (Western and British) universities can help grassroots organisations (in the Global South) gain recognition with local policymakers and funding agencies, as also suggested in Zine’s and Zebster’s accounts of what my research can do, namely to put Delhi on the map and explain hip hop to third parties (Chapter 1). This representation through research can, but must not necessarily, be considered orthogonal to scientific rigour, objectivity and autonomy. Yet, there is an inherent risk in such advocative research. We might privilege those people included in the research over other groups of the same locale that have not been hailed by the ethnographer.2 Writing ethnographies

Representation is a key problem of ethnographic writing. The forces of scientific independence and analytical practicalities through anonymisation and the kind of emancipatory commitments through non-anonymisation might create subtle dilemmas while writing up fieldwork reports, conference papers, articles and monographs. I will do my best to at least try to indicate these dilemmas through rhetorical devices such as codemeshing in my writin, with the aim of making readers more aware of my ‘sympathetic but detached’ (Duranti, 1997: 94) dual role as an ethnographer. There is a fine line between what counts as critical detachment and what counts as advocative sympathy, and this has to be decided in every instance anew. Ultimately, of course, in cases where political commitment and the protection of integrity conflict each other, I have either concealed the identity of the researched or I have decided to remove the analysis altogether. For instance, I never analyse extracts in which participants talk about other participants or other individuals or clearly identifiable groups in ways that I deem could be harmful to anyone. I also excluded from my analysis sections in which participants talk about illegal or socially stigmatised activities such as writin unauthorised graffiti, drinking alcohol or smoking marijuana. For the same reasons, I decided against making full transcripts or audio recordings of interviews available to readers of this book. The micro-analytical approach that I employ in this book and the overly intellectualised terms (e.g. indexicality, narrative, discourse) surely detach my analyses in this book from the embodied experiences I had with my participants in the field. As I continuously felt the danger of over-intellectualising my findings, I sent out emails to those research

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participants whose textual fragments and stories I intended to use in published scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as in this book, asking them to check if they felt they were correctly represented, a strategy that is part of ethnographic monitoring (Hymes, 1980; Van der Aa & Blommaert, 2011). The responses I got were predominantly positive, yet some of my research participants did not fully appreciate the academic language required for getting published and the relevance of the themes that I was trying to develop, such as ‘narrative’, ‘polyphony’, ‘indexicality’, among others. They perhaps felt that the specialised jargon of academic disciplines, with which researchers accrue cultural capital among academic peers, was entirely detached and different from the type of language I used with them in our interactions and interviews. I was beginning to feel embarrassed to send them my pieces as I increasingly felt that I was writing about them, but for another audience, a university-trained international audience (see also chapters in Brettell, 1993). One of my research participants, for example, told me that the piece I sent them was difficult to read and that they were not able to understand my argument. Perhaps even more importantly, they lamented that if they had known that I would analyse every ‘erm’ in their speech, they would have preferred an email interview. Analytical ethics

These are issues that seem to me important but under-theorised within sociolinguistics, discourse studies and linguistic ethnography. I believe that we have to take such issues seriously and I wish to invite our disciplines to think more sincerely about what I would like to call analytical ethics. This is a type of ethics that applies to our work after the collection of data in the field, namely it applies to the scholarly analysis and writing back home in the armchair.3 As Ochs (1979: 44, emphasis in the original) pointed out decades ago, recording participants does not mean that the classic ethnographic problems of the influence of the researcher on the data and the ethical implications of this influencing are by-passed: these problems ‘are simply delayed until the moment at which the researcher sits down to transcribe the material from the audio- or videotape’. Therefore, Tagg et al. (2017: 272) suggest that ethics should be understood as processual rather than static, which requires a ‘reconceptualisation of research ethics not as an external set of guidelines implemented before commencing a research project but as being at the core of research, driving decision-making at all steps of the process’ (see also Kubanyiova, 2008).

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Ethics has to be put front and centre in our fieldwork, in our analysis, in our literature review and in our writin. In an attempt to conceptualise this driving force in the research process, I suggest we think sincerely about what could be called analytical ethics. This would raise a number of questions that linguistic ethnographic researchers could fruitfully develop in order to ethicise their research – and research their ethics – after the collection of data has been completed. Firstly, if we apply ‘scientific’ methodologies, such as subjecting our data to computerised analysis in software packages such as Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2013), forcing the data into transcripts or deploying overly intellectualised concepts such as ‘indexicality’ and ‘ideology’ in our writing, what does this mean for our research participants’ understanding of our written-up arguments? Secondly, and related to this, who do we write for? Or put differently, is it important to consider our readership when devising, conducting, writing up and presenting our analysis and what does this mean for the autonomy of the academy? Thirdly, the notion of analytical ethics allows us to complicate the role identities ethnographers take on while interviewing and engaging with research participants. Can we continue to build rapport with our participants during an interview in the field, when we already know that we are going to criticise them later from our armchair at home? The post hoc analysis in the armchair creates a role ambiguity between the researcher-as-fieldworker and the researcher-as-analyst/writer, which, I suggest, can only be re-paired through reflective writing. If the analysis, for instance, reveals that a given statement in the data is racist, homophobic, misogynistic or otherwise discriminatory, and if the researcher makes critical arguments about this in his writing, he does this from a very comfortable epistemic position. This position involves having available a recording of the interaction that can be replayed, a transcript and some computer-generated measurement perhaps and a university library in which he can assemble an arsenal of analytical concepts developed over the last two and half millennia of documented philosophy. The researcher does not deploy these resources in the interview situation itself. Here, the researcher is trained to stay in the background and make the interviewee talk and feel comfortable so as to produce more ‘natural’ discourse. Ethnographic interviewers usually do not interrupt their interviewees, or even stop the interview, when participants make a problematic statement; ethnographers do not analyse on the spot – at least I do not. I believe that such questions are crucial to address in any linguistic ethnographic research project, if we wish to develop the kinds of detailed, micro-analytical methodologies purposed in linguistics and advance the

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critical writing and reading of contemporary culture and language in ethnography. Throughout this book, I will reflect on the ethical considerations spelled out in this section: informed consent, the double standards of anonymisation and analytical ethics. The wilful persistence (Ahmed, 2012) with which I remind readers of my ethical commitments to my research participants and to my culture, I hope, will create moments of discomfort for readers. I intend to write this book in ways that ethical dilemmas are laid open, rather than trying to produce only a nice and smooth reading experience for readers to enjoy themselves. This, I hope, problematises our objectivistic writing, our analytical rigour and our methodological dogmatism and it reflexively informs my ‘own’ voice as the author of this book. As I will argue in the following section, rather than something to be concealed, the ambiguous roles that linguistic ethnographers assume can be employed to complexify our participation in the encounters with our participants. Researcher Identities as Role Ambiguity

Geertz’s (1973) classic discussion of thick description emphasises the importance of context in describing and adequately interpreting ethnographic encounters. Spittler (2001) and Sarangi (2007) note that thickly describing an event requires the researcher to thickly participate in the event, to acquire a literacy in, to become an apprentice of and to socialise into the culture or community they study. This highlights the multiple roles and identities researchers assume and it helps to move away from strict objectivism. In my own ethnography in the hip hop scene in Delhi, I experienced moments of role ambiguity, in which it was not clear whether I was assuming the role of an academic researcher or the role of a hip hop practitioner. In the following autobiographical narrative, ‘I add myself into the mix’ (Fine, 1993: 281; see also Coffey, 1999) and reflect on my own identity as a linguistic ethnographer and hip hop head. I hope that this will help readers to discover ethnographic problems, shortcomings, my lack of competences and, more generally, subjectivism in this piece of research. I argue that, rather than being something that should be erased or concealed, role ambiguity can function as a resource for both participation in and description/interpretation of the ethnographic encounters I had in the field. The creation of my hip hop identity

I had always been a great music fan. Growing up in the 1980s around Frankfurt, Germany, I remember how I used to sit in my older sisters’

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bedrooms, playing vinyls and dancing to the disco sounds of the 1970s and 1980s. My mother was also a great influence; she had a whole crate of Bob Marley and the Wailers cassettes that we used to listen to all day. In the evenings, my father would often put on records of Indian film music and ghazals of the 1950s and 1960s. Hip hop was just another form of music to me. As a teenager I grew very fast, so someone suggested I should try basketball. I did and soon got into the world of basketball, the National Basketball Association (NBA), late-night live broadcasts of the finals and endless summer afternoons with friends on our local court. The music of basketball was hip hop. US-American hip hop, Fugees, Busta Rhymes, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, 2Pac, Snoop Doggy Dogg. Cassettes circulated, which were copied from CDs or records available in the nearby PX, the ‘Post-Exchange’ shops of the US army barracks in Wiesbaden. Everyone knew someone (who knew someone) who had access to the PX and soon there was a real underground market for American music and clothes, especially basketball shoes, as well as beers (the Olde English 40s that we saw in films like Menace II Society and Boyz n the Hood). I had started to connect hip hop with a lifestyle, a way of dressing up, moving, acting, forming relationships; it became part of my identity – something the other musical forms could not provide for me. My friends and I soon got deeper into hip hop, buying CDs of the Wu-Tang Clan, Onyx, Smif-N-Wessun, Outkast, N.W.A. and many others. Soon German rap music kicked off, and by the late 1990s, there were hundreds of German rappers, deejays and producers touring across the Republic. German rappers started releasing albums and singles, which we would buy mostly on vinyl records because CDs were starting to be viewed as somewhat less authentic in our community of teenage hip hop fans. Record shops would pop up, even in smaller towns, selling vinyls and other hip hop-related merchandise such as T-shirts, books and graffiti cans and markers. I saved up to buy two turntables and started deejayin for my friends who started experimenting with emceein and freestylin. Later, I grabbed the mic myself and started recording music and performing at local venues and festivals. I then got more into producin hip hop music with the analogue equipment I was finally able to afford. It was not only rap music that was big, graffiti writin, turntablism, beatboxin, producin, breakin, basketball, skateboardin and jokin and foolin around were all part of our local hip hop universe too. The Wall Street Meeting, Europe’s largest graffiti festival, now called Meeting of Styles, used to happen in the abandoned slaughterhouse buildings of Wiesbaden (for a history of the Meeting of Styles, see Gerullis, 2013; see

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also Blommaert, 2016a). Writers from all parts of the world would meet annually and transform the old industrial buildings into Europe’s biggest open-air gallery. Breakers would get down on the floor, dancin to the breaks of the deejays and on the stage emcees would rap and freestyle into the night. Graffiti writers would sit around in groups and show each other their black books (a collection of sketches) or just chat shit and have some beers or share a joint. Friendships were made, trips and night actions were planned and opinions were exchanged. My autoethnographic narrative of becoming a hip hop head in Germany in the 1990s and early 2000s, situates the ethnographer within the central theme of this book: transculturation. The German hip hop scene then, as the Indian hip hop scene now, appropriated and negotiated forms, aesthetics, practices, ideologies and discourses that derive from African American and Latinx cultural expressions. Involved in this appropriation is neoculturation and the reformulation of voices; what is considered authentic in US-American hip hop is not blindly copied but made appropriate in the local context (see also Androutsopoulos, 2003; Pennycook, 2007a, 2007b; Singh, 2020a). Even though the general principles of transculturation in the contemporary digital moment in Delhi and in my own experiences during the analogue 1990s in Frankfurt seem similar, the ways of appropriating and negotiating are fundamentally different. As Dattatreyan (2020) powerfully shows in his book The Globally Familiar, the Indian hip hop generation we both experienced in 2013 was virtually connected; they negotiate meaning on the internet, their PX is the www and their records are mp3s on their mobile phones. They are a few clicks away from accessing the entire history and all forms of hip hop internationally. Their cultural flows come in Facebook posts, YouTube videos, blogs, forums, etc. I remember struggling to find Dutch or Swiss hip hop music on CD, tape or vinyl as a teenager growing up in Germany, while my research participants in India consume a plethora of audio-visual and multinational art: Somali rap, Korean breakin, Nigerian naija, Slovakian graffiti. This means that my fieldwork involved updating my knowledge of hip hop and paying attention to these new types of digital flows, becoming an apprentice of my participants and beginning to recognise their hip hop aesthetics. It involved jettisoning my ‘own’ ideas about hip hop transculturation at the centre of my ethnographic moves in the field and allowing for a more or less neutral terrain of experiential input. I was not always successful in doing this. My musical tastes and my ideas of practicing hip hop (authenticity) sometimes complicated my positionality as an apprentice ethnographer, yet it was precisely my positionality as an ‘experienced’ hip hop head from abroad that also seemed to give me

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particular credibility in and access to the hip hop scene in Delhi. As Alim (2006b: 969) notes in his discussion of hiphopography: ‘Knowledge of the aesthetics, values, and history as well as the use of the language, culture, and means and modes of interaction of the Hip Hop Nation Speech Community are essential to the study of Hip Hop culture’. My participants recognised my knowledge and experience of hip hop cultural practices and occasionally asked me to evaluate the quality of their art for instance, or invited me to tell stories about German hip hop back in the day. Thus, loosely, I was assuming two identities during my fieldwork: a researcher identity (an apprentice, looking to learn things from my participants) and a hip hop head’s identity (an expert, with a set of completed ideas telling my participants my aesthetic and ideological opinions). During my research these two identities conflated and led to a continuous oscillation between insider and outsider – a role ambiguity. For instance, during interviews I often co-constructed the stancetaking of my interviewees because I could draw on a general cultural dictate of what it means to be authentic in global hip hop. This aligned our knowledge (epistemic stances), emotions (affective stances) and morals (deontic stances), while navigating a global hip hop discourse. However, it was, at times, difficult to move out of my role of an experienced, ageing hip hop insider and move into a non-knowledgeable ethnographer position; a researcher who wants to find out something. I found myself using ‘India’ and my relative inexperience with the particular locale of Delhi and my inability to speak fluent Hindi as ways to construct myself as a researcher and move into a decreased epistemic positionality. The half-Indian, non-Hindi-speaking researcher in the field

In addition to this role ambiguity, I found myself navigating my racialised and linguistic identities during my fieldwork. Being brought up in Germany, I was always aware of the ‘Indian element’ of my descent. In comparison to my ‘German’ mother, my ‘Indian’ father perhaps biologically endowed me with elements of the other: e.g. black hair, brown eyes, darker skin. My ‘foreign-sounding’ and/or ‘unsure-how-topronounce/spell’ name (Jaspal, or my nickname Pali) presented me as the racialised other as well. On coming to the UK, where I studied for many years, my name was often recognised as ‘Punjabi’, or even ‘very Punjabi’, especially by other ‘Asians’. This was a new type of relegation, which I had never experienced in Germany, where I was simply ‘Indian’ or mockingly called ‘the Indian’ (der Inder) by my friends – the definite article indexing the relative lack of an Indian or South Asian community in the area and time in which I grew up.

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In Northern India, middle-class Indians, diasporic Indians and travelling hip hop heads would repeatedly make explicit and implicit references to my name and my heritage: With your name you should be farming in the Punjab, not doing a PhD on hip hop, a middle-aged woman – who identifies as a Punjabi Delhiite – jokingly said at a friend’s dinner party (field notes p. 90). Or, in a club, when the DJ called for all the Punjabi people in the crowd (usually a signal that the next song was going to be a bhangra4 tune), a friend – who identifies as British Punjabi who was living and working in Delhi at the time – said, with your height5 you should really be in the middle of the floor right now, again tongue-in-cheek, especially because we had talked about this stereotype many times before (field notes p. 58). Delhi-based hip hop heads, in contrast, hardly ever identified me as Indian or diasporic Indian. Membership in the Global Hip Hop Nation seemed to be the more significant identity trait and this membership seemed to connect us more than our common ancestry. For instance, in the extract presented in Chapter 1, B-Boy Rawdr identifies me as german and white but quickly downplays these national and racial identifiers and stresses that hip hop is our common culture. My inability to speak Hindi, Punjabi or another South Asian language in any reasonable manner further complicated my identity in the field and opened translation zones with my participants (see Singh, 2021). During academic meetings of all types, scholars often asked how without competence in Hindi I was planning to account for codeswitching phenomena, or how I thought I could study the ‘lower classes’ or ‘locals’ who predominantly speak (a variety of) Hindi. More generally, did my incompetence in speaking and understanding Hindi in any reasonable way, thereby requiring all interactions be conducted in versions of Englishes, not impede my thick participation (Sarangi, 2007; Spittler, 2001) in their community and consequently make thick description (Geertz, 1973) impossible? Yes, however, in order to understand global hip hop culture, its transculturation and worldly indexicality, I would argue, my incompetence in speaking Hindi in any fluent way and my fluent competence in English positioned me as a hip hop traveller, a worldly exponent of the global networks to which my participants perhaps strived to belong. While most conversations among my participants in Delhi indeed happened in Hindi,6 even though everybody I met spoke some and understood most English, my participants regarded English as a valuable resource to communicate with travelling hip hop heads, including me, the travelling ethnographer who himself speaks a ‘non-native’ version of English.

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Certainly, our interactions were therefore indexically imbued with the socioeconomic ideologies of modernity and middle-class aspirational lifestyles in Delhi, where English is used as a resource for social distinction (Chand, 2009a, 2009b, 2011; Hall, 2005, 2009, 2019). Yet, sociolinguistic survey research suggests that an English-Hindi hybrid code, known as Hinglish, seems to be entering public domains, such as media and schooling, previously dominated by monolingual versions of either Hindi or English, leading to a new type of urban diglossia and bilingualism within families and among all sections of society in Delhi (Satyanath & Sharma, 2016). Finally, the use of English is an index of membership in global hip hop (Androutsopoulos, 2010; Lee, 2007); therefore, English can also become part of hip hop’s postcolonial ambitions to critically address social hierarchies and divisions (Pennycook, 2003a, 2007a, 2007b). English in the hip hop scene in Delhi, I therefore suggest, operates within multiple scales (Blommaert, 2007). On one level, English is a mainstream index of modernity and aspirations of upward social mobility; on another level, English is part of a casual, urban, hybrid code; and on yet another level, English is a counter-hegemonic index available for grassroots appropriation. Thus, because of my inability to speak Hindi, the multiple scales associated with various Englishes in Delhi structured every communication I had with my research participants. Our interactions are thus charged with the power and knowledge of the postcolonial world and this, in turn, contextualises and thickly describes the transculturation of hip hop in urban India. Put more directly, without my incompetence in Hindi, I would not have been able to produce contact-zone research (Pratt, 1991) that can begin to untangle the transculturation of hip hop in Delhi. A Hindi-speaking researcher would have produced a very different – certainly not less interesting – sociolinguistic account of Delhi hip hop. The other researcher

A rather curious thing happened in the course of this research project that helped to formulate this book with heightened reflexivity on the role ambiguity that I described above. Just five weeks before leaving for India, in late November 2012, I found an abstract of an American Anthropological Association (AAA) conference paper on the internet in which the author talks about a specific mall in Delhi and how b-boys from a neighbouring settlement community would use the mall as a practice space, attracting the attention of both middle-class shoppers and security guards (Dattatreyan, 2012; for a more detailed description of this episode, see Dattatreyan, 2017). Partly anxious that someone else would ‘take away’

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my research topic and partly excited that I seemed to be on the ‘right track’ with my research interest, I sent the author of the paper, the then PhD student anthropologist Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan from the University of Pennsylvania, an email, introducing my proposed research topic and my plans to do fieldwork in Delhi starting shortly after the new year. He responded promptly, saying that he, too, was departing for Delhi in January and he proposed meeting there and talking about our respective projects in person. During our first meeting on a cold January night over dinner at his guesthouse in Delhi, we were snooping around each other, trying to work out what exactly the other researcher would do and how it would possibly affect one’s ‘own’ project. We soon found out that we were planning to do very similar things, came from quite similar intellectual traditions, shared life stories as diasporic Indians living in the West and generally had many common interests, including our love for hip hop. At one point, towards the end of our meet up, Dattatreyan emphasised that we would have to work together. I was happy to hear this and laughingly said: oh but then you will become my research subject, using the word ‘subject’ rather than ‘participant’ or ‘ethnographic interlocutor’ to perplex the ethical implications of our mutual intentions. He laughed and said: and you will become mine (field notes, p. 37). Dattatreyan and I spent countless hours together, doing fieldwork, recording music, shooting videos, reflecting together, discussing academic approaches and so on. Sometimes, during our coincidental time in Delhi, we would sit for hours and share experiences of our ethnographic exposures to the Delhi hip hop scene and reflect on our positionality in the city that has played an important role in each of our families’ histories. In a conversation I had with him in the middle of our fieldwork, Dattatreyan said our work would complement each other, and, put together, would give a more holistic account of the Delhi hip hop scene. I often felt that Dattatreyan’s presence in Delhi provided me with an additional pair of eyes and ears and an additional mind, inviting a heightened reflexivity in the research process. To give him voice on these pages, I will keep referring to Dattatreyan’s published articles, his monograph and our collaborative work; not least to open up linguistics to anthropology. The strange and the familiar: Diasporic researchers in an urban space

‘India’ is a world region that has lured generations of anthropologists, writing travellers, travelling writers, musicians and artists to find the exotic, the other, the spiritual, the ancient and so on; in other words,

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they went to make the strange familiar. ‘Hip hop’, in contrast, has predominately been studied by urban ethnographers and cultural insiders, who turn their hobby into a profession (the dogmatist would say) or drop some knowledge (the hiphopographer would say). Hip hop ethnographers have to translate their cultural knowledge into academic jargon, so that it becomes understandable and evaluable in a complex structure of scholarly debate. In order to survive in the ivory tower, the hip hop scholar makes the familiar strange (for insightful discussions on related ideas, e.g. hip hop and ‘domestic orientalism’, see Yousman, 2003; and hip hop and the ‘globally familiar’, see Dattatreyan, 2020). The study of ‘Indian’ ‘hip hop’ complexifies the ontologies of the strange and the familiar, which is further complexified by Dattatreyan’s and my positionality as diasporic researchers with hip hop expertise. Nothing and everything was familiar and strange to us simultaneously. As diasporic returnee researchers (Dattatreyan, 2014), one could describe our locus of enunciation (Mignolo, 2000) as hybrid (Sarangi, 2011) and as taking up third spaces of enunciation (Bhabha, 2004). Dattatreyan’s and my celebration and styling as hip hop doyens with a biography of metropolitan urbanity (Dattatreyan grew up in New York City, I grew up in Frankfurt) and our status as diasporic Indians during the fieldwork as well as in our writing, therefore enter the transculturation of Indian hip hop in complex ways. In anthropological terms: the presence of the ‘hybrid’ researcher in this ‘hybrid’ setting did not clearly establish otherness, or attempt to familiarise the strange, as in old-fashioned anthropology (white researcher – tribal natives), and it did not clearly establish sameness, or attempt to gain critical analytical distance, as in urban ethnography (researchers study their own community). Rather these processes ran parallel to each other, conflating, intersecting, disguising, erasing or reaffirming each other. The research itself seems polyphonous and transcultural. The processes of familiarisation and detachment made us diasporic researchers constantly oscillate between roles. The encounters between the researcher and researched and the semiotic material (either in real-life encounters or in encounters with the recorded data) were shaped by hybrid role relationships. Table  3.1 lists a few possible sets of hybrid social roles, depicted as two ends of a continuum. By assuming these roles, researchers and researched could activate discourses, which I show in italics. Ethnographic interactants could utilise these social roles and discourses to do things with their words (e.g. an interview request, getting to know someone, hanging out, producing music), but interactants could

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Table 3.1  Indexing roles in the ethnographic encounter Denotative role

Possible social roles assumed in the encounter

Researchers

Academic – hip hop head professional-lay

West–East diaspora

English speaker English as a world language

Researched

Friend – b-boy private-public

Modern – traditional globalisation

Hindi – English speaker diglossia

also ‘cognitively’ use these role relationships to understand something about hip hop and the world and make sense of their ‘own’ positionality within the discourses that are being activated by taking such roles. Data analysis back home in the armchair, in front of a computer, is a drastic case of such ‘cognitive’ interpretation of semiotic material, in which the researched seem staticised, their pragmatic potentials of doing things with their words are moderated by the researcher who selects whose voices get represented and then applies several analytical filters to substantiate some interpretative venture, to the degree that the automatised computer programmes do things to the data that lead to an aha-effect, a pattern previously invisible to the researcher, which, so it is hoped, can prove or disprove a scholarly theory. Conclusion

In this chapter, I have put forward a methodological programme for global hip hop linguistics. This programme is inspired by linguistic ethnography (Rampton et al., 2004). I described how I elicited the data that forms the empirical basis for this book and highlighted my methodological choice of analysing narratives from a micro-analytical perspective. Such a methodology, I argued, requires critical reflection on collecting, analysing and presenting data and a heightened awareness of research ethics, both in the field (consent) and after leaving the field (anonymisation and analytical ethics). I concluded this chapter discussing how I, the travelling ethnographer, negotiated my identity in the field. I described that my thick participation as a diasporic returnee hiphopographer generated complex role ambiguities in my engagement with Delhi hip hop in 2013. I hope that the reflexive and sincere considerations that I put forward in this chapter help readers of this book develop their ‘own’ critical voices towards the claims I make in the next five chapters.

4 Othering Voices: Prosodic Normalising of the Authentic Cosmopolitan Self

Introduction

When we say that an author ‘owns’ her voice, we do not mean this literally. One’s ‘own’ voice does not emerge out of some sort of origio of individuality, nor can it resonate in a cultural vacuum, rather it always dialogically responds to a multitude of other voices. Bakhtin (1986: 89) writes that our speech is filled with varying ‘degrees of otherness’ and ‘our-own-ness’. To understand the narrators’ polyphonic orchestrations, we thus always have to ask Whose voice is this? An analysis of prosody – the sound quality of voice, i.e. its loudness, its pitch and its rhythm – allows us to answer this question on the level of the semiotic surface: we can hear voice contrasts by sonically perceiving qualities of sound waves. The two narrators who you will meet in this chapter style-shift between prosodic registers to index voice contrasts and construct dialogues between narrative figures in their story worlds. Prosody, and in particular intonation, has been studied extensively in interactional sociolinguistics, where it has been shown to function as an important contextualisation cue (Gumperz, 1982) and cultural index in speech (Queen, 2001; Sicoli, 2015). In this chapter, I will offer an analysis of the two narrators’ use of cantante (‘sing-song’) intonation patterns, stereotypical of Indian English or Hindi speech registers, which they seem to use to index a localised voice of the other that takes specific epistemic and deontic (or moral) stances towards the aesthetics, the languages and the mediatised circulation of Indian hip hop. Both narrators orchestrate marked differences in intonation patterns to contrast voices on a moral and aesthetic axis of cosmopolitan hip hop authenticity. In line with the overall aim of this book to understand normalisation processes in transcultural voices, ‘I am interested in finding out how this cantante intonation helps the two narrators to normalise their ‘own’ authentic cosmopolitan voices in dialogic relation to these other voices and thereby imagine 90

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their future participation in the transculturation of hip hop across the globe. The rapper Manmeet Kaur creates voice contrasts in her narrative to construct dialogues between two narrative figures in the story world: an Indian music producer and Manmeet herself. The Indian music producer comments on underground hip hop music on social media and overthinks the technicalities of producing hip hop, thereby assuming an inauthentic positionality. This other voice speaks with a stylised cantante (‘sing-song’) intonation pattern to take stances that are opposed to global underground hip hop’s moral framework of authenticity. In contrast to this inauthentic voice, Manmeet’s ‘own’ voice appears as normally authentic and cosmopolitan. In the second narrative, the b-boy and hip hop organiser Bunty uses a similar cantante intonation pattern to achieve a stylistic fusion of two of his ‘own’ voices; his habitual American English speech fuses with his native ‘Indian’ prosody. The prosodic fusion of voices seems to index Bunty’s translocal cosmopolitan positionality in the Delhi hip hop scene as both an American and an Indian. Let me begin this chapter with a few words on cosmopolitan authenticity as a moral framework of global hip hop. Cosmopolitan Authenticity in Global Hip Hop

The two narrators who feature in this chapter, the rapper Manmeet Kaur and the b-boy and community organiser Bunty, are originally from the Punjab, but their lives are characterised by mobility. Bunty lived in New York City as an adolescent and then returned to India, first to Mumbai and then to Delhi, as a young adult. In New York, he picked up breakin and when he returned to India, he started teaching breakin to young people in Mumbai and Delhi, many of whom lived challenging urban lives. Manmeet lived in Mumbai at the time of my fieldwork in 2013, but she would often travel to Delhi and Chandigarh in the Punjab. She was born in Kashmir. After my fieldwork, she lived in Chennai and Goa and travelled in France, Italy, Belgium and Germany to perform her largely English-language soulful hip hop music, collaborate with international artists and record an album. At the time of writing this book, in 2020, Manmeet was artistin-residence in Berlin and Bunty was back in New York City. Can we understand Manmeet and Bunty as some type of hip hop cosmopolitans? Their mobility was made possible partly through their engagements with global hip hop; yet, to some extent, the moral frameworks of global hip hop also restricted their sense of cosmopolitanism. For example, from the moment Manmeet Kaur picked up the mic, she struggled against male dominance in hip hop spheres. Should she be able

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to claim an authentic hip hop positionality for herself ‘even though’ she is a woman? The cosmopolitan voice would say ‘yes, of course!’, yet her implicit – and at time explicit – exclusion from hip hop spaces suggests that there is little or no room in the moral frameworks of global hip hop for non-sexualised femininity. You will meet Manmeet again in the epilogue of this book, where I say more about her positionality as a female artiste in global hip hop. Hip hop cosmopolitanism is a type of transculturation that is different from elite cosmopolitanism. While elite cosmopolitanism essentially uses the racialised economic infrastructures established during European colonialism to cross borders and see difference, hip hop is a type of vernacular cosmopolitanism that articulates a moral obligation to build ‘connective marginalities’ (Osumare, 2001); links between marginalised hip hop heads and spaces across the postcolony. In other words, in the Global Hood (Osumare, 2001) or the Global Hip Hop Nation (Alim, 2009; Morgan & Bennett, 2011) cosmopolitanism gains social value only when it is readily imbued with marginality – perhaps in the form of global Blackness or by growing up in the ghetto/hood/favela/slum/ township – and/or when it grapples with questions of hip hop authenticity (Judy, 2012; McLeod, 2012; Turner, 2017).1 Hip hop authenticity can be described as ‘the tension between a [global] cultural dictate to keep it real and the processes that make this dependent on local contexts, languages, cultures, and understandings of the real’ (Pennycook, 2007b: 101). To claim such authenticity, to keep it real, when you are not Black and not from the hood, becomes a moral question of having to constantly verify that you stay true to the cultural values of both global hip hop and the local environment that produced you (e.g. Dattatreyan, 2020: 163–189; Judy, 2012; Lee, 2010; McLeod, 2012; Simeziane, 2010; Solomon, 2005; Westinen, 2014). When resemiotised as global hip hop authenticity, Blackness becomes a matter of positioning oneself and one’s crew in opposition to the mainstream entertainment industry. ‘Selling out’ to the mainstream is thus the moral opposite of ‘keepin it real’ in the underground. Kahf (2012), who discusses authenticity in Arabic rap in Palestine, maintains that a detailed look at authenticity claims in Palestinian hip hop will reveal that hip hop only maintains its empowering potential and ‘authentic’ voice of the oppressed margins when it positions itself in opposition to the mainstream without the goal of becoming mainstream, or in other words, when it has a reference point in the status quo to which it is responding and against which it is revolting. (Kahf, 2012: 119)

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Looked at from the perspective of such a moral framework of hip hop authenticity, both Bunty’s and Manmeet’s narratives grapple with moral questions of global hip hop authenticity. Yet, they do so in different ways. While Manmeet has no goal of becoming mainstream and orchestrates in a constructed dialogue two voices that starkly contrast in terms of both moral positionality and prosody, an authentic underground voice and a fake mainstream voice, Bunty’s aims to popularise hip hop in India are authenticated through an orchestration of voices in an inner dialogue. Bunty seems to (f)use cantante with his habitual American intonation to achieve a dual positionality as both local and translocal, while Manmeet seems to deploy cantante intonation to establish voice contrasts between narrative figures of the self and the other. In their narratives, the cultural dictate of keepin it real is animated through voices of the self and of the other that take epistemic and deontic stances towards the aesthetics and languages of Indian hip hop. Epistemic stances designate a speaker’s claims to knowledge and evidentiality (Heritage, 2012; Kamio, 1997; Zuczkowski et al., 2017), deontic stances are moral positions about how the world ‘should be’ in the future or in hypothetical time (Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2012; Stevanovic & Svennevig, 2015; for more on stancetaking, see Chapters 2, 7 and 8). Cosmopolitanism, of course, is itself a deontic stance, because it envisions a future world in which difference should be accepted as the new norm (Hannerz, 1992). As Beck (2006) argues, this acceptance of difference creates a thorny problem for the cosmopolitan orientation, since the normalisation of difference has to include and already anticipate anticosmopolitanism. Recent sociolinguistic narrative research on cosmopolitanism has shown how the construction of a non-cosmopolitan voice is central to constructing cosmopolitan selves. Creese and Blackledge (2020) discuss how two migrants in the UK construct a figure of the peasant migrant by means of which they can understand their own migratory identity as cosmopolitan. Similarly, elsewhere (Singh, 2020b), I show how a graffiti writer in Delhi constructs his cosmopolitan migrant positionality in contrastive opposition to a figure of the local racist Delhiites (for related explorations of such constructions of cosmopolitanism, see also Hall, 2019; Martín Rojo & Molina, 2017; McDuie-Ra, 2012b; WilczekWatson, 2016; Woolard, 2016; Zhang, 2018). The narrators who you will meet in this chapter construct their ‘own’ cosmopolitan voices in dialogic response to a voice of an inauthentic other, who interrogates and challenges the imagined moral framework of authenticity in global hip hop. Thus, the two narrators’ agency does not pertain so much to the ways in which they construct their selves, but more about how they normalise

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their ‘own’ voices vis-à-vis the voice of the other. In this chapter, I will show how this normalisation is achieved by prosodic style-shifting. Enregistering Cantante Intonation for Styling and Stylising

Agha’s (2003, 2005, 2007a) notion of enregisterment is useful for beginning to think about how prosodic features become recognisable indexes of how certain types of people speak (see also Sicoli, 2015). Agha (2003: 231) conceptualises enregisterment as semiotic ‘processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms’. As discussed in Chapter  2, such enregisterments establish indexical fields, which indexically link linguistic differences to contrastive voices, styles and stances, which are in turn ideologically linked to social difference (Agha, 2005; Eckert, 2008; Irvine, 2001; Ochs, 1992). Once linguistic features have been enregistered (i.e. have become recognisable indexes for social voices), they become available for style-shifting (Bell, 1984; Coupland, 2007). The prosodic feature of cantante intonation has been enregistered to index ‘Indian’ speech registers; the two narrators can style-shift between degrees of cantante-ness to voice various narrative figures. But the narrators’ transcultural voices do not merely utilise an already enregistered link between cantante and Indian speakers, they also further enregister cantante to index social qualities and positionalities relevant for their futures in global hip hop, such as overthinking technology, aesthetic complicatedness and cultural inauthenticity (in Manmeet’s narrative) and local knowledge, media awareness and translocal hybridity (in Bunty’s narrative). We can thus observe in these narratives a dynamic metapragmatic process between what we could call macro-enregisterments that indexically order linguistic forms in relation to dominant language ideologies and micro-enregisterments that link prosodic features to social qualities by shifting between styles in the interactional real-time unfolding of the narratives (see also Singh, 2020b). Style-shifting is not merely a reflex to social situations or interview tasks. It can also be agentively deployed by speakers to construct new contexts and enregister linguistic forms to become recognisable indexes of social groupings and situations. As explained in Chapter 2, similar to codeswitching, style-shifting can thus be more habitual or situational (styling) and it can be more performative or metaphorical (stylisation) (for a classic account of situational and metaphorical codeswitching, see Blom & Gumperz, 1972). With Bakhtin’s (1986: 89) conceptualisation of dialogism, we could also think of the difference between stylings and

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stylisations as having to do with ‘varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of “our-own-ness”, varying degrees of awareness and detachment’. When we bring the voices of the other into our ‘own’ voices, we can do so in more or less reflexive ways (see also Hastings & Manning, 2004; Rampton, 1999, 2006). Coupland (2007: 146–154) thinks of the distinction between styling and stylisation as mirroring a distinction between performance and high performance (see also Chapter 7). While stylings can be said to be habitual performances of the stylistic repertoires that ‘belong’ to the self, stylisations are high performances that make use of semiotic resources that are associated with others. Drawing on the work of Bauman, as well as Rampton (but see Rampton, 2014), Coupland (2007: 154) understands stylisations as projecting ‘personas, identities and genres other than those that are presumedly current in the speech event’. Stylisations are thus always evaluative metacommentaries on how speakers other than oneself speak (Coupland, 2007: 154). In order to recognise stylisations and not confuse them with stylings, audiences need to hear voice contrasts, which in turn requires certain degrees of enregisterment. To help audiences with recognising voice contrasts, speakers, when stylising, often use ‘emphatic and hyperbolic realisations’ of others’ speech and therefore display what Coupland (2007: 154) calls ‘strategic inauthenticity’. Intonation is a particularly productive semiotic resource for stylings and stylisations (e.g. Gumperz, 1982; Günthner, 1999; Queen, 2001; Selting, 2000). Together with loudness and rhythm, intonation is part of the prosody of speech. Prosody is non-referential, which means that its meanings are decoupled from the semantic meaning of an utterance and this decoupling allows speakers to layer prosodic elements over any utterance that they wish to mark in specific ways, independent of what is being said on the level of word and sentence meaning (Sicoli, 2010, 2015). Intonation, also called tonal movement or pitch, is measured in Hertz (Hz) and is perceived as the ‘melody’ of speech. Usually, only the tonal movements on vowels and voiced consonants carry non-referential meanings. The literature usually distinguishes between five tonal movements: ↘fall, ↗rise, ↘↗fall-rise, ↗↘rise-fall and →level (Brazil, 1997; Halliday & Greaves, 2008: 44–46; O’Grady, 2013: 79–80). I used the software package Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2013) to measure and depict the intonation of utterances in narratives. Sometimes, background noises interfere with the speech and lead to inaccurate depictions of intonation. For instance, in Bunty’s narrative, which was recorded in his flat during Delhi’s hot summer, the sound of a ceiling fan disturbed

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the measurements of Bunty’s intonation, often leading to scattered high-frequency lines and dots in the depictions. Because the data I use here is very different from data collected under laboratory conditions (both in terms of its audio quality and its contextual richness), readers are asked to understand the depictions of intonation that I present in the transcripts below as good-enough approximations of tonal movements. The two narrators in this chapter use a particular intonation pattern, namely cantante (‘sing-song’), to index the voices of the other and contrast these with their ‘own’ voices. A cantante intonation pattern can be described as a quick succession of tonal rises and falls, which endows speech with a certain ‘up-and-down’ or ‘sing-song’ quality (cantante means ‘singing’ in Italian; a language conventionally used for descriptions of musical – and by extension vocal and sonic – styles). Cantante intonation in speech is sometimes stereotypically associated with Hindi and Indian English speakers. We can hear it often when comedians, both professional ones on stage and self-proclaimed ones in our friendship circles, ‘put on an Indian accent’ for humorous purposes. Rampton (1995: 72; see also p. 68), for instance, describes how multicultural British boys used cantante as a prosodic strategy for crossing into the register Stylised Asian English for comedic effect and to playfully mock their teachers and the researcher, thereby renegotiating the social power structures to which they found themselves subjected. I myself repeatedly encountered the cantante intonation pattern during fieldwork and in my many trips to Northern India and when speaking to people of Northern Indian origins. Despite the seeming prevalence of cantante intonation in India, to my knowledge neither its linguistic form nor its interactional and social functions have been studied so far. In the following analysis, I will attend to this gap in the literature and argue that the narrators draw on this macro-enregisterment of cantante intonation indexing ‘Indian’ speech for their intricate style-shifting and orchestrating voices in narratives to ultimately normalise their cosmopolitan and authentic selves in the moral frameworks of global hip hop. The language ideological link between cantante and Indian speech might have a perceptual basis. It might stem from the observation that speakers of Hindi2 and many other North Indian languages chunk their utterances into relatively short prosodic segments, leading to a syllable-timed rhythm in Hindi (Sengar & Mannell, 2012). Inner-circle varieties of Englishes (such as British English, American English and Australian English) are said to have a stress-timed rhythm with approximately equal time between any two stressed syllables in an utterance, independent of the number of syllables in between these stressed

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syllables. In Hindi each syllable, whether stressed or unstressed, receives approximately equal time. This syllable-timed rhythm of Hindi produces short prosodic segments which – importantly here – each carry a tonal movement, usually a rise. Sengar and Mannell (2012) call these short segments in Hindi ‘accentual phrases’ (APs). Each AP has a default rising tone, creating a distinct rise-fall pattern across APs, with the final AP carrying either a rise for interrogatives or a fall for declaratives (Sengar & Mannell, 2012; see also Harnsberger, 1994). Syllable-timed default utterances in Hindi: Declarative: ↗AP ↗AP ↗AP… ↘AP Interrogative: ↗AP ↗AP ↗AP… ↗AP Sengar and Mannell (2012: 152) remark that ‘because of this rise-fall pattern (of APs) most non-Hindi speakers say Hindi sounds very singsong’. The Hindi cantante intonation pattern possibly also influences the way North Indians speak English, depending on their level of bilingualism and their exposure to other Englishes (Fuchs, 2016; Puri, 2013; as I also discuss later in the chapter in relation to the notion of intonational fusion). In all of my interviews with Indian hip hop heads who use English as an additional language, this cantante intonation can be found. These bilinguals seem to use cantante somewhat habitually and it could therefore be regarded as an ‘interference’ of Hindi in their English speech. Yet, in this chapter, what I am interested in is not so much to establish whether or not Indian English speakers or my research participants ‘have’ this intonation as part of their habitual styling, but rather I want to understand how the two narrators style and stylise cantante to construct dialogues with narrative figures that represent a local or Indian perspective and that contrasts or fuses with their ‘own’ cosmopolitan identities. In this chapter, I use the distinction between styling and stylisation in order to analyse the use of cantante to construct dialogues between the voice of the other and the voice of the self. While the speaker might use stylings of cantante as part of their ‘own’ habitual stylistic repertoire, the use of cantante for the voice of the other is stylised in ways similar to Coupland’s strategic inauthenticity. Stylised cantante is hyperbolic, in that it uses a wider range of upward and downward tonal movements than the speakers would habitually do. Thus, we can say that the two narrators make reflexive metacommentaries on how others speak and are. These others, in the two narratives, are local Indians that stand in some kind of moral opposition to the narrators’ own cosmopolitan Indian selves. Using stylised cantante is thus a strategic inauthentication

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to construct the voice of the other, with the effect that the voice of the self is normalised as authentically cosmopolitan within a moral framework of global hip hop, as the first example suggests. Manmeet Kaur: Indian Artists Commenting on Songs

In the cold February of 2013, while settling in in Delhi, I decided to take a short trip to Mumbai and visit Manmeet Kaur, as well as the two emcees Enkore and A-List, who I had contacted on social media beforehand and who had agreed to meet me. In the months to come, I would make further brief visits to Mumbai, to get some idea of how hip hop in Delhi might be different from or similar to hip hop scenes in other Indian metropolises. On this particular trip in February 2013, I was accompanied by BabaAbna, a young man from Berlin volunteering in Delhi at the time, who I had met at the Snoop Lion concert in Gurgaon just a few weeks earlier. As Abna was an emcee and a passionate graffiti writer, he was excited to tag along on my brief research trip to Mumbai in order to experience the city’s hip hop scene, and we were both excited to leave Delhi’s cold and extremely polluted air for a few days and catch the warm ocean breeze in sunny Mumbai. After a 20-hour train ride, Abna and I met Manmeet Kaur in Bandra, Mumbai’s young, hip and partly affluent neighbourhood. After we dropped off our bags at our hostel, Manmeet invited us to join her to go to a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI+) event, where spoken word, comedic and musical performances took place and created a safe space for Mumbai’s cosmopolitan and progressive scene to socialise. Abna and I were excited to learn that Manmeet had organised a slot for us and we instantly agreed to share the stage with her for a few minutes and rap on some beats that she had selected (she rapped in English, Abna and I rapped in German). Sharing a mic on the first night of an ethnographic encounter felt remarkable, I remembered in my field diary afterwards, and in hindsight my meeting with Manmeet in February 2013 in Mumbai fundamentally shaped and changed my ideas about Indian underground hip hop music, cosmopolitanism and gender in Delhi; one of the reasons I decided to start my analysis in this book with her narrative and add an epilogue in which I write about meeting Manmeet again in 2019 in Chandigarh and Delhi and in 2020 in Berlin. On the last afternoon of our four-day stay in Mumbai, Abna and I met up with Manmeet again to do a more formal ‘research interview’, yet the interview was far from formal. We had agreed that I could leave my audio recorder running for the entire time we ‘hung out’ and so our conversations progressed almost entirely organically, even though

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I made some occasional attempts to steer the conversation towards topics I found relevant. Such interviewing techniques are perhaps the reason why narrative is such a prevalent genre in the materials I recorded. When we encounter each other, we tell stories all the time; storytelling seems to me the most natural and economical way to share experiences and bond. We started our conversational interview in a restaurant, where we had freshly made juices and South Indian snacks. We then sat on Chowpatty Beach for two hours or so, overlooking the Arabian Sea and Mumbai’s crescent-shaped coastline crammed with skyscrapers and high-rise apartment blocks. We finally took a taxi ride through central Mumbai to the train station where Abna and I caught the overnight train back to Delhi. The narrative I present below is taken from the taxi-ride episode. Our conversations were always engaged and focused, yet also relaxed, humorous and sincere. We discussed (and narrated) important topics such as hip hop education, misogyny and the glorification of violence in rap music, travelling, growing up and social media practices. While we did not always agree on each other’s positions, we managed to maintain an amicable and empathetic atmosphere throughout our conversations. After all, we were real hip hop heads and cosmopolitans who celebrate difference. The following narrative was recorded towards the end of our meeting, in a taxi traversing through central Mumbai. After rappin on the LGBTQI+ event and hanging out for several hours, sharing food, stories and opinions, we had now established significant rapport and trust and spoke freely about whatever crossed our mind. At this point, Abna had just suggested that we should all produce a song together and we were excited about the idea. Manmeet evaluated his suggestion with the following words: yeah let’s make a fucking raw song! We all laughed and after a few seconds of silence, she started with a narrative in which she constructs two narrative figures: an Indian social media user who comments on the quality of songs uploaded by underground hip hop artists, and herself, responding to these comments. Interview with Manmeet Kaur and BabaAbna, Mumbai 2013 {09:25–10:05} Pitch settings: Lower: 200 Hz; Upper: 700 Hz3 Background noise: Traffic, cars beeping

01 Manmeet:

in india it’s a tendency. (1.3)

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02

artists will (.)

03

when you share a song on their wall. ((on social media)) (0.7)

04

they’ll comment on the @@☺ quality of the recording.

05 Jaspal:

mhm

06 Manmeet:

☺ they will never talk about what’s spoken.

07 Jaspal:

mhm

08 Abna:

@@

09 Manmeet:

@@

10 Jaspal:

so what would they say (.) like?

11 Manmeet:

they were like.

12

“e:::r y’know what I think the overdubs should have been a little more subtle.” ((cantante, lento))

13 Abna:

14 Manmeet:

@@

“y’know I think you should’ve e:::rextended the beat and done like this.” ((cantante, lento))

15 Abna:

@@

16 Manmeet:

and I just- I just (.) say “that’s really dope.”

17 18 Jaspal:

“you know if you think like that”. mhm

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19 Manmeet:

“if there’s a thought provoked in ME”.

20 “because of the song and just appreciate that man”. ((allegro)) 21 Jaspal: mhm 22 Manmeet:

“what a concept dude what what a thing man”.

23 what’s this deal with mixing and ((car beeping)) 24 Jaspal: nah 25 Manmeet: 26 Jaspal:

“we’re fuckin underground man what do you expect?” ☺ yeah yeah

Here, Manmeet narrates how Indian hip hop artists on social media, when you share with them a song, have a tendency to comment on the quality of the recording (Line 04) rather than on the content of the lyrics (Line  06). Her smile voice in those two lines suggests that she frames this practice as somewhat ridiculous. When I prompt her to elaborate on what exactly they would say (Line 10), she uses stylised cantante intonation to construct a hypothetical voice of these commentators as a narrative figure of the other (Lines 12, 14). Note that, of course, the original sources of the voices that she ‘quotes’ were never spoken, but rather written as comments on social media, and therefore did not contain any intonation pattern or prosodic style at all. Still, prompted by my question, Manmeet animates the voice of the other with a stylised cantante intonation to index some of the narrative figure’s social characteristics. This corroborates Tannen’s (2007) suggestion that constructed dialogues are not verbatim or authentically reproduced speech, but rather stylisations of how certain groups of people are imagined to stereotypically and hypothetically speak (see also Irvine, 2001). And Manmeet seems reflexively aware of her stereotyping when she frames her story as reflecting a tendency (Line 01),

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rather than as recounting an actual semiotic surface. Her stylisations of cantante are thus a semiotic-surface level document of her active reception of others’ speech (Vološinov, 1973) and her metapragmatic awareness of languaging in social media. Let us take a closer look at those two instances of the cantante stylisations of the voice of the other in Lines 12 and 14.

“er::::::::::::::: ↗ykn↘what ↗I  ↗↘think ↘the ↗overdubs  ↘should have →been ↘ little more  ↘sub ↗tle”.

“↗ykn I ↗↘think ↘y ↗should have  er::::::::::::: (.) ↗ex ↘tend ↗ed ↘the ↗beat ↘n done ↗like ↗this”.

We first notice that, compared to all the other utterances in this narrative, these two utterances contain many syllables (19 and 16 syllables), making them roughly twice as long (each around 4 seconds) compared to the other utterances in this narrative (ranging between 1.3 and 2.3 seconds). The long-utterance length might already index the complicatedness with which the Indian artists comment on songs that have been shared on their wall. These indexes of long-utterance length are combined with stylised cantante. Manmeet achieves this stylisation by accentuating the upward and downward tonal movement. The three highest frequencies of the entire narrative can be found in these two utterances: 566 Hz on ↗ykn↘what (Line  12), 583  Hz on ↗↘think (Line  12) and 649  Hz on ↗↘think (Line 14). But, it is not only the absolute pitch levels that make these two utterances stand out prosodically from the rest of this narrative. It is also their staccato rhythm, in which each syllable receives equal stress and is detached from the following syllable. The long-utterance length in combination with staccato allows each segment or accentual phrase (Sengar & Mannell, 2012) to carry a marked upward or downward tonal movement. While these tonal movements are accentuated, even exaggerated, in utterance-initial position, they can be found also in utterance-final position, as can be seen in the two high-rise terminals on ↘sub↗tle (Line 12) and ↘n done ↗like↗this (Line 14).

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The two voicings of the social media commenter show parallel syntactical and intonational structure. In her discussion of a narrative about race, conflict and friendship told by the white high school student Brand One, Bucholtz (1999: 450) notes that ‘the use of structural parallelism in constructed dialogue implicitly differentiates or associates various narrative figures by highlighting differences or similarities in their speech’. The poetic parallelism of Lines 12 and 14 enregisters stylised cantante as belonging to the narrative figure of an inauthentic computer nerd who knows much (too much?) about sound and musical aesthetics but does not understand what really matters for underground music: rawness and dopeness. It must be noted here that Manmeet styles cantante throughout her speech as a narrator. This appears as normal and unmarked; it is just the way she habitually speaks. Cantante is part of her highly fluent and nativised styling when speaking Indian English. However, when she animates the narrative figure of the local Indian artist, she seems to hyperbolically stylise this cantante pattern as part of a strategic inauthentication (Coupland, 2007) to construct the voice of the Indian artist commenting on social media. The differences are in the degree of cantante-ness, and although subtle, the difference is significant enough to establish a contrast of voices (Agha, 2005). Her use of stylised cantante can thus be read as a metaphorical codeswitch (Blom & Gumperz, 1972), which draws on differences in the degree of cantante-ness to contrast her own voice with that of the other. It is important to stress that cantante does not do the contrastive work alone. Rather cantante gets enregistered into a larger stylistic repertoire that can be used to construct the voice of the Indian artist commenting on social media. The repertoire includes sound engineers’ technical jargon (overdubs), hedges (little more subtle), hesitation (er:::) and epistemic stance markers (you know what). Furthermore, the narrative figure evaluates underground hip hop music with retrospective deontic stances (should have), which makes them appear as an annoying know-it-all who is entirely dissociated from what really matters in rap: dope lyricism and the expression and uptake of thoughts and ideas. All these stylistic markers, together with cantante, are part of Manmeet’s micro-enregistering in the real-time unfolding of the narrative. Her stylisation strategically inauthenticates the voice of the figure of an Indian artist, who overthinks musical technicality and uses social media to showcase their knowledge of professional audio-recording, rather than ‘just’ appreciating your raw underground music that you shared with them. It can therefore be said that stylised cantante intonation, in combination with other semiotic resources, functions as an othering device, which allows Manmeet to

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mark a stretch of reported speech as belonging to a narrative figure other than herself, whose moral positionalities represent the alterity against which her ‘own’ identity becomes normalised. The stylised cantante voice of the narrative figure of the Indian artist contrasts with both the voice of the narrator in the storytelling world and her voice as a narrative figure in the story world. Her ‘own’ voice as a narrative figure sounds normal, i.e. exactly like her voice as a narrator. In Line  16, the narrator voices herself in the story world: “that’s really ↘dope”. This evaluation contains only four syllables, with the final syllable containing a fall, perhaps to emphasise the contrast with the high-rise terminals of Lines 12 and 14. In light of Manmeet’s crisp and cool evaluation in Line 16, the previous stylised cantante intonation now appears as even more ridiculous, more abnormal, so to say. In contrast to the highly animated and long-winded technically detailed evaluation of the Indian artist, her ‘own’ voice appears as normalised: it just appreciates good music, no matter how expensively it was produced, mixed and mastered. Note that she uses the little word just in her quotative construction I just say (Line 16), which demonstrates her metapragmatic awareness of her normalising in the interactional real time. In hip hop jargon, dope means good (see e.g. Ice-T’s lyric in his song I’m your Pusher: ‘Dope rhymes, dope beats, dope cuts’). Using dope as a positive evaluator indexes membership in underground hip hop culture. Like Rawdr’s getting down, discussed in Chapter 1, dope is part of a lexical register that evokes hip hop authenticity and constructs a b-boy stance (see also Prabh Deep’s narrative in Chapter 5). Saying that something is dope means that you acknowledge the content, the flow and the creativity of the song without getting too stuck in an over-analysis of technicalities. Therefore, the low quality of a rap recording can also be read as an index of the song’s dopeness and its underground rawness. If an emcee, deejay or beat producer does not have the money to pay a professional studio to do the mixing and mastering necessary to make the sound quality of a song perfect according to some mainstream industry standards, it means that they have not sold out and continue to drop music for their homies free of commercial pressures. It’s just real hip hop. A beat and a mic. In Lines 16–22, Manmeet provides us with a number of further examples of how she herself would evaluate a friend’s song when they share it on her wall. She constructs five comments for herself, which emphasise her appreciation of the lyricism and the content of the song, rather than the technical qualities of the recording. She emphasises that dope songs provoke thoughts in her (note the emphasis on ME, Line 19) and

Othering Voices  105

make her think. If a dope emcee spits dope rhymes and dope concepts, she gets it, no matter how technically perfect the track was recorded. This ideology is very common in underground hip hop and it speaks to the style over technique debate, which I discuss in some more detail in Chapter 7. This appreciation of content and lyricism in contrast to technicality connects her own positionality as an underground hip hop artist to the positionality of her underground hip hop friends. Her ‘own’ transcultural voice in this narrative directly opposes the figure of the Indian artist who overthinks music, and she rhetorically attempts to persuade this figure to align with underground hip hop: ‘we’re fucking underground man what do you expect?’ Underground is here evoked as a key signifier in the hip hop cultural sphere to index authenticity and opposition to the mainstream entertainment industry. In her narrative, the evocation of hip hop underground establishes a cosmopolitan connection, or a connective marginality (Osumare, 2001) between her and BabaAbna and me, two hip hop travellers from Germany. By telling us a story about the inauthenticity of some Indian artists, she constructs the cosmopolitan hip hop underground in opposition to the local Indian mainstream, represented by the Indian artist who overthinks music and speaks with cantante intonation. The orchestration of the different voices is also gendered. Manmeet uses dude (Line  22) and man (Lines  20, 22, 25) as indexes of cool solidarity (Kiesling, 2004) to address friends who share some of their music on her wall. Although these terms of address are denotationally masculine, Manmeet uses them here as generic discourse markers (as she did throughout our conversational interview and in the many interactions I had with her in the years to follow) to emphasise her cool solidarity bonds with fellow musicians and friends, no matter if they are male or female (yet almost all are male in hip hop cultural worlds). Nevertheless, I would argue that her use of dude and man here are not genderless. They seem to play into her construction of her identity as an authentic underground hip hop artist who emphasises rawness, dopeness and detachment from the commercial mainstream. As also argued in my discussion of the b-boy stance in Chapter  7, authenticity seems to be tightly interwoven with masculinity in hip hop’s moral frameworks. Manmeet uses stylised cantante to contrast her own voice with the voice of the local Indian artist commenting on songs on social media. This stylisation is possible because cantante is already enregistered as an index of ‘Indian’ speech. By hyperbolically stylising cantante when constructing the voice of the Indian artist, she enregisters further indexical

106  Transcultural Voices

meanings, such as overthinking, mainstream inauthenticity and localness. In contrast to this voice of the other, her ‘own’ voice appears as normalised; a positionality that she uses to present herself as authentic in global underground hip hop cosmopolitanism (for further examples of the ideological contrast between local and cosmopolitan, see Chapter 5; see also Singh, 2020b). Through the next example, I will further explore how cantante can be used as a prosodic resource to construct a positionality that wrestles with itself in an inner dialogue about the potential of being seen as inauthentic. Moreover, the narrator constructs a complex cosmopolitan voice for the self; one that is both translocal and local at the same time. Bunty: Restructuring the Organisation

In his narrative Bunty explains how he plans to restructure his hip hop community centre in Delhi, in order to tap into the Hindi-language media industry in the future. Bunty (a self-chosen pseudonym) is a well-known b-boy and hip hop activist in India. He was born and raised in the Punjab, then moved to New York City as a young teenager and returned to India in his early twenties. Bunty started breakin in New York City in the 1990s and upon returning to India in the early 2000s he teamed up with local breakers to organise breakin workshops in Mumbai. After living in Mumbai for several years, he resettled to Delhi, where he set up a hip hop organisation for young breakers to practise and socialise. Many of my research participants accredited Bunty with popularising or even ‘bringing’ breakin to India. He himself, however, always emphasised that breakin had already been practiced in India in the 1980s, long before he returned from America. Just because it wasn’t videotaped, doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, I remember him saying to me on several occasions. In all the places where Bunty has lived, he has acquired the respective native languages, i.e. Punjabi, New York City-inflected American English and Mumbai-inflected Hindi (Bambaiyaa Hindi), later Delhi-inflected Hindi (Khariboli). When speaking English – with me at least – Bunty largely sounded like a New Yorker; however, his American partner who was living with him in Delhi at the time once jokingly commented that Bunty sounds more and more like an Indian the longer they stayed in India. She said that he sometimes goes up and down like…, and then ‘sung’ an intonational cantante melody and moved her index finger up and down in a wavy fashion. Bunty simply smiled and said ☺ yeah in response to his partner’s metalinguistic evaluation.

Othering Voices  107

Bunty falls outside of my imposed categorisation of my research participants as either ‘locals’ or ‘travellers’ and instead occupies a hybrid positionality in Delhi’s hip hop scene that is, in part, constructed through his ability to speak local versions of Hindi fluently with locals as well as his ability to speak New York City-inflected American English with travellers, visiting hip hop heads and international media representatives. When speaking English, with me, Bunty largely orients towards American English intonation norms. His usage of the cantante intonation at specific times in our interview can thus be read as fulfilling the interactional purpose of highlighting his localness. In the narrative presented below, Bunty seems to use cantante strategically to index a voice that is knowledgeable of the local context in which he runs his hip hop organisation. Thus, it does not seem to be the case that Indian speech patterns unconsciously or somewhat randomly creep into the speech of Americans/foreigners living in India. Rather, it seems that cantante (and perhaps other variables indexing Indianness, such as the retroflexing of consonants) becomes available as a semiotic resource for cosmopolitan Indians with nativised Englishes to agentively create for themselves a voice that is invested in and knowledgeable of the local Indian context. When I met Bunty in 2013, he had been, for several years, running a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that promotes hip hop culture in an informal settlement in Delhi. Breakers, emcees, beatboxers, producers, graffiti writers and hip hop-affiliated friends would get together in Bunty’s private flat where they would practise, battle, socialise and learn about hip hop. At the time of my fieldwork, Bunty and his partner were planning to leave the hectic city life of Delhi and settle down elsewhere in India. However, he wanted to make sure that his NGO would live on and so was planning to convert it into a private limited company. In this way, he trusted, they would be able to generate money and build sustainable structures in which hip hop culture in Delhi and India could flourish. In the narrative that I selected from the two-and-a-half-hour long interview we conducted in his flat in May 2013, five months after I had first met him, Bunty explains how he wants to restructure his organisation. He says that he wants to focus less on breakin and more on hip hop music production in order to create an idiosyncratically Indian hip hop sound, which caters to a mostly Hindi-speaking audience and that has the potential to enter the popular Indian mediascape. In the moral framework of hip hop this could be seen as problematical and potentially inauthentic, since breakin is often considered the rawest and least commercial element

108  Transcultural Voices

of hip hop (see e.g. Emdin, 2013; Schloss, 2009; also discussed further in Chapter  7). Much of Bunty’s narrative attends to this potentially inauthentic move: intonational style-shifting helps him explain and justify his decision to discontinue the breakin centre and instead turn towards hip hop music production, which promises financial stability for his organisation. Just two months prior to our interview, Bunty and a few of the young Delhi-based breakers who practised under his mentorship travelled to Mumbai to feature in a mainstream Bollywood film. The film was about to be released. He mentions this film as an opener for his narrative. He anticipates a wider recognition for his NGO among Hindi-speaking audiences after the release of the film and he explains what kinds of structures he needs to build to make best use of their anticipated popular recognition. Interview with Bunty, Delhi 2013 {09:25–10:05} Pitch settings: Lower: 90 Hz; Upper: 220 Hz Noise: Loud fan on the ceiling

01 Bunty: yeah

02

but now what I’m gonna do. (2.8)

03

is with.

04

[NGO] is in a movie now.

05 Jaspal:

yeah tell me about that.

06 Bunty:

so that’s BIG right.

76

10

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07

this will be playing in theatres all over (0.5)

08

and it just gives us aNOther legitimacy. ((cantante))

09

IN india like people in india you know (0.8)

10

it’s like before we got in press (.)

11

and it’s all english reading people.

12

or people (xxx xxx xxx).

13

nobody reads that shit.

14 Jaspal: yeah

15 Bunty:

but NOW it’s like something a MEdium (.)

16

which is POP.

17

which is like “OHHHHHH it’s DAMN” (0.6)

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18

so what I wanna do (1.0) ((cantante))

19

is (0.6)

20

I’m gonna REstructure. ((cantante))

21

like I’m not gonna (.) ((cantante))

22

for NOW (0.5) ((cantante))

23

for at least a few MONTHS. ((cantante))

24

not REALly (.) ((cantante))

25

FOcus ON. ((cantante))

26

like the b-boys have a b-boy centre.

27

we can’t afford it right now. (0.5)

28

honestly. (0.6)

29

AND. (0.8)

Othering Voices  111

30

what I’m planning to DO (.) is get (0.7) 8

4

31

the older kids (.)

32

like zan (0.6)

33

all the rappers (0.5)

34

and getting wazulu here (1.0)

35

and opening a STUdio (.)

36

where they can WORK and make some solid (.) music.

37

cuz I think that’s what’s you know (0.8)

38

I think with hip hop in INdia. ((cantante))

39

that’s all it needs now.

40

like the b-boys are there they’re gonna do their thing.

41

no matter what.

6

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42

you know no one is gonna stop that.

43

but there ISn’t that MUsic (0.5)

44

there’s a disconnect.

Bunty’s ‘Indian’ and ‘American’ voice

Bunty’s narrative is about his future plans to make his organisation successful in India. He identifies music production as a need or lack in Indian hip hop (Lines 37–38 and 42–43) and he suggests that opening a music production studio would enable members of his organisation to create an Indian version of hip hop music (Lines 29–38). This future plan is the complicating action of the narrative, which is preceded by an orientation about his anticipation of the popular recognition his organisation will receive after the release of the Hindi-language Bollywood film (Lines 4–17). The causal link so in Line 18 logically conjoins the two parts and presents the complicating action as a consequence of the orientation. This causality, as I will argue below, is justified by orchestrating a voice that speaks in the heteroglossic deep structure to which the narrator responds in an inner dialogue. However, for now, let me make the simpler claim that Bunty uses a cantante intonation pattern layered over his American English speech. This layering of voices (Hill, 1995) allows him to construct a hybrid positionality for himself, one that is both authentically local and authentically translocal. This authentic cosmopolitanism puts him in a position from which he can critically evaluate the Indian mediascape and make informed suggestions about restructuring his organisation in the future. In the orientation, the narrator distinguishes between two types of media in India on the basis of language. On the one hand, we have the Indian English-language press, and perhaps the international press that circulates in India, in which his organisation had previously featured (Lines  10–13). On the other hand, we have the Indian Hindi-language media, including the Bollywood film industry, in which his organisation will now become known through the release of the film. Bunty takes evaluative stances towards these two types of Indian media. The Hindi-language media is understood as popular (Line  16) and big

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(Line  06) and something relevant to their organisation now (Lines  02, 15), whereas the English-language press, which was relevant to them before (Line  10), is belittled: nobody reads that shit (Line  13). In this rendering, perhaps contrary to mainstream imaginations, the globalised English media operates on smaller scales of circulation and relevance compared to the local Hindi media. The recognition his organisation has previously received from an English-reading Indian elite and an international readership thus contrasts with the legitimacy Bunty anticipates his organisation will receive in the popular Hindi media after the release of the film in India and from people in India (Lines 08–09). This assessment of the Indian mediascape legitimises his later argument to restructure his organisation in the near future and turn towards producing Indian hip hop music targeted towards the local, Hindi-speaking masses (for a similar language ideological assessment, see Daku’s narrative in Chapter 5). Bunty’s localisation on the argumentative level co-occurs with what we could read as a localisation of his prosodic voice. In Lines  8 and 9, Bunty creates an ‘Indian’ voice by styling cantante intonation. The intonational patterns resemble Manmeet Kaur’s stylisation of the Indian artist commenting on social media. The two accentuated rise-falls on ↗and ↗it just ↘gives (182 Hz) ↗us ↗ a↘NOther (193 Hz) are combined with a staccato rhythm and a number of less accentuated up and down tonal movements and a high-rise terminal. Bunty’s ‘Indian’ voice legitimising the NGO in India

↗and­  ↗ it just  ↘gives

↗us ↗ a↘NOther  ↘le  ↘giti  ↘ma  ↗cy.



↘IN ↘india like    ↘people  ↗in   ↘india  ↘you know. On the level of referential content, these two utterances suggest that the organisation – and by extension Indian hip hop more generally – gains local legitimacy for people in India, who, it is implied, consume Hindi-language Bollywood films. The ‘Indian-sounding’ prosody of

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cantante thus co-occurs with Bunty’s expression of his knowledge of the Indian mediascape. More precisely, cantante seems to indexically iconise (Irvine, 2001) his knowledge of the local. While Bunty’s reasons for choosing to use this specific cantante intonation pattern cannot be determined ultimately of course, it seems important to stress that cantante is used in the moment in which Bunty speaks about the future legitimacy of his organisation in India. Bunty’s animated and explanatory voice in Lines  8 and 9 contrasts with his cool ‘American’ voice that he constructs in Lines 10–15. While his habitual English speech always sounds ‘American’, in the same way that Manmeet Kaur’s English speech always sounded ‘Indian’, Bunty now shifts into a hip hop-accented American style, a kind of b-boy voice register. Bunty’s ‘American’ voice belittling the English press

10

it’s like before we got in press (.) 23

11

21

and it’s all english reading people. ((allegro, diminuendo)) 27

12

96

13

23

or people (xxx xxx xxx). ((allegro, diminuendo)) 23

nobody reads that shit. ((creaky))

In Line 10, we see an intonation pattern that resembles the beginning of a cantante intonation pattern again. However, other prosodic features that enter Bunty’s delicate styling make his utterance sound much less like the styled cantante he used before. From Line 10 onwards, Bunty suddenly sounds much more ‘American’, his intona`tion is somewhat ‘flat’ – which contrasts starkly with the sing-song ‘up and down’ typical of cantante. The utterances in Lines 11 and 12 are spoken in a fast-paced rhythm (allegro) and he gradually decreases the volume (diminuendo), leading to three incomprehensible syllables in the transcription

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(xxx xxx xxx). In his evaluation of the English-language press, he also uses a creaky voice (Line  13) (for more on the indexicality of creaky voice, see Mendoza-Denton, 2011). These voice qualities perceptually endow his speech with some kind of relaxed cool, perhaps most easily recognised in the transcript by the use of the taboo lexeme shit. The brief, allegro, diminuendo, evaluation of the English-language press is presented as given, presupposed and non-negotiable knowledge; a mere apposition to Bunty’s main argument. The negative evaluation of the English press is presented as shared knowledge among hip hop heads like us. I align with him by saying yeah (Line 14), thereby normalising our epistemic positionality as given; as something we agree upon and do not even have to discuss. Bunty continues in Line 15 with his ‘American’ voice, using three falls and no cantante pattern. In contrast to the ‘flat’ intonation in Lines 10– 13, however, the ‘American’ voice here is much more animated and presents new information, namely it magnifies the Hindi-language media. However, it never sounds ‘Indian’. He uses a creaky voice on POP and on the constructed dialogue “OHHHHHH it’s DAMN” to positively evaluate the popular medium of Bollywood. Bunty’s ‘American’ voice aggrandising Indian popular media

15

but NOW it’s like something a MEdium (.)

16

which is POP ((creaky))

17

which is like “OHHHHHH it’s DAMN” (0.6) ((creaky))

To sum up my analyses so far, Bunty seems to use cantante intonation patterns to construct an ‘Indian’ voice to claim local legitimacy for his organisation (Lines  08–09). This ‘Indian’ voice contrasts with the distinct styling of his ‘American’ voice, with which he belittles the English-language press (Lines  10–13) and magnifies the Hindi-language media (Lines  15–17). I would contend that this voice

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contrast is constructed by stylistically introjecting into his ‘normal’ American English speech two further voice registers: an ‘Indian’ quality of cantante intonation, and that this ‘Indian’ quality in turn also constructs the particular positionality of his ‘American’ voice, which now appears as hybrid and therefore specifically knowledgeable of the Indian mediascape. Different from Manmeet Kaur’s stylised animation of the voice of the other speaking in a constructed dialogue, Bunty here seems to style cantante rather than stylise it (as discussed above, on the distinction between styling and stylisation, see Coupland, 2007). He does not seem to use cantante to establish a voice contrast between a cosmopolitan self and a local other. Rather, he seems to layer over his American English speech an Indian-sounding intonation contour to construct himself as translocal; as American and Indian. Cantante thus does not function as an othering device in Bunty’s narrative in the same way as it did in Manmeet’s narrative. Rather, cantante can be understood as a hybridising device. Bunty appears as glocal: as both Indian and American. This reflects his hybrid positionality in the Delhi hip hop scene. Bunty is not like a hip hop tourist, ambassador or traveller (or researcher) who looks at Indian hip hop from the outside – Bunty is a local; and he uses local intonational strategies to envision how he can make his organisation grow in the local context. But Bunty is also not like any other local Indian hip hop head; he can bring to the table the sociocultural and linguistic competences he has acquired as a teenager in New York City to expose the English-language media in India as elitist and insignificant for Indian pop culture. While his claim for local legitimacy is articulated in the voice of a local insider, the Indian mediascape is hybridly evaluated both in his local voice and in his American voice. These complex narrative positioning practices achieved through the delicate orchestration of intonation patterns present Bunty as a translocal hip hop head who knows intimately how to navigate the global in the local. Bunty’s summons–answer sequences

Cantante intonation not only flavours Bunty’s speech to allow him to index local personae, but it also functions as a dialogic summons–answer (SA) sequence (Schegloff, 1968). The sequence allows the narrator to dialogically orchestrate antagonistic voices and thereby manage knowledge about hip hop authenticity. Bunty constructs two voices, a summoner and

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an answerer, which occupy opposing epistemic and deontic stances in the heteroglossic deep structure. By orchestrating these voices, Bunty constructs an inner dialogue in which authenticity has already been dealt with and now appears as non-negotiable. Ultimately, his new epistemic position deontically (morally) justifies his future plans for hip hop in India. As mentioned, to my knowledge no research has been conducted exploring the communicative and social meaningfulness of this ‘Indian’ cantante intonation pattern. Judging from my own impressionistic experiences while growing up around North Indian languages and Indian-inflected dialects of English and German, the rise component seems to signal that a speaker wants to ‘test out’ their audience’s ability to finish the utterance. Like a teacher who would use a rising tone in the middle of an utterance and wait for their class to finish the utterance. However, the Indian speaker ‘gives away’ the correct answer straight away, demonstrating their knowledge and social status to hold the floor. The rise component in this interpretation would not be a genuine question, but rather a strategy to summon the listeners and keep their activity of listening high, only for the speaker to shine with their ‘own’ knowledge. When I was searching for scientific support for my impressionistic reading, I found that the linguistic literature on Hindi and Indian English prosody reports that, compared to inner-circle Englishes natives, Hindi and Indian English speakers chunk their utterances into much shorter segments, called ‘accentual phrases’ (Sengar & Mannell, 2012), leading to a syllable-timed rhythm typical of Hindi and also Indian English (Fuchs, 2016; Puri, 2013). Each accentual phrase carries a rise pattern (and a rise or fall in the utterance-final AP). These observations support the idea that ‘most non-Hindi speakers say Hindi sounds very singsong’ (Sengar & Mannell, 2012: 152). This analysis supports my reading of Bunty’s use of cantante as evoking Indianness. However, it does not say much about the interactive or social meaningfulness of the cantante intonation apart from it being a default pattern in Hindi. While the literature describes the default Hindi utterance as a series of rising APs with the final tone being either a rise (for interrogatives) or a fall (for declaratives), Bunty uses not only multiple rises, but also multiple falls. Furthermore, all the studies on Indian intonation that I found use experiments or corpus analysis in an attempt to describe ‘Indian English’ or ‘Hindi’ as languages or varieties in their totality, making universal claims about the nature of intonation and rhythm in these codes. None of the studies discusses the details of situated stancetaking and strategic positioning in conversation and interactive narrative. In the following discussion, I attend to this gap in the literature.

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In order to analyse Bunty’s intricate positioning work in his narrative, I propose to understand the rise component of the cantante intonation as a ‘summons’ and the fall component as an ‘answer’. By assuming both roles, summoner and answerer, Bunty dialogically manages epistemic and deontic stances in an inner dialogue and so attends to possible questions and critique about the authenticity of the closure of the b-boy centre that could be levelled against him. My impressionistic interpretation of the social meaningfulness of the cantante pattern as summons and answer is surely influenced by discussions of the functions of rising and falling intonation in the English-speaking world, or perhaps even universally. As Cruttenden (1997: 163) contends, there seem to exist ‘near-universal differences between the use of falling tones on the one hand and the use of rising tones on the other’. Drawing from his cross-linguistic survey, Cruttenden is able to list groups of near-universal meanings for falling tones and rising tones. Falling tones are connected to neutral statements; they occur in sentence-final position; and they function as questions with neutral question words or as commands. Rising tones are connected to implicational or tentative statements; they occur in sentence-non-final position; and they function as questions, sympathetic question words or requests. In American and British Englishes, falls are generally associated with declarative statements and certainty, while rises are generally associated with questions or uncertainty inviting a response (Wells, 1996: 15–36). Lakoff’s introspective feminist account links rising intonation to female speech, politeness, hesitation and an ‘unwillingness to assert an opinion’ (Lakoff, 1973: 56) and ‘seeking for confirmation’ (Lakoff, 1973: 55) from the addressee. Responsiveness is also underlined in Tench (1996: 5), when he states that rising intonation invites the hearer to complete the utterance. However, telling for my case, Tench (1996: 5) also asserts that rising intonation could signal that the speaker is not ready to give up the floor. Rising intonation has also been studied in so-called uptalk, or high-rise terminal. Uptalk describes declarative sentences in which a rising intonation is used on a final element. Uptalk has been documented in the entire English-speaking world from New Zealand (Warren & Britain, 2000), to Australia (Fletcher & Harrington, 2001) and North America (Ching, 1982). Research has found that uptalk can have a range of interactive functions, including checking knowledge with interlocutors, inviting a response from audiences, structuring information and establishing interpersonal relationships (for an overview, see Warren, 2016: 56–68). Uptalk seems very similar to what I found in Bunty’s and Manmeet Kaur’s narratives and it might be possible that the worldwide

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proliferation of uptalk enforces the two cosmopolitan narrators’ use of rising intonation in these narratives. Warren (2016: 94) fleetingly mentions a possible connection between rising intonation in Indian Englishes and uptalk, but laments that the sparsity and decontextualised types of analysis in studies of intonation in Indian Englishes make it impossible to fully understand this connection. The functions of uptalk or rising intonation have mostly been studied, often introspectively, within two-party or multiparty interaction. Rising intonations seem to have the interactive function of inviting a response from another speaker, while falling intonations seem to evoke finality and discourage a response. As I will show in the remainder of this chapter, Bunty uses these general interactive indexicalities of rising and falling intonation for his own dialogic styling of two different narrative figures in his narrative. While Bunty, the narrator, holds the floor, he dialogically constructs two voices interacting in an inner dialogue: a summoner and an answerer. The first voice, indexed by the rise component, asks a question. The second voice, indexed by the fall component, provides an answer. The orchestration of two voices allows Bunty to take an epistemic stance of increased knowledgeability in the interactive world of the interview. As far as I am aware, no research has understood intonation from such a perspective of dialogism. I deploy Schegloff’s (1968) discussion of an SA sequence as a way of revealing the dialogism inherent in this cantante intonation pattern. Schegloff (1968: 1080) describes the summons part as an ‘attention getting device’, which could be a telephone ring, a term of address (e.g. ‘Madam?’), a courtesy phrase (e.g. ‘pardon me?’) or a physical device (e.g. tapping someone’s shoulder). He also mentions that ‘[s]ummons items may have a distinctive rising terminal juncture, a raising of the voice pitch in a quasi-interrogative fashion’ (Schegloff, 1968: 1081). The rising intonation in the summons opens a transition relevance place (TRP) (Sacks et  al., 1974; Selting, 2000), and in Schegloff’s (1968: 1083–1084) conceptualisation, therefore, an answer is ‘expectable’ or ‘conditionally relevant’. He thus sees these SA sequences as a unit, rather than as two separate utterances, with such units later called ‘pair types’ or ‘adjacency pairs’ (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973). Schegloff and Sacks (1973: 74) define adjacency pairs with the following five features: ( 1) Two utterance length. (2) Adjacent positioning of component utterances. (3) Different speakers producing each utterance.

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( 4) Relative ordering of parts. (5) Discriminative relations. The type of SA sequence that is studied here amends feature (1) to include multipart utterances, but more importantly it violates feature (3). Schegloff and Sacks only discuss cases in which a second speaker takes the turn and provides the answer. However, in Bunty’s narrative the summoner does not give up the floor but provides the answer himself. This allows the narrator, as I will argue, to orchestrate two voices, which are differentiated by their epistemic and deontic stances. By assuming the role of both the summoner and the answerer, the narrator, Bunty, presents himself as having already attended to questions concerning hip hop authenticity. Consider Lines 11–14. After the narrator has provided an orientation in which he evaluates the Indian mediascape, he starts with his complicating action about his plans to restructure his organisation in the future. Bunty uses the cantante intonation pattern over the stretch of 12 tone units. I will assign each rise component to a ‘summons’ (S) and each fall component to an ‘answer’ (A): SA sequence 4.1: Restructure 65

3

18   S

so what I wanna ↗do. (1.0) ((cantante))

19  A

↘is (0.6)

20  S

I’m gna ↗REstructure. ((cantante))

21   S

like I’m not ↗gonna (.) ((cantante))

22  S

for ↗NOW (0.5) ((cantante))

23  S

for at ↗least a few →MONTHS. ((cantante))

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24  S

not ↗REALly (.) ((cantante))

25  S

FO↗cus ↗ON. ((cantante))

26  A

like ↘the ↘b-boys have a ↘b-boy ↘centre.

27  A

↘we ↘can’t ↘afford it ↘right ↘now. (0.5)

28  A

↘ honestly. (0.6)

36

41

On the content level, this is the complicating action in this narrative. Bunty wants to restructure his organisation and he brings up the word ↗REstructure. However, before explicitly saying what exactly he wants to restructure, he engages in a series of qualifications (constructed with rise components) that seem to ward off a number of criticisms that might be levelled against him. He emphasises that this restructuring will only last for a few months, during which he will not ↗REALly focus on facilitating the breakers of the neighbourhood. This is potentially an inauthentic proposition within hip hop discourse. Saying that one does not want to continue with promoting and facilitating breakin culture could easily be construed by other hip hop heads, in this case me, the travelling hip hop ethnographer, as disrespecting the true values of hip hop and the each-one-teach-one informal types of pedagogies inherent in breakin (on ageing breakers and their pedagogical relationship to the scene, see also Fogarty, 2012a). In light of this ideological pressure of hip hop authenticity, Bunty’s many pauses and hedges and his uncertainty expressed through rising tones in Lines  18–25 suggest that he takes great care of how he puts his plans across to me. This interpretation is somewhat substantiated in the answer part of this sequence, where he ↘HONestly states that the organisation cannot (financially?) afford to maintain the b-boy centre at the moment. Rather than merely saying that rising intonation signals uncertainty, we could push this analysis and say that the up-and-down cantante

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intonation indexes an inner dialogue that Bunty has with himself. The rise component indexes a summoner, a figure who knows about the pressures of the idealisation of authenticity in global hip hop and the fall component indexes a figure who has to get on with finding workable solutions for the future of the organisation. These two narrative figures do not exist directly on the semiotic surface, although the semiotic surface retains some iconic traces of these dialogues in the form of tonal movements. The figures ‘exist’ only as presupposed voices of Bunty’s inner dialogue. Bunty’s orchestration, then, positions the narrator as someone who has grappled with, and resolved, questions around hip hop authenticity, mediatisation and economic hard facts. In other words, cantante intonation allows Bunty to indicate to me that he has already grappled with the potential inauthenticity of his plans and he thereby wards off any questions or even accusations that I might have in relation to this inauthenticity. By way of orchestrating voices in this inner dialogue, he normalises the ‘problematic’ answer, namely his intent to temporally discontinue running the b-boy centre, which he finally provides in Lines 26–28, as already dealt with and perhaps justified. Having already attended to critical questions in the heteroglossic deep structure, his plan to discontinue the b-boy centre and focus on music production appears as a well-argued proposal. The rising intonations, as well as the hedges and pauses, in the summons display that Bunty knows about the complexities around localising and commercialising hip hop and has reflected on the potential inauthenticity of such moves. Bunty’s critical faculty to reflect on authenticity in hip hop culture and its uneasy relationship with the commercial mainstream is indexed in the summons parts. As the first part of an adjacency pair, the summons creates an expectation which needs to be fulfilled in an answer. The answer has to provide new information that is conditionally relevant to the questions asked in the summons. Thus, the epistemic stance in the answer must, by definition, be different from that in the summons, what Schegloff and Sacks (1974: 74) also capture with the concept of ‘discriminative relations’ between the summons and the answer. By shifting between the roles of summoner and answerer, Bunty mitigates potential inauthenticity and thereby deontically justifies the entrepreneurial ‘hard facts’: the temporal closing of the b-boy centre. In Lines 37–44 of the narrative, Bunty further justifies his plans to temporarily close the b-boy centre by assuring his audience that breakin culture will not deteriorate because of his restructuring of the NGO:

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like the b-boys are there they’re gonna do their thing. no matter what. you know no one is gonna stop that. He then uses the logico-semantic enunciative marker of polyphony ‘but’ (Angermuller, 2014; Ducrot, 1981; Nølke et al., 2004) to take on another positionality which underlines his future plans of opening a studio: but there ISn’t that MUsic (0.5) there’s a disconnect. Thus, polyphony in this narrative is constructed not only through cantante intonation that constructs dialogic SA sequences in the deep structure but also through semantic markers of enunciation like not, no, no one and but, as through personal and spatiotemporal deictics. Bunty continues with the second part of the complicating action of his narrative. Bunty describes how he wants to open a music studio in his flat. He explains this in the following way, again using cantante to construct two SA sequences. The first sequence consists of three rises followed by two falls, two levels and another fall. The second sequence consists of one rise followed by two falls. SA sequence 4.2: Plans

46

29  S

4

↗AND. (0.8) 6

46

30   S

what I’m planning to ↗DO (.) is →get (0.7)

31  A

the ↘older kids (.)

32  A

like ↘zan4 (0.6)

33  A

all ↘the rappers (0.5)

34   A

and getting wa↘zulu5 here (1.0)

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85

53

35   A

and opening a ↘STUdio (.)

36   A

where they can ↘WORK and make some solid (.) ↘music.

In contrast to SA sequence 4.1 discussed above, SA sequence 4.2 contains more answer parts than summons parts. This represents Bunty’s knowledge as certain and thus his positionality is perhaps more monoglossic than before. The summoner in Lines 29-36 is only allowed to speak in the two summons parts at the beginning. The answerer shoots salvos of answers and progresses with the argument. The tables seem to have turned and the answerer takes on a more authorial and confident positionality in the dialogic play. Note also that Lines 18-28 does not contain any negation, ‘buts’ or other classic enunciative markers of polyphony, which further suggests that Bunty here performs a more monoglossic voice and assumes more authorship over what he says compared to SA sequence 4.1. In the evaluation of Bunty’s narrative this authorial voice persists. His reorientation from breakin to music, which had been so carefully negotiated in Lines 29-36, has now been established as a viable plan, i.e. Bunty’s positionality in the moral frameworks of hip hop authenticity has been normalised. Linking back to the orientation of the narrative in which Bunty evaluated the Indian mediascape with his translocal knowledge, he now comes full circle and interprets the move from breakin to music as being the most needed step to take for his organisation at this moment in time. Bunty says this explicitly in the evaluation of the narrative in Lines 37–44, again using a cantante intonation pattern, further justifying the local focus on music (and the resulting necessary closure of the breakin centre) in a series of seven answers. SA sequence 4.3: Needs

9

37  S

58

cuz I ↘think that’s what’s ↗you know (0.8)

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38   S

I think with ↘hip hop in ↗INdia ((cantante))

39  A

↘that’s all it needs now.

40  A

like the ↗b-boys ↘are there they’re gonna do their thing.

41   A

no matter what.

42   A

you know no one is gonna stop that.

43  A

but there ↗ISn’t that ↘MUsic (0.5)

44  A

there’s a ↘disconnect.

Bunty’s use of the cantante intonation pattern, as I have shown, does not construct dialogues on the semiotic surface in the same way as Manmeet Kaur’s narrative. It also does not merely ‘flavour’ his American English speech with Indianness, but intonation also seems to act as a prosodic resource to construct inner dialogues by means of which he normalises his epistemic and deonitic stances. Thus, it is not (just) the aesthetic diglossic qualities of this cantante pattern as ‘Indian’ with iconic localising capacity that motivate its deployment but also the dialogic stancetaking potentials it affords. These stances enter into the construction of a translocalised persona; a persona that allows Bunty to speak from a third space of enunciation which seems to justify his decisions and manage his transcultural project of promoting hip hop culture in India and his own transcultural self within this project.

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Discussion and Conclusion: (F)using Cantante

Bunty and Manmeet Kaur seem to actively or agentively enregister cantante to become part of a voice register that indexes Indianness. This voice register includes other linguistic features such as long-utterance length, staccato rhythm and overly complicated technical jargon, and it markedly contrasts with a hip hop-inflected hyperbolic cosmopolitan voice register, which includes creak, diminuendo intensity, allegro rhythm and taboo lexemes. In combination and in contrast with these linguistic resources, cantante becomes indexical of a register that evokes Indianness. Cantante thus gets enregistered as a prosodic resource to index the voice of the other. However, this voice of the other stands in a different relationship to the voice of the self in the two narratives. In Manmeet’s narrative it appears in constructed dialogues on the semiotic surface, and in Bunty’s narrative it appears in inner dialogues in the heteroglossic deep structure. In both cases, the voice of the other helps both narrators to narratively normalise the voice of the self. That the cantante intonation pattern indexes Indianness and that the absence of cantante indexes Americanness (in Bunty’s case) or some form of cosmopolitan Indianness (in Manmeet Kaur’s narrative) are, of course, entirely subjective and – I would like to stress – tentative claims imposed by me, the listening researcher. Although I cannot build on previous research on cantante in Indian English, it is important to note here that both Manmeet and Bunty are highly proficient in communicating in various languages. In their cosmopolitan lives, have acquired various registers and dialects of Punjabi, Hindi and English and they use all these language resources in their everyday translanguaging. We might therefore argue that hearing an ‘Indian’ intonation pattern in their narratives seems relatively unsurprising, since the narrators might be ‘fusing’ two (or more) intonational systems as a result of their multilingual communicative practices and their mobile biographies. The term ‘fusion’ in relation to prosody was coined by Queen’s (2001: 55) study with Turkish–German bilingual children in Germany, ‘to account for the two-way influence between the two languages’. Queen (2001: 57) notes that ‘fusion is likely to be found primarily in linguistic subsystems that are deeply context-bound [i.e. non-referential]. Prosody – specifically, intonation – is one such subsystem’ (see also Sicoli, 2015). We could, therefore, be tempted to understand Bunty’s

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and Manmeet’s prosodic style-shifting as cases of fusion. However, Queen (2001: 57) argues that fusion ‘differs from codeswitching in that it does not constitute movement between two systems but rather represents a new structure altogether’. This seems not to be the case in the two narratives analysed in this chapter. Rather than fusing two intonational systems to create a new pattern altogether, I have suggested that the narrators, in fact, keep the two voices stylistically apart to agentively and reflexively use them for metaphorical codeswitching (Blom & Gumperz, 1972), even if they do so subtly and not only on the intonational tier. Puri (2013: 120), who experimentally studies intonational fusion in Hindi–English bilinguals in Delhi, finds that only simultaneous bilinguals, those who acquired Hindi and English before the age of three, use a fusion system in their Indian English speech, but not in Hindi, whereas late bilinguals, those who acquired Hindi as children and then learned English later in their lives, only use Hindi intonation patterns in their Indian English and Hindi speech (Puri, 2013: 118). Puri (2013: 117; emphasis added) does not make any claims about the situational use of intonation but rather suggests that simultaneous bilinguals ‘have a largely merged system’. While Manmeet could possibly fall into the category of simultaneous bilinguals, and her use of cantante could therefore be a case of fusion, Bunty’s bilingualism cannot be easily categorised as ‘simultaneous’ or ‘late’. He spent his childhood in Northern India and his adolescence in New York City, where he ‘natively’ acquired the respective local ways of speaking, including systems of intonation. Bunty never sounded ‘Indian’, but rather ‘American’ or ‘New York’, when speaking English (with me), unless he crossed into Stylised Indian English for comical effect, in ways similar to Rampton’s (1995) research participants. However, in contrast to Manmeet’s narrative, Bunty’s narrative does not use cantante intonation in comical ways. Rather, it is the case that Bunty uses cantante intonation in narrative moments in which there seems to be much at stake for him and his organisation in relation to hip hop’s moral framework of authenticity, so that a thoughtful narrative handling of the difficult situation is required. He seems to be able to keep the intonational systems stylistically apart and this ability might in fact demonstrate his glocal knowledge and hybrid positionality as an American and an Indian: he knows how to talk to the English-language press and he also knows how to talk to the locals

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and make his organisation’s voice heard in the popular Bollywood industry. Therefore, to say that he ‘has’ this intonation pattern or that he uses it entirely habitually, or even unconsciously or mechanically, would confuse his skilful deployment of resources for sheer reflexes to the linguistic environment in which he finds himself (as also noted in Queen, 2006) and perhaps take away from his agency to orchestrate voices in his narratives. In Bunty’s case, his ‘own’ hybrid positionality as an American and as an Indian allows him to strategically deploy his linguistic resources to take epistemic and deontic stances towards the Indian mediascape. In order to do such indexical work, I have shown that Bunty does not fuse intonational patterns but he keeps them stylistically apart as recognisably ‘American’ or ‘Indian’. Similar to metaphorical codeswitching (Blom & Gumperz, 1972), we could think of his styling as a way to attend to two contexts: the local and the translocal. In Manmeet’s case, we can see that cantante intonation is hyperbolically used or stylised to achieve a voice contrast in constructed dialogues in which a narrative figure takes overly complicated evaluative stances towards underground hip hop music circulated online. As narrative figure and narrator, she positions herself antagonistically to this figure of the Indian artist by taking simple evaluative stances that emphasise underground hip hop rawness. Her ‘own’ voice, I have argued, uses only habitual cantante. Nevertheless, more research on the ‘Indian’ cantante pattern would be needed to compare Bunty’s and Manmeet’s prosody with other Indian speakers’ prosody and ascertain whether or not these two cosmopolitan and mobile narrators reproduce exactly the intonational patterns of Hindi and Indian English, which would support metaphorical codeswitching, or if they differ from these norms in any way, which would support fusion. This chapter has made the case that cantante can work as an othering device or a hybridising device that helps narrators to index an Indian voice, which moreover seems to be used complementarily to the voice of the self. The voice contrast is therefore effective and socially functional in the glocal diglossia (Ferguson, 1959) of Indian hip hop in which Bunty and Manmeet operate and in which their narratives are set. Similar to the ways that Hill (1995: 116) describes Don Gabriel’s use of Mexicano and Spanish, two languages that represent ‘fundamentally opposed ideological positions’ in Don Gabriel’s community in central Mexico, Bunty’s and Manmeet’s use of cantante draws on

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language ideologies that circulated in India and that rendered certain styles of speaking as ‘Indian’, which, in turn, could be employed to index local personae. In Chapter 5, I further investigate language ideologies and I show how narrators’ transcultural voices can simultaneously challenge and reproduce such ideologies; a transformative and narrative process that I describe as remixin.

5 Translingual Voices: Remixed Language Ideologies

Introduction

In this chapter, I discuss how hip hop heads in Delhi both challenge and reproduce – i.e. remix – language ideologies as part of their narrative constructions of their ‘own’ transcultural and translingual voices. In the orchestration of many voices, the three narrators who feature in this chapter construct for themselves translingual and cosmopolitan orientations by putting forward language ideologies that emphasise the fluid ways in which linguistic resources operate at various scale levels in global hip hop (see also Alim, 2009; Barrett, 2016; Westinen, 2014, 2016; Williams, 2017). While the three narrators seem to transgress reified language ideologies that fix languages in space, time and personhood, they also and simultaneously seem to rely on precisely these boundaries and reified fixities of language in order to represent themselves, their cosmopolitan communities and Indian hip hop at large. I suggest that the notion of translanguaging can help us account for such complexities in remixin language ideologies. In particular, I argue that the three narratives discussed in this chapter remix language ideologies by metapragmatically normalising the tensions between the transgressive and the essentialising forces inherent in translanguaging. While, on the one hand, translanguaging highlights that mobile and multilingual languagers use multiple linguistic resources drawn from many scales with a degree of unpredictability, thereby transgressing language boundaries, it does not, on the other hand, reject the essentialist idea that language can represent identities, culture and transnational solidarity. These are the complex ways in which narrators construct their ‘own’ translingual voices; voices that cross reified language boundaries while they nevertheless also find representation through reified language ideologies. The first narrative is about remixin spoken 130

Translingual Voices: Remixed Language Ideologies  131

languages (Punjabi, English and Urdu) in rap music and the second narrative is about remixin scripts (Devanagari and Roman) in graffiti writin. In the third narrative, the idea of linguistic difference and ensuing mutual unintelligibility gives way to a transcendental ideology of translanguaging that allows for intercultural understanding by developing (nonlinguistic) practices and relationality. Before I present and analyse the three narratives, I spell out necessary theoretical points about translanguaging, remixin, representation and language ideologies. Theorising Translingual Voices

Translingual voices, at first sight, are trapped in between the languages, yet they eventually escape and transcend or transgress languages. When using translingual voices, speakers, narrators and rhymers become acutely aware of language. Metapragmatically, they start to think and then they sink into the paper, like they were ink. Rakim, Yasiin Bey and all the other hip hop lyricists, emcees, graffiti writers, text producers, body movers, poets and wordsmiths move between the languages, the styles, the rhymes, the modalities. They are confident with language, overconfident even, which is the prerequisite for the remix. They borrow, sample, change, transgress and generally play around with language, with language ideologies and they eventually escape language, only to bring language back in the next bar with a dope rhyme. Language ideologies

When we sociolinguists say that ‘all language is ideological’, we point to the fact that nobody can speak, write, rap, narrate, language from nowhere (Gal & Woolard, 2001; Heyd & Schneider, 2019). Language ideologies – sometimes also called linguistic ideologies – involve metapragmatic evaluations of language use that people circulate among and negotiate with each other (Blommaert, 2005; Gal & Irvine, 2019; Kroskrity, 2018; Silverstein, 1976; Woolard, 2016). Everyone seems to have particular ideas about language (e.g. what a language is and what it isn’t, what constitutes correct or incorrect language use or where a particular language comes from and how it is likely to develop in the future) – yet not everyone is aware that they have these ideas or that their ideas are not shared by everybody else; i.e. that they are not objective truths. Thus, language ideologies are social constructs that can remain ‘implicit’ and partly hidden below the level of speaker consciousness; nonetheless, they also, at times, become ‘explicit’ and

132  Transcultural Voices

make their way into social awareness and public or political discourse (Woolard, 2016). People become differently aware of such language ideologies, depending on the discursive conditions of the historical moment and their ‘own’ scalar positionality within discourses. As discussed in Chapter 2, the metapragmatic analysis of language ideologies attempts to describe how these ideas about semiotic difference (see also Gal, 2016; Gal & Irvine, 2019) are theorised (or not) by people themselves and how, in turn, the circulation of these ideologies shapes the language practices of social groups, and this is what this chapter is about too. Language ideologies have a social function. They help us to differentiate social groups by means of supposedly objective features of speech and language use (Bourdieu, 1991; Gal & Irvine, 2019; Irvine, 2001). To achieve such objectivity in people’s everyday metapragmatic evaluation of speech and language use, the complexities of languaging are reduced and normalised, and language-to-group associations are naturalised and fixed in time and space (Blommaert, 2016b). This results in essentialist or reified and stereotypical imaginations of how certain people speak, some of which are mediated and circulated globally, while others have local valence. Language ideologies allow us to explain difference in linguistic behaviour across cultures and societies often by naturalising and normalising essentialised links between linguistic forms and sociocultural groups. This, in turn, also allows us to position ourselves in relation to these other voices in society; our ‘own’ languaging explains who we are, what we do and why we are different from others. Yet, this does not mean that such ideological language-to-people associations are simple or straightforward. In his work on Indigenous multilingualisms in North America, Kroskrity (2018: 134) proposes the notion of ‘language ideological assemblages’ to investigate how language ideologies are ‘part of a larger complex of relevant beliefs and feelings, both Indigenous and externally imposed, that may complement, contest, or otherwise dynamically interact with each other to modify language ideologies and linguistic practices’. Kroskrity’s suggestion of language ideological assemblages is helpful for my discussion in this chapter because it allows us to resist an understanding of narrators’ language ideologies as unified and non-complex and their moral positionalities as either good or bad, or alternatively, as either parochial or cosmopolitan. I will show how the narrators’ language ideological remixes draw on various, at times contradictory, assemblages in an effort to represent the narrator as both essentialising and anti-essentialist, both parochial and cosmopolitan, both monolingual and translingual.

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Translanguaging

One of the most important critical interventions in our understanding of language in the last decade has been the development of the notion of translanguaging (Bucholtz et al., 2018; Canagarajah, 2013; García & Li Wei, 2014; Jaspers, 2018; Jaspers & Madsen, 2016; Lee & Dovchin, 2020; Pennycook, 2016). In this view, the abstract notion of ‘language’ gives way to a processual practice dubbed ‘languaging’ (Becker, 1991), sometimes also conceptualised as language-in-use, talk-in-interaction or parole. In multilingual and multiculturally superdiverse contact zones, such languaging practice cannot be reduced to one language only. Rather, multilingual speakers draw on a range of languages and fragments of languages that they pick up as they navigate superdiverse societies and their own mobility across national, linguistic and digital scales, as well as across modalities (speaking, reading, writing, typing, non-verbal and embodied communication). Translanguaging is a crossing of essentialised linguistic borders that challenges the ontologies of these borders as much as it relies on them to be recognised as transgressive. Translanguaging research, or translinguistics (Lee & Dovchin, 2020), offers a conceptual imagination that allows us to critically account for some of the complexities and language ideological tensions between transgressive and essentialising assemblages when mobile people interact across languages, styles, modes, knowledge and social groups. Thus, in my deployment here, I do not imagine translanguaging to be a cosmopolitan linguistic utopia. In my reading, translanguaging does not proclaim that linguistic and cultural borders no longer matter or that we should all be free to use whatever language variety we wish to use. While essentialist linguistic borders can be transgressed, the fluidity of linguistic resources demonstrated in the narratives I present here cannot be entirely free of essentialising ideologies that anchor languages within cultural/national singularity (see also Fleming & Ansaldo, 2020; Wee, 2018). In fact, I argue that the remixin of language ideological assemblages involves strategic essentialism that marshals precisely such reified ideological connections between language and culture/identity in order for the narrators to gain social voice, show love and represent – or rep – themselves and their mobile and marginalised communities. Reppin love

When hip hop heads speak of reppin themselves and their crew and their hoods, they are usually referring to an indexing of their personal, social and spatial rootedness. Usually, this is done to locate themselves

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and their homies within a cultural geography of hoods in their city or in the Global Hip Hop Nation, depending on the scale at which they are reppin. In my fieldwork, certain localities of Delhi became associated with hip hop cultural practice. For example, Khirki Village and Shivalik, two localities just adjacent to where I had rented a flat in Malviya Nagar, were often recognised as hotspots of hip hop. This was partly so because many international graffiti writers visited these areas and left their colourful pieces on walls and other surfaces in the urban environment. These served as powerful backdrops for rappers and b-boys and b-girls, who would congregate along graffiti pieces to dance, pose and snap pictures or shoot semi-professional music videos. Certain localities in Delhi thus became emblematic of hip hop and could be used in audio-visual worlds to represent themselves as globally familiar (Dattatreyan, 2020). Reppin your hood, or representing your neighbourhood in more stiff formal English, became common practice during and after my fieldwork in 2013. The neighbourhoods in which breakin crews practised, or graffiti writers were up, or emcees set up their studios, became known, talked about and visited by crews from all over the city. Delhi’s hip hop practitioners soon began to use these neighbourhoods as indexes of hip hop authentic hyperlocality, or extreme locality (Williams, 2017: 137), that could be used to represent oneself or one’s crew in the local and international mediascapes. Stories about the hardships of the local people, or about celebrations of local life, often featured in the hip hop music videos and lyrics. Prabh Deep, for instance, released his album Class Sikh in 2017, which features several tracks about him growing up in his working-class migrant neighbourhood in Tilak Nagar in West Delhi. In many ways, Prabh Deep has repped his hood, Delhi 18 as he calls it, across scales of mediatisation in Delhi, in India and internationally. Yet, Spivak (1988) would ask: Can the subaltern speak? And Marx (1852) would add: They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. The hip hop cultural practice of reppin might ultimately run into the same conundrum as Deleuze and Foucault have run into when they talk about representation in their poststructuralist critique of the unified subject, which Spivak (1988: 70) so brilliantly dissects for us: ‘Two senses of representation are being run together: representation as “speaking for”, as in politics, and representation as “re-presentation”, as in art or philosophy’. The former sense of political representation (German: Vertretung, which Marx had used in his original 1852 text Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon: ‘Sie können sich nicht vertreten, sie müssen vertreten werden’) and the latter sense of artistic and linguistic representation (Darstellung) are interrelated but not interchangeable in Marxist theory.

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Spivak argues that Deleuze and Foucault’s conflation of the two senses of the term, their ‘verbal slippage’ (Spivak, 1988: 69), shows their ‘indifference to ideology’ (Spivak, 1988: 68) and their inability to reflect on their own positionality as producers of discourse. If we want to understand ideology, as I do in this chapter, Spivak (1988: 74) pushes us to attend to both senses simultaneously: ‘My view is that a radical practice should attend to this double session of representations rather than reintroduce the individual subject through totalizing concepts of power and desire’. As I will argue in this chapter, such radical double practice of reppin (as darstellen and vertreten) must involve what Spivak (interviewed by Grosz, 1990) and others have called strategic essentialism. In the context of language ideologies, strategic essentialism is a momentary tactic for a subversive translingual politics that makes efforts to challenge dominant ideologies, while relying on precisely these same ideologies to represent their ‘own’ and other marginalised communities. When analysing these narratives of remixed language ideologies, I found that the notion of ‘love’ was regularly evoked by narrators to explain their strategic essentialism when reppin their translingual voices. Love thus emerges as a resolution to the narrative complexities that arise out of strategic essentialism, and in this sense, love is imagined as a political concept in these narratives. Hardt and Negri (2004) end their book Multitude with a few hopeful notes that describe such a political conceptualisation of love. Whereas in European modernity love has been ‘limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family’ (Hardt & Negri, 2004: 351), it is now time to expand its meaning and recognise ‘that love serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society’ (Hardt & Negri, 2004: 352). Hardt later elaborated on his conceptualisation of love as a political concept, as a joyful promise for a new world order of celebrating encounters and interactions across difference (Hardt in Schwartz, 2009; Hardt, 2011). Wilkinson (2017: 58) complexifies Hardt’s ideas and proposes that ‘we need to think about the ambivalence, incoherence, and unruliness of love: how love can be both joyful and painful, enduring and transient, expansive and territorial’. Wilkinson’s conceptualisation of love as unruly, incoherent and ambivalent attempts to bridge two opposing ideologies: love as a cosmopolitan joy of togetherness across difference and the parochial experience of loving one’s roots, kin, race, country and self. For the purposes of this chapter, I read Wilkinson’s complex politics of love as a resolution to the conflicting ideologies inherent in translinguistic strategic essentialism: Translanguaging is a crossing of essentialised linguistic borders that challenges the ontologies of these

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borders as much as it relies on them to be recognised as transgressive. The translingual voice proclaiming ‘love’ is thus a narrative resolution to the complexities of reppin, in the sense of both darstellen and vertreten, oneself and one’s cultural community in the remix. Remixin

The notion of remix has been used in hip hop studies on education (e.g. Ibrahim, 2016) and in the wider field of cultural studies (e.g. Murthy, 2010; Navas, 2012; Navas et al., 2015) to discuss a set of diverse hybrid and appropriative cultural, musical, digital and linguistic practices. Remixin, similar to but not identical with samplin (see Chapter  2), involves the recontextualisation (Bauman & Briggs, 1990) and imitation (Lempert, 2014) of signs, sounds and voices. More generally, remixin is a semiotic practice that we could subsume under the notion of citationality (Nakassis, 2013). Nakassis (2013: 54) thinks of citationality as a type of semiosis that has the ‘ability to re-present an event of discourse while reflexively marking that representation as not(-quite) that which the citational act presences’. The ‘not-quite’ quality of citationality is reflexively indexed in a marked gap between original voice and imitated voice. Drawing on Derrida and Briggs and Bauman, Nakassis (2013: 56) suggests ‘that any citational act depends on inscribing a difference, or gap, between the very acts that are made iconic with each other’. Quotation marks, whether written or spoken, would be an example of such inscription of the difference between original text and recontextualised text. We can hear or see where the cited voice of the other begins and ends. As I have shown in Chapter 4, constructed dialogues, with or without quotatives, are another way of marking such gaps between voices. Also, Rampton’s (1995) notion of crossing and Coupland’s (2007) strategic inauthenticity, both inspired by Bakhtin’s double-voicing, aim to capture the processes by which speakers reflexively mark their own voices as different from, or at least ‘not quite’ like, the voices they quote. Similar to such reflexive recontextualisation practices of citationality, remixin, in hip hop lingo, designates a process in which existing materials are used in new contexts to create new pieces of art or cultural practice, which nevertheless always clearly refer back to the original sources. Different from some samplin techniques (see also Chapter 2; Singh, in press), remixin is a reflexive borrowing practice that does not attempt to conceal its origins or source materials (Williams, 2014). For Navas (2012: 97), ‘the remix will always rely on the authority of the original composition’. In doing so, the remix is ‘completely dependent on the original work’s history […] thus making the awareness of history absolutely important

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for both the original work and the allegorical work to be valid’ (Navas, 2012: 118). The remix attends to two contexts simultaneously. For example, in hip hop music production, a remix usually denotes a musical track that combines the lyrics and melodies of an existing older song with a new drum beat. The newness of the beat updates, rejuvenates, the older song and makes it consumable and mixable alongside other contemporary songs. The remix can thus be understood not only as a type of citationality but also as a type of schizophonic mimesis, a term Feld (1996: 13) introduces to ask ‘how sound recordings, split from their source through the chain of audio production, circulation, and consumption […] stimulate and license renegotiations of identity’. Deejays can exploit the schizophonia of the remix to create smooth transitions between the newest tracks and old classics that have been remixed. In that way, audiences can be taken on a sonically smooth journey through time to experience a complexity of chronotopic musical voices (for more on chronotopes, see Chapter 6). Taking inspiration from this hip hop musical practice, Alim (2009: 114) describes how global hip hop actors remix language forms and language ideologies; how ‘youth around the world create styles and languages that (re)mix dominant styles and languages (such as the global dominance of Black American Hip Hop or the dominance of French Hip Hop in the Francophone world) in relation to those already present in their repertoires’. Alim (2009: 105) understand these language remixes in global hip hop not only to be about linguistic forms but to also include ‘styles, aesthetics, knowledge, and ideologies that travel across localities and cross-cut modalities’ (my emphasis). Alim argues that the global hip hop youth are ‘cultural theorists’ themselves, who constantly reflect on the remix, its historical connections, thereby theorising the ideological changes of the globalised world. Picking up on this idea, I suggest in this chapter that the three narrators remix, or reflexively orchestrate, language ideologies in order to articulate their ‘own’ translingual voices. Initially, they engage in such citationality in seemingly contradictory ways: they both challenge and reproduce essentialist language ideologies. Williams (2017), whose study of Coloured and multicultural rappers in the Cape Flats in South Africa and their remixed multilingualism repertoires possibly comes closest to my own conceptualisation of the term, writes that the political power of the remix lies in its juxtaposition of unexpected forms: Remixing is a process in which the production of new forms of speech, register and style in local context serve to show speakers’ identities,

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cultural authenticities, and voice. […] 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 mainstream politics of identity. (Williams, 2017: 17)

As Williams highlights throughout his work, such remixin and the unexpected juxtaposition of linguistic forms (and language ideologies?) allow multilingual and marginalised rappers to project their identities and voices across various scales of the Global Hip Hop Nation, from the extreme local to the translocal, as well as circulate their voices in the mainstream arena of politics to challenge dominant language ideologies in post-apartheid South Africa (see also Roux & Williams, 2020; Stroud, 2018). Here, we might want to make a connection between remixin and the transcultural process of neoculturation (Ortiz, 1947), which describes how the trauma of colonial subjugation that cannot be forgotten or resolved is always explicitly referenced, while it is refashioned in culturally sustainable ways to uphold a future hope for emancipation. Similar to the transcultural voices described in this book, the translingual voices that the narrators in this chapter claim as their ‘own’, construct newness and third spaces of enunciation that cross reified language boundaries, but nevertheless also represent identity through precisely such reified language ideologies. What I hope to show through my analyses is that the three narrators construct for themselves translingual voices that normalise the tensions between the transgressive and the reifying forces of translanguaging. Reification, also discussed as essentialism, refers to making something a thing. Reification (Latin: res ‘thing’, facere ‘to make’) is a thingification. Reification erases differences and complexities between people and represents them monolithically as one group. National stereotypes, such as ‘the Germans are punctual’ or ‘the Japanese are polite’, are dramatic examples of reification, where everybody within the racialised borders of a nation-state is said to share certain behavioural traits. In critical intercultural communication research, the term ‘reification’ is often used to point out cultural stereotypes and biases in research, education and the media, which reduce every linguistic or social action of a human to their culture (e.g. Holliday, 1999). In other words, through reification, culture becomes an explanatory variable in intercultural encounters as well as in intercultural research (Bond et  al., 2000; Sarangi, 1994). ‘It’s a cultural thing’, we sometimes say, to explain someone’s behaviour by means of relying on what we know about the person’s culture.

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Analogously, a remix, then, can be (re-)conceptualised in global hip hop linguistics as a way of mixing such cultural and linguistic things, yet this mixing also creates a new thing. The dual function of the remix (Latin: res-micsere), or the thing-mix, allows narrators to engage in strategic essentialism: they transgress reified language ideologies while simultaneously reproducing them in order to represent themselves, their local community and their global hip hop transculture. In this sense, the remix, just like hip hop itself, is both a way and a thing (see Rawdr’s narrative in Chapter 1 and Scientik’s narrative in Chapter 8); a centrifugal process and a centripetal essence. In what follows, I discuss ethnographic interactions I had with three Delhi hip hop heads. First, the emcee Prabh Deep challenges dominant language ideologies when he narrates that he uses the various languages at his disposal in an unseparated way to emphasise flow in his raps. Seemingly contradictory, he also reproduces dominant language ideologies when he later says that he always uses Punjabi in his raps to represent himself and when he says that he plans to also write a verse in Urdu to represent unity and solidarity with the people of Pakistan. Secondly, the graffiti writer and street artist Daku narrates his reasons for using the Devanagari script in his graffiti. In his narrative, he compares his scripting choices with a hypothetical oral speech event to remix language ideologies across semiotic modalities. Thirdly, the graffiti writer Dizy tells a story about her experiences of teaching a hip hop workshop in South India. Despite not sharing a common language with her South Indian students, they were nevertheless able to understand each other through practicing hip hop and building good relations with each other. Thus, we can say that Dizy’s remix transcends language. All three narratives evoke love as a political concept and resolution to the complexities of translingual strategic essentialism. Prabh Deep: There’s No Separation between the Languages

Prabh Deep, who you already met in the introduction to this book, comes from a Punjabi Sikh family who migrated to Delhi from the part of the Punjab that is now in Pakistan during the traumatic partition in the immediate postcolonial moment in 1947. He speaks fluent Punjabi, Hindi and English. At the time of my fieldwork, he was 19 years old and had been dancing as a b-boy for several years. However, personal quarrels with some of his b-boy crewmates led Prabh Deep to experiment with producing beats and recording raps. Since I had been a rapper for several years, I supported him in writing lyrics and recording raps on beats and

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we spent substantial amounts of time together talking about rap and hip hop culture. He became a key participant in my study and I recorded several short and two longer interviews with him. The narrative excerpts I present below are taken from one such short interview. On this particular night, we had been producing beats together in his makeshift home studio. Prabh Deep also showed me a short passage (eight bars to be exact) of his newest rap lyrics, performing them on the beat we had just produced. After some hours spent in the studio, we went onto the rooftop to catch some fresh air and I used the opportunity to ask him a few questions about the lyrics he had just shown me. Interview with Prabh Deep, Delhi 2013 {00:06–03:16} 01 Jaspal: so you were er. 02 so you were rapping. 03 the song I I listened to. 04 right now. you know. 05 these little eight bars? 06 Prabh: uhum 07 Jaspal: so they were going back and forth in hindi 08 er in punjabi and er in english (.) you know? 09 Prabh: ya 10 Jaspal: so you were. you were not. 11 because previously remember when we were talking about you know. 12 this one song we wanted to produce. 13 and I said. 14 you said “okay I want to have the first verse in punjabi. 15 and the second verse in english”. 16 Prabh: ya 17 Jaspal: and then I said. 18 “no no make two verses in english (.) er er sorry [punjabi]. 19 Prabh: [punjabi] 20 Jaspal: right? so right and then we recorded some stuff and erm. 21 I was saying “it’s it’s better if it’s one language” and all this you know. 22 and we were recording with sun-j and everyone ((Sun-J is a breaker/rapper)). 23 and sometimes sun-j would be moving into english. 24 and back back (.) [into hindi]. 25 Prabh: [into hindi]

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26 Jaspal: 27

but he was doing it. he was doing eight bars in english and then eight bars in hindi. 28 or four bars in hindi you know? 29 but he was- the languages were SEparated in a way you know. 30 even if you have a chorus in hindi you know it was more separated. 31 but THIS song? 32 which I listened to right NOW? 33 I cannot see the separation. 34 it goes swoosh swoosh swoosh. 35 english punjabi whatever you know. 36 so so what do you think about this? 37 I mean how do you- why why do you do it? 38 you know. 39 what are your thoughts on this? 40 Prabh: my thoughts on this like. hm 41 I want to do- I want to do this because I love this. 42 it doesn’t matter in which language we are doin. 43 but more important for me is like. 44 I always represent MYself. 45 cos I’m a punjabi so I represent my language. 46 in every- in every verse. 47 if either it’s in india or if it’s in u.k. or anything. 48 Jaspal: hm 49 Prabh: so ☺ I don’t bother like if people can’t understand the language. 50 but I know they will enjoy the flow. 51 like you enjoy the flow and the rhythm and all the things. 52 there is no separation between the languages. 53 so there is one little message in it. 54 like people think. 55 er like (.) you and me are different. 56 no we are not different. 57 you seen the rap. you seen that eight bars. 58 Jaspal: uhum 59 Prabh: english and punjabi is not a separate thing. 60 Jaspal: ah 61 Prabh: it’s (.) it’s a combined. it’s the SAME thing. 62 Jaspal: ya

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63 Prabh: you never feel the difference. 64 Jaspal: ya 65 Prabh: between the- so it’s just a little sweet message to them. In the long introduction to my question (Lines 1–39), I construct several narrative scenes and evaluate Prabh Deep’s newest multilingual lyrics. For example, I narrate a scene with Sun-J, another rapper with whom the two of us had been working, who used Hindi and English in his raps in a separate fashion (Lines 29–30). In contrast, I perceived Prabh Deep’s newest lyrics to move between languages without separating the languages (Lines 34–35). I finally ask him for his thoughts on this (Line 39). His answer in Line  41 is sober and markedly non-linguistic: I want to do this because I love this. He downplays the importance of language and having to choose between one language or another (Line  42) and emphasises that he finds it more important to always represent himself (Lines  43–44). As a Delhi-born Punjabi, he quickly recognises that he can use the Punjabi language to represent himself (Line 45) and he also recognises that this representational value of Punjabi has currency across national scales, such as India and the UK (Line  47), which is home to a large Punjabi diaspora. Representation, not understanding, is what is at stake here for Prabh Deep. He says that he does not bother like if people can’t understand the language (Line  49) because he knows they will enjoy the flow (Line 50). His evocation of flow determinately challenges my artificial separation of languages that I suggested to him for aesthetic reasons or due to some monolingual ideology of mine that one song should be rapped only in one language: ‘it’s it’s better if it’s one language’ (Line 21). But for Prabh Deep, there is no separation between the languages (Line 52). He later elaborates on his powerful translanguaging argument: english and punjabi is not a separate thing (Line 59), it’s (.) it’s a combined. it’s the SAME thing (Line 61), and he fittingly adds that you never feel the difference (Line  63). Prabh Deep’s evocation of flow and feeling resolves the difference between Punjabi and English understood as separate codes. Importantly, his translingual voice does not merely challenge monolingual ideologies on the level of linguistic form. He is quick to recognise that there is one little message in (Line 53) his English-Punjabi translanguaging. Prabh Deep seems to be acutely aware that his fluid translingual moves between the languages in his raps has a social indexical meaning and can challenge common beliefs that speakers of different languages are inherently different from each other: like people think. er like (.) you and me are different. no we are not different. you seen the rap. you seen that

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eight bars (Lines 54–57). His cosmopolitan message is an example of what Osumare (2001) describes as a connective marginality that links global hip hop heads (in this case an ethnographer and a research participant, both children of the Punjabi diaspora though, who ultimately grew up in different parts of the world) across difference and language (see also B-Boy Rawdr’s narrative in Chapter 1). This is his little sweet message to them. Who are they? Perhaps you, the audiences of my research, who, Prabh Deep knew very well could take note of his translingual voice, if I decided to represent his translingual voice to you, which I’m doing right now. He himself wants to circulate his message; he is not relying on the visiting ethnographer. In the following passage of his narrative, he explains how he tries to express and circulate his dope message by improving his literacy practices of writing lyrics. He says that he always wants to write lyrics that are meaningful and dope (an ameliorative hip hop term that roughly translates as ‘good’). Interestingly, after this general evaluation of his future poetic plans, he starts talking about writing a verse in Urdu to show love to the people of Pakistan, India’s arch-enemy. Let’s listen to Prabh Deep a bit more. Interview with Prabh Deep, Delhi 2013 {04:12–04:57} 66 Prabh: 67 68 69 Jaspal: 70 Prabh: 71 72

when I write- nowadays when I writing something. i just (.) erm. takin my mind like. “i want to write something DOPE.” ((i.e. good)) (1.5) yeah meaningful AND dope. so that’s just I started writing. even I wanted to drop ((i.e. write/rap)) a verse in URdu as well. 73 Jaspal: uhum 74 Prabh: in the future. 75 I don’t know urdu that much but I want to do that. 76 Jaspal: yeah 77 Prabh: because people think like pakistanis are different from us. 78 they’re bad peoples and all that. 79 no man. 80 they are also human beings. 81 so I just want to represent MYself spitting ((i.e. rapping)) in urdu. 82 just to show the love to pakistani peoples out there. 83 Jaspal: nice

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Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and it is also associated with Indian Muslims, who are currently suffering under rising Islamophobia in India (Ahmad, 2011, 2015; Puniyani, 2018). Prabh Deep’s plan to represent himself (Line 81) through the medium of rapping in Urdu, a language he claims he has only limited competence in (Line 75), challenges not only mainstream language ideologies that marginalise and stigmatise Urdu in India but also his earlier metapragmatic recognition that he should always represent himself through the medium of Punjabi. However, given the fact that his family migrated to Delhi from the part of the Punjab that is now in Pakistan, we can also read his plan to write a verse in Urdu as a desire to reconnect with the ancestral homeland that his family had to abandon, while fleeing from the communal killings that occurred in the colonial ruins that the British left behind in India. Urdu, now emblematic of Pakistan and Indian Muslims, might here be strategically deployed by Prabh Deep to remember historical family connections and grapple with the shambles of colonialism. While transgressing borders, Prabh Deep’s argument thus also reproduces and reifies language ideologies that attach languages to groups of people and even nations. These reifications strategically endow languages with representational power in the construction of diasporic identities and postcolonial solidarities. I would argue here that strategic essentialism is at play in these tensions between the two forces of transgression of language boundaries and the representational reification of language, that constitutes his sweet little translingual message as the resolution and moral of his story: love. As a Delhi-born Punjabi Sikh emcee, with family roots in what has been called Pakistan since 1947, for Prabh Deep using Urdu in a verse becomes a possibility to remix his ‘own’ translingual voice, one that he says above is best represented through the Punjabi language. Urdu, used by a Punjabi diasporic emcee in Delhi, becomes a juxtaposed index of solidarity and love towards other marginalised communities. Indeed, in a follow-up visit to Delhi in January 2020, I again met up with Prabh Deep for a long reflective afternoon in his house in Tilak Nagar. He is now one of the most famous rappers in India, and just weeks prior he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone India, but he still lives in the hood, humbly, with his family, producing dope music in his bedroom studio that reaches tens of thousands of loyal fans globally. Over homemade roti, dal and saag paneer (give thanks), he played me several of his newest unreleased tracks which contained segments in Urdu. I said: Oh shit you really did some verses in Urdu like you said you would in our interview back in 2013. He just smiled and said: ☺ yeah, of

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course. Although deeply invested in his Punjabiness, Prabh Deep refuses to see the world, its languages and its speakers as separated and it is this cosmopolitan vision of his translingual voice that generates his future hope for love, either love towards rap and hip hop culture (i want to do this because I love this, Line 41) or love towards other peoples (to show the love to pakistani peoples out there, Line 82). Love, then, begins to emerge here as a tool for remixing language ideologies. Firstly, love for hip hop allows Prabh Deep to transgress linguistic boundaries and love, in turn, allows me and his other listeners to enjoy the flow of his raps even though we might not fully understand all of his lyrics due to his unexpected language mixing. Love for his own Punjabi people, secondly, inspires Prabh Deep to use the Punjabi language in every verse to represent himself and his marginalised and diasporic community, and it is this recognition of the representational power of languages with which he can express his love towards other marginalised peoples as well, when he says that he is planning to write a verse in Urdu to show love to the Pakistani people, which he did in his future career. The American philosopher Michael Hardt has started thinking about love as a political concept. He aims to open up the concept of love, which has been confined to the private sphere of the family and romantic coupledom, to the public and political forum. In similar ways as the notions of cosmopolitanism, transculturation and translanguaging, and indeed the Global Hip Hop Nation, have been conceptualised, Hardt (interviewed by Schwartz, 2009: 813) suggests that ‘love has to be thought of as a proliferation of differences, not the destruction of differences. Not merging into unity, but a constructing of constellations among differences, among social differences’. Similarly, Mignolo’s (2000: 273) notion of ‘bilanguaging love’ emphasises translingual diversification in decolonial thinking: ‘Love is the necessary corrective to the violence of systems of control and oppression; bilanguaging love is the final utopic horizon for the liberation of human beings involved in structures of domination and subordination beyond their control’. Mignolo (2000: 273) suggests that such bilanguaging love, or we could say translingual love, is not like love towards national languages and one’s nation state, but rather that it ‘arises from and in the peripheries of national languages and in transnational experiences’. Prabh Deep’s remixed language ideologies, in my reading, arise in such borderlands too. He strategically uses the representational power of language to recognise difference, both his own difference as a Punjabi Sikh in a Hindu majoritarian and increasingly Islamophobic city and the difference between nations and peoples, while at the same time contesting that languages have to be separated or left un-remixed. And this

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recognition also contains his sweet little message, his political activism, which informs Prabh Deep’s dope translingual writin tactics. His translingual lyrics stand as a testament to his political project of love. Daku: Writin My Name in Devanagari on the Wall

The next narrative is taken from an interview I conducted with the Indian street artist and graffiti writer Daku. Daku rose to fame in the Indian, Asian and global street art scenes because of his intelligent pieces that critically speak to social issues in India, such as bribing and sexually motivated violence. He was also one of the first (perhaps the first?) graffiti artists in India to use the Devanagari script to write his name in his pieces and tags: डाकू (see Figures 5.1 and 5.2). Daku/डाकू [ḍɑːku] is Hindi and means ‘bandit’ or ‘outlaw’. Below, Daku narrates his choice of calling himself Daku and using the Devanagari script to represent his name in graffiti pieces and tags on the wall. In the narrative, he orchestrates a dialogue between two narrative figures. First, we hear the voice of a passer-by, who sees Daku’s pieces or

Figure 5.1  डाकू graffiti piece, Devanagari script, Okhla Industrial Estate (Photo by author, Delhi, 2013)

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Figure 5.2 Daku graffiti piece, Roman script, and डाकू tag, Devanagari script, Khan Market (Photo by author, Delhi, 2013)

sees the artist in action painting on the wall. The passer-by asks several questions (Lines 8–16). We then hear the narrative figure of Daku himself, responding to the passer-by’s questions (Lines 17–18). In the second part of the narrative, Daku further explains his choice of using Devanagari scripts in his graffiti by remixing modalities and language ideologies. Interview with Daku, Delhi 2013 {10:07–11:35} 01 Daku: 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10

I’m more of a street art (.) person. but I also do graffiti. for the love of type. at the same time. when I’m doing graffiti. you e:rm er pass by it. like passing by it. wonders “why, why there’s daku?” “who’s writing this?” “why am I [read: is he] writing this?”

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

“and what’s the what’s the motive behind it?” so the common questions people ask you when you paint on the wall. is “what are you doing it? why are you doing it?” “is someone paying for this?” “there must be somebody, somebody must be paying you some money.” “right? to do this.” and you say “no, no, it’s our own paint.” “our own thing” whatever. after you’ve done it stays there. people passing by. I started also writing in devanagari. so that when I’m talking to you. when I’msuppose I’m on the mic and I’m shouting something. when I’m shouting in english. only half the crowd will understand. rest of the crowd won’t understand. but if I’m shouting in hindi. ninety-nine percent of the crowd will understand. of what I’m talking about. the same thing. even in hindi. when it’s graffiti most of the people expect it to be english. but (.) when it’s in hindi. and when you understand that it’s in hindi. and when you read once daku. it kind of rolls. rolls on it. and you can keep seeing daku. or if you see something you try to spell it. “aha okay this is daku” or whatever. it kind of automatically comes (.) comes to you.

The first thing we might notice in this excerpt is that this narrative contains no interjections or turns by me, the interviewer. Daku’s narrative is therefore much less interactively co-constructed and much more monologic in comparison to the other narratives discussed in this book. Yet, while Daku was narrating, I probably gave off non-verbal

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minimal responses, such as hand gestures and head nods. As I only have an audio-recording available for my analysis, I cannot account for my non-verbal co-constructions of Daku’s narrative here. However, to say that Daku’s narrative is interactively monologic does not mean that it is not dialogic, when we understand dialogism to refer to the use of reported speech in constructed dialogues with narrative figures and voices and other polyphonic strategies and resonances in the heteroglossic deep structure. The narrative begins with Daku setting himself up as a narrative figure. He describes himself as more of a street art (.) person but equally someone who is invested in writing graffiti for the love of type. Type is the art of writing letters. This subcultural positioning as a street artist and graffiti writer follows on from our discussion, immediately preceding the start of the above transcript, about the differences between street art and graffiti. This discussion emerged out of an earlier narrative about how the Indian and international media often dubbed him ‘the Indian Banksy’ – a label from which Daku wanted to distance himself. (Banksy, from Bristol in the UK, is undoubtedly the most popular street artist in the world.) Daku, in contrast, emphasises that he can best express his love for type through the medium of graffiti writin. From Line  5 onwards, Daku begins to set up a narrative world in which he writes graffiti on a wall and passers-by see the graffiti (Line 08) or see him in the processes of writing the graffiti (Line  12). The narrative figure of the passer-by asks several questions about the graffiti and about the artist. When the passer-by asks if someone was paying Daku to write on the wall (Lines 14–16), he himself reappears as a narrative figure who answers: “no, no, it’s our own paint” (Line 17) and that this is “our own thing” whatever (Line 18). Daku here constructs himself as a graffiti writer who takes ownership of his artistic expression and is independent of commercial ties and obligations. In Line  19, Daku begins the second part of his narrative when he mentions that he started also writing [graffiti] in devanagari (Line  21); the script used for writing in Hindi (see Figure  5.1). His choice to use the Devanagari script in his graffiti is then explained by drawing a comparison with a hypothetical speech event in which someone makes an announcement on a microphone to a crowd of people (Lines  22–31). According to Daku, using English would be understood by around 50% of the people (Lines 26–28) but using Hindi would be understood by 99% (Lines 29–31). This common, yet hypothetical, language ideology is used to support a cross-modal remix – or adequation (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005), most prominently articulated in Line 32: the same thing – to explain and

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rationalise his choice of writin graffiti in Devanagari. The new remixed language ideology thus relies on reified language ideologies that naturalise the diglossic relationship between Hindi and English in India (see also Bunty’s narrative in Chapter 4), while it also transgresses linguistic boundaries that prevent Indian graffiti writers from imagining writing in Hindi or Devanagari. The tensions between the dual forces of transgression and reification are normalised and their complexities are reduced in Daku’s ‘own’ translingual voice with which he aims to be both distinctive and pioneering in the Indian graffiti and global street art scenes, while also fashioning his pieces as intelligible and legible to the majority of Indians. Daku’s remixin remains somewhat ambivalent in his narrative. He uses the labels ‘Hindi’ (a language) and ‘Devanagari’ (a script) both separately and interchangeably. Although he announces in Line 21 that he started writing his name in Devanagari, he never explicitly uses this label in the remainder of the narrative, where he only talks about Hindi. It is not clear if the label ‘Hindi’ here refers to the Devanagari script (which it often does in colloquial speech, as in the question: ‘Can you read Hindi?’) or the fact that the word ‘daku’ is the Hindi word for bandit. We might ignore this ambivalence in the analysis, let it pass and say it refers to both, which would in fact only intensify Daku’s transmodal and translingual remix here. Daku continues to theorise how his graffiti circulate and are taken up by Indian people. He first maintains that the people would expect graffiti to be in English (Line 34). Yet, when they see graffiti in Hindi (Line 36) and when they understand that it is Hindi (Line 37), they see and read the name Daku once (Line 38), and then after that it kind of rolls (Line 39) or rolls on it (Line 40), an idea he later expresses as it kind of automatically comes (.) comes to you (Line 44). Thus, once a person recognises a Devanagari graffiti piece by Daku, reads it and perhaps spells it (Line 42) and understands that it is Hindi, this person will then enter into a dialogic relationship with Daku’s pieces across the city (Line 41) and perhaps, so it might be implied, start becoming interested in the street artist, “who is writing this?” (Line 9). To make this narrative argument, Daku relies on a language ideology that renders Hindi as automatically accessible to the majority of Delhiites and that Hindi feels familiar to them, yet that it is not the expected language for the genre of writin graffiti. Devanagari in graffiti creates an unfamiliar artistic juxtaposition, a remix, which garners interest and prompts questions. From the above we could infer that Daku’s artistic project is an attempt to enregister (Agha, 2003) Hindi as a language and Devanagari

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as a script that can be legitimately used for writin graffiti in India. In turn, the circulation of his name in Hindi/Devanagari across the city valorises his name and makes it recognisable. As discussed in Chapters  2 and 4, Agha (2003: 232) conceptualises enregisterments as ‘processes of valorization and circulation’; ‘processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms’ (Agha, 2003: 231). The socially recognised register of forms in our case is the genre of writin graffiti on the wall and the specific linguistic repertoire here is the Hindi language and the Devanagari script. By using the Hindi word ‘Daku’ and its Devanagari rendering ‘डाकू’ in his graffiti pieces, Daku attempts to valorise and circulate – i.e. he attempts to enregister – Hindi as a language that can be socially recognised as a language used for writin graffiti. At the time of my fieldwork in 2013, using Devanagari for graffiti was a novelty, Daku’s enregisterment was still an attempt and far from being unnegotiable, normalised or sedimented in the Indian hip hop scene, where most graffiti writers used Roman letters. At the time of writing this book in 2019/2020, the situation had not changed much. All new graffiti that I saw pop up on the streets of Delhi and Mumbai and which I took note of on the internet used Roman letters. Devanagari is almost entirely absent in the Indian graffiti scene; however, it might be more prominent in the street art scene. We can thus conclude that Daku’s attempt to enregister and normalise Hindi as a language that can be used for graffiti was not successful. Even Daku himself did not produce any Devanagari graffiti in the years that followed our interaction, at least not under the name ‘Daku’. Nevertheless, the ways in which Daku himself theorises his remix of Devanagari as graffiti transgresses mainstream language ideologies that link graffiti to the English language and Roman letters (most of the people expect it to be english, Line 34). Using Hindi and Devanagari in his graffiti localises and popularises graffiti within the Indian context. Since graffiti is a genre that is associated with illegality and counterculture (also consider his name Daku, i.e. bandit), his choice of writing graffiti in Hindi/Devanagari also challenges mainstream language ideologies that link Devanagari and Hindi to official Indian nation state registers and he thereby makes Devanagari/Hindi available for street-cultural artistic expression. This new remixed ideology, although not widely materialising as semiotic surfaces in the Indian graffiti scene, stands as Daku’s powerful proposition in the transculturation of hip hop in India, which, I hope, will inspire future generations of Indian – as well as global – graffiti writers to experiment with challenging the dominance of Roman letters in graffiti writin and in our urban linguistic landscapes more generally.

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Dizy: We Don’t Understand the Language, but We can Relate, that’s What Hip Hop is

The final narrative I discuss in this chapter is taken from an interview with another graffiti writer. However, the narrative is not so much about graffiti but rather about hip hop intercultural work. Dizy narrates her experiences of travelling to places and practicing and teaching hip hop across cultures and languages. At the time of the interview, Dizy was 18 years old and she had been writin graffiti for several years. Inspired by her brother, who is also a writer, she discovered hip hop and graffiti and her dope pieces soon became visible on the streets of Delhi. Her visibility in the hip hop scene made it possible for her to travel across India as well as internationally. For example, during the Indo-German Hip Hop and Urban Art Project 2011–2012, she travelled to Germany for two weeks to meet and collaborate with writers and breakers in Stuttgart. At the time of writing this book in 2020, Dizy had permanently settled in Berlin and she continues to write graffiti and travel to several cities in China, India and Germany to write and teach graffiti. Back in 2013, we met each other on a few jams and, hearing about my research, she agreed to do an interview with me in a café in central Delhi. The passage I selected begins with me asking her to talk about a recent trip that she took to Pondicherry (now known as Puducherry), a Union Territory in the south of India, where she, accompanied by a group of German hip hop activists and ambassadors who were on a visit to India, taught a series of hip hop workshops with schoolchildren. The project was called ‘Each One Teach One’, evoking hip hop’s pedagogical strategy of informal cultural and intergenerational transmission (see also Singh & Dattatreyan, 2016). However, Dizy misunderstands my question initially and begins talking about her trip to Germany a year prior. Interview with Dizy, Delhi 2013 {27:23–28:12} 01 Jaspal: 02 03 04 05 06 Dizy: 07 08

so another thing I wanted to (.) ask you is erm. about your experiences with going to pondicherry. and you know travelling with the (2.0) with the german guys. and all this you know. (3.0) what do you think about all this? the trip was so good. ya. it- I mean I still ☺ remember it so fre:::sh. and er I was doing what I really wanted to do.

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09 we were doing for the sake what I really love. 10 we were doing for for two weeks. 11 yeah so that was amazing experiences. 12 yeah and to know each other culture ya. 13 and I didn’t find any difficult. 14 because (.) humanity is (.) ☺ the first language. 15 Jaspal: yeah okay 16 Dizy: so it was e- it was easy ya. 17 I had fun. 18 and I learned some (.) ☺ german. 19 Jaspal: hahaha. ☺ okay good. Although I asked Dizy to relay her experiences about a trip to Puducherry with a German hip hop delegation, she slightly misunderstands my question and starts talking about her experiences when travelling to Germany as part of the Indo-German Hip Hop and Urban Art Project. She describes her trip as having been ☺ so fre:::sh (Line 07) and amazing (Line 11). Similar to Prabh Deep and Daku, she evokes love when she says that her trip enabled her to do what she really wanted to do (Line 08) and what I really love (Line 09). She also says that she gained some intercultural competences (Line 12) and that she had no difficulties (Line 13) with cultural or linguistic differences because (.) humanity is (.) ☺ the first language. (Line 14). This linguistic ideology transcends the importance of language and misunderstandings due to linguistic differences. She instead emphasises a universal notion of humanity that would enable understanding across linguistic difference. However, a few lines further down she also says that she learned some (.) ☺ german (Line 18). So, it seems that learning bits of language is not completely unimportant for intercultural experiencing, yet it does not seem to be absolutely essential either, because humanity transcends language. Dizy’s evocation of humanity is further explained in the following part of her narrative. Prompted by my reiteration of my initial question, she narrates that, due to the fact that her students in Puducherry did not speak Hindi and very little English,1 communication problems occurred during the workshops. Yet, Dizy is quick to say that the good relation (Line 42) she and the other German teachers established with the children allowed them all to communicate with each other across language barriers. This relation, we might say rapport in ethnographic terminology, was engendered not by linguistic understanding but rather by ☺ smiling (Line 39), ☺ doing (Line 40) and ☺ performing (Line 41). She resolves

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her narrative when she identifies such a practice-based understanding of communication as the essence of hip hop; what hip hop is (Line 70). Interview with Dizy, Delhi 2013 {28:14–31:04} 20 Jaspal:

and what about all this you know this project each one teach one. 21 what is it- what is it all about? 22Dizy: erm it was er. 23 yeah it was er we were giving a workshop there. 24 like breakin workshop. 25 graffiti workshop. 26 yes so teaching other people and giving the knowledge. 27 of its- what hip hop is all about. 28 Jaspal: so who were these people who you who you taught? 29 Dizy: the the local people. 30 the local sch- children 31 er the local school children. 32 so we went went to the school and giving workshop there. 33 Jaspal: okay and erm. 34 how did they respond? 35 I mean how- what was their reaction? 36 Dizy: actually er there was little bit erm communication problem. 37 because they don’t understand (.) hindi. 38 and little a little bit english. 39 so but er but all er all they were doing was ☺ smiling. 40 ☺ and doing. 41 ☺ performing. 42 you know when you when you made the good relation. 43 like then ya then they feel free. 44 and then they started learning what we were teaching. 45 Jaspal: okay and you spent like whole two weeks with the- with this with this46 Dizy: yeah first er four five days we taught them. 47 and then the main day they have to (.) [perform] yeah. 48 Jaspal: [perform] 49 Dizy: ☺ so it was like what we have taught it is the time to show other people. 50 Jaspal: okay 51 and erm did you teach only erm:: 52 I mean was there some philosophy behind that?

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53 54

you know like er: because in hip hop it’s more than just like knowing how to paint. 55 or knowing how to break. 56 you know there’s this kind of erm (.) attitude behind it. 57 and this kind of. 58 you know love and peace and having fun and all this you know. 59 were you able to- to get this across? 60 to them? 61 Dizy: erm yes er that was the motive. 62 but er I told you about little bit communication problem. 63 Jaspal: yeah 64 Dizy: but still. 65 you see if we don’t understand the language. 66 but we can you know. 67 relate. 68 er we can talk in69 we can understand each other what we are doing. 70 that’s what hip hop is you know. 71 Jaspal: yeah 72 Dizy: ☺ no language no caste yeah. 73 Jaspal: cool sweet. 74 yeah that’s good. Here, Dizy puts forward a non-verbal or multimodal ideology of translanguaging, namely that embodied practice (smiling, performing, doing) transcends language and linguistic difference because it allows people to understand each other and build relations with each other. The question I pose in Lines 50–60, in which I evoke hip hop’s deeper philosophy, the attitude that comes with it and its moral framework of love, peace, unity and having fun, might have not been easy to get across (Line 59) to the children. This was due to the language barriers that exist between North and South India as well as between social classes. Yet, a translingual approach, in which practice and relations were emphasised, eventually helped all the participants of the workshops to understand each other what we are doing (Line 65). Dizy’s argument for practice and doing challenges common language ideologies (as implied in my question) that hip hop teaching relies on getting the message across through linguistic understanding. Hip hop pedagogy is translingual in the sense that it transcends language. Dizy makes

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the point that her translingual ideological remix is characteristic of the essence of hip hop (Line 70) and she also quickly recognises, like Prabh Deep, the social message of this remixed ideology, when she smilingly says that hip hop rejects language and caste (Line 72). If Dizy’s utopian ideology of hip hop as a universal language that transcends social and linguistic barriers is valid, hip hop should also be able transcend gender and sexuality. Yet, hip hop in India and elsewhere dramatically underrepresents women and non-heterosexual men. In the same interview, Dizy talks about her positionality as a young female graffiti writer, who at times felt unsafe when traversing the city, especially after the brutal gang rape and murder of Nirbhaya in December 2012, after which markedly fewer women and girls were seen on the streets of Delhi. Yet, Dizy always kept a positive attitude and still went out to paint, and she actively tried to change the representation of women in India and in hip hop as docile, fearful and dependent on men. The day after our interview, Dizy was embarking on a trip to Mumbai to meet up with Manmeet Kaur and b-girl Am-B to shoot an all-female music video. Dizy rockin the cans, Manmeet rippin the mic and Am-B breakin the floor. Dizy had met Manmeet the previous year in Mumbai, during the Indo-German Hip Hop and Urban Arts Project, and ever since they had the idea to form our own girls’ crew, as she said later in our interview. Dizy said she was excited about this trip and the video shoot because it would be the first time for girls reppin India in global hip hop. Discussion and Conclusion: Strategic Essentialism

Representation, love, transgression and transcendence seem to be important concepts that inform young hip hop artists’ remixin of language ideologies. While the narrators in this chapter seem to challenge dominant language ideologies that reify links between language and identity, they also seem to rely on precisely these reified language ideological links to represent themselves and their marginalised communities. The reifications that are part of the construction of translingual voices that emerge in these narratives of remixin can be understood as something that Spivak (in an interview with Grosz, 1990[1984]) has discussed as strategic uses of essentialism (for a discussion of strategic essentialism within sociolinguistics, see Bucholtz, 2003; McElhinny, 1996; Wee, 2018). While Spivak rhetorically sides with anti-essentialism, she maintains that the feminist struggle could benefit from a reflexive awareness of tactically using essentialism for political representation in a non-decontextualised way.

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I think it’s absolutely on target not to be rhetorically committed to it, and I think it’s absolutely on target to take a stand against the discourses of essentialism, universalism as it comes in terms of the universal – of classical German philosophy or the universal as the white upper-class male … etc. But strategically we cannot. Even as we talk about feminist practice, or privileging practice over theory, we are universalising – not only generalising but universalising. Since the moment of essentialising, universalizing, saying yes to the onto-phenomenological question, is irreducible, let us at least situate it at the moment, let us become vigilant about our own practice and use it as much as we can rather than make the totally counter-productive gesture of repudiating it. (Spivak in Grosz, 1990[1984]: 11–12, emphasis in the original)

When we take seriously such tactics of strategic essentialism, we get encouraged to jettison our conviction or desire that translanguaging must always be about challenging language ideological reifications. Such a view of translanguaging is inaccurate and perhaps says more about us researchers’ cosmopolitan visions and liberal agendas than about the lived realities of the people who we study. In his discussion on transracialisation and strategic essentialism, Alim makes a similar point: Transracialization is not about doing away with race altogether; it’s about both doing race and undoing race in an effort to develop a subversive transracial politics. The transracial political project is about developing a more nuanced, strategic stance that requires us to know when (and when not to) uphold, reject, and exploit racial categorization. (Alim, 2016: 47)

Analogously, remixin language ideologies can then be seen as subversive translingual politics that makes efforts to both challenge dominant ideologies and rely on precisely these same ideologies to represent, experience interculturality and show love towards their ‘own’ and other marginalised communities. Dizy’s, Daku’s and Prabh Deep’s language ideological remixes, while transcending language boundaries, or even language per se, also articulate strategies of political communication and representation; strategies for transcultural voice. Trying to do away with language ideologies and proclaiming some utopian vision that anyone can use any language or that language does not matter are only a naïve reading of translanguaging. The marginalising realities felt by people and communities seem to work in the opposite direction: language belongs to the people/community/self and this essentialised belonging is strategically

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remixed to become effective as a political and personal project of love and representation. Remixin is also a historical positioning practice. As the literature suggests, the remix depends on the history of the original – its citationality even explicitly marks the gap between original and mimicry. This means that the narrators’ essentialising strategies of representation are both past oriented and future oriented; they reproduce and challenge, presuppose and entail, they are a thing and a process, knowledge and practice, hip and hop. While recounting past experiences, the narrators also take future positions. Dizy’s trip to Mumbai to rep Indian women in hip hop, Daku’s attempts to enregister Devanagari as a script for graffiti writin and Prabh Deep’s plan to drop a verse in URdu as well. in the future (Lines 72–74), all articulate the narrators’ future aspirations and position themselves within history. In Chapter 6, I will explore such chronotopic positioning practices in hip hop historicity.

6 Synchronising Voices: Travelling the Delhi to Bronx Wormhole

Introduction

In the previous two chapters, I showed how narrators orchestrate prosodic registers of intonation and language ideologies of Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, English and Indian English to index voices of the self and the other. In this orchestration, I suggested, narrators’ ‘own’ transcultural voices become normalised. As mentioned throughout this book, these voices are also historicised because they emerge from an orchestration of narrative figures that represent the past, the present and the future. The focus of this chapter will be to explore in more detail how narrative voices are historicised and how narrators normalise their ‘own’ voices in relation to history and chronotopes (space-times). The analysis of this chapter demonstrates that this normalisation of historicity is achieved through the discursive process of synchronisation (Blommaert, 2005). Synchronisation allows narrators to connect the voices of hip hop’s past to their ‘own’ voices in the contemporary moment and in their futures as hip hop cultural producers in India. Thus, more than being mere nostalgia, such synchronisation opens up the possibility to situate one’s present in history and thereby find opportunities to transform one’s future. One particular synchronisation that continually recurred in my fieldwork involved a narrative comparison between the Bronx in the 1970s and Delhi in the 2010s. In many narratives I collected, these two chronotopes (space-times) were compared and eventually synchronised. I propose to use the metaphor of wormholes (Sheppard, 2002) to qualitatively describe this synchronisation of chronotopes in the narratives of transculturation for hip hop in Delhi. By travelling the Delhi–Bronx wormhole, narrators construct the transcultural historicity of the Global Hip Hop Nation. This is achieved by ordering narrative events or plots and by constructing voices that are emblematic of a particular chronotope. This spatio-temporal ordering of historical events, plots and voices 159

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is complex, but narrators reduce this complexity in the resolution of the narratives. In the resolutions, narrators present the reasons for their historical synchronisation, and for telling the narrative in the first place (the famous So what? question, see Labov, 1972b), thereby putting forward their ‘own’ voices as narrators and normalising their historical positionalities. The transcultural wormholes, I show, also have pedagogical and transformative values for my participants. Their wormhole travelling helps them to make sense of their ‘own’ contemporary space-time and imagine themselves as future practitioners of hip hop. I begin this chapter with a brief overview of the conceptual toolkit needed to analyse such narrative historicity in hip hop talk. I then present examples in which narrators travel the Delhi–Bronx wormhole. In this process of narrative wormhole travelling, the chronotope of the Bronx 1970s/1980s appears as a myth. Deploying the myth of the Bronx instantly evokes a historical situatedness for the narrator and fosters their critical historical awareness of their positionality – their ‘own’ transcultural voice – within global hip hop and across the postcolony. Historicity: Chronotopes, Synchronisation and Transcultural Wormholes

The analysis of discourse has produced considerable insights into the discursive construction of time and historicity (Adam, 1995; Foucault, 1972; Wallerstein, 1997). Rather than trying to objectively describe the history of events, ‘as they really happened’ in the past, like some old-school historians would try and do, discourse analysts are interested in understanding how speakers themselves perceive time and construct and shape their own and others’ histories. I suggest drawing together a theoretical and methodological vocabulary that will allow us to move away from an objectivist analysis of the ‘actual’ history and towards an analysis of the discursive construction of historicity. Three concepts seem relevant for such an analysis of historicity: chronotopes, synchronisation and wormholes. Bakhtin (1981), borrowing from Einstein, coined the term chronotope (time-space) to refer to the spatio-temporal representation of voices in novels, which, in turn, constructs genre expectations. Once upon a time…, for example, introduces readers to the mythical time and space of the genre fairy tale. Here, we can expect fantastical creatures like dragons, witches and elves to speak and play socially meaningful roles and we can also expect a certain plot in which narrative figures such as kings, princesses, knights and villains orchestrate some kind of moral teaching,

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often explicitly summarised by the author’s ‘own’ voice at the end: and the moral of the story is…. Bakhtin (1981: 250) emphasises the functions of chronotopes for narrative: ‘The chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied. It can be said without qualification that to them belongs the meaning that shapes the narrative’. Chronotopes thus bring historical space-time into narrative space-time (see also Perrino, 2015). Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope has been productively applied in sociolinguistics and cognate disciplines, where it came to describe how speakers position themselves in relation to scales of historicity (see e.g. Agha, 2007b; Blommaert, 2015; Blommaert & De Fina, 2015; Creese & Blackledge, 2020; Eisenlohr, 2015; Hall, 2019; Kroon & Swanenberg, 2020; Silverstein, 2005; Woolard, 2016). Blommaert (2015) argues that chronotopes allow for a nuanced and complex-oriented type of research that challenges one-dimensional models of spatial and temporal contexts in the analysis of languaging. Chronotopes are always scalar because they connect various levels of space and time in complex ways (for more on sociolinguistic scales, see Blommaert, 2007; Carr & Lempert, 2016; Singh, 2016; Singh & Spotti, in press). The immediate here and now is connected to various scales of the there and then. Yet, different from Einstein’s conceptualisation, cultural chronotopes do not only represent time and space but because they emerge in acts of situated languaging they also index one’s ‘own’ identity in the present in relationship to other identities in the past or in the future. Agha (2007b) thus defines chronotopes succinctly as semiotic ‘depictions of place-time-and-personhood’. However, it is not the case that each narrator or each narrative represents one and only one chronotope. Rather, multiple chronotopes can be orchestrated in narratives in complex and multi-scalar ways. Blommaert (2005: 134) proposes the notion of synchronisation to grasp the ways in which speakers arrange several chronotopes and layers of historicity to create continuity and coherence in their talk. Yet, in this process of synchronisation, speakers compress histories into one single layer, thereby denying the complexity of their own historical positionality. Synchronization in discourse is a tactic of power. The denial of the layered nature of simultaneity in discourse, or, to put it differently, the reduction of overdetermination to just one single (clear, transparent) meaning, results in images of continuity, logical outcomes, and textual coherence. It is a denial of the complexity of a particular position from which one speaks, and of the differences between that position and that of others. Instead we get a flat comparison [of different times and places]

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within one time frame, the present, our experiential present, denying the rather fundamental differences between such time-scales and the various positions people assume on such scales. (Blommaert, 2005: 136, original italics)

Synchronisation can also be conceptualised as a temporal dimension of what Bucholtz and Hall (2004, 2005) call adequation. Adequation, they say, ‘denotes both equation and adequacy’ in the ‘pursuit of socially recognised sameness’ (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004: 383). Adequation (and its counterpart distinction) is a tactic of intersubjectivity at play when people construct and understand social relations and negotiate identities more generally. In this process of adequation, ‘potentially salient differences are set aside in favor of perceived or asserted similarities that are taken to be more situationally relevant’ (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004: 383). An analysis of such discursive processes of the synchronisation of historicities or the adequation of chronotopes promises to shed light on how people narratively position themselves and others towards history and current global complexity. The synchronisation of historical layers or the adequation of chronotopes is studied in Pennycook and Mitchell’s (2009) discussion of interviews with African and Aboriginal Australian hip hop artists, who conceive of hip hop not as something external to their cultural heritage, something that needs to be appropriated, but rather as something that is already there and theirs. Pennycook and Mitchell (2009: 26–27) use the notion of dusty foot philosophy (originally articulated by the Somalian-Canadian emcee K’Naan) to understand ‘the ways in which localized hip hop can on the one hand still be part of a global, digital world and at the same time have its feet and fingers in the dirt’. Drawing on the work of Mignolo, Pennycook and Mitchell (2009: 27, original italics) ‘are trying to get beyond common images whereby localization is merely the appropriation of the pre-existing global, in order to explore instead how these artists’ articulation of the coevalness of origins obliges us to spatialize time and think differently about the already local’. This also means that the attempt to find out about the ‘true’ history of global hip hop, understood one-dimensionally as spreading from the South Bronx in 1973 to the world, must therefore be ultimately replaced with a more complex understanding of scalar historicity. The point, then, is that it is not fruitful to pursue the true origins of Hip Hop, as if these could be found either in the villages of Africa or the ghettoes of North America, but rather appreciate that once Hip Hop is taken

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up in a local context, the direction of appropriation starts to be reversed: No longer is this a cultural form that has been localized; now it is a local form that connects to several worlds: Australian Aboriginal Hip Hop does connect to African oral traditions but not as much as it connects to Australian Aboriginal practices. (Pennycook & Mitchell, 2009: 35)

The Global Hip Hop Nation does not have one single history, but rather it occupies several scales of historicity which are polycentrically connected to one another through transcultural narratives and voices. In this chapter, I will show such polycentric transculturation of historicity by attending to the narrative trope that we could describe as a Delhi–Bronx cross-chronotope scale-jumping, or more metaphorically as wormhole travelling. Sheppard (2002), also borrowing from Einstein, suggests that the notion of wormholes can further help with imagining the synchronisation of chronotopes in globalisation. Sheppard is interested in an analysis of positionality in the global economy. He faces the problem that the global economy cannot be understood as simply a spatial phenomenon, rather globalisation is complexly intertwined with time, as Marx’s (1858) ‘annihilation of space by time’ or Harvey’s (1990) ‘space-time compression’ suggest. Because the complexity of the current global economy challenges the fixity of space and time in globalisation, Sheppard (2002) proposes the metaphor of wormholes (from physics) as a way of representing the highly non-Euclidean spatiality of global economy […]. When two relatively isolated places become closely connected, meaning that their positionality becomes closely interrelated, then a wormhole opens between them. (Sheppard, 2002: 308)

Euclid’s ancient model of spatial fixity complicates, in fact renders impossible, an accurate representation of the global economy. The flows of goods, workforce, finance and languages in contemporary globalisation operate on scales of spatiality that transcend geographical fixity; that is to say that globalisation includes a type of spatiality that is nonEuclidian. A wormhole, known in physics also as the Einstein–Rosen Bridge (Einstein & Rosen, 1935), theorises the timeless and spaceless passage between two points in the universe; it theorises a synchronisation of two chronotopes. The wormhole metaphor helps Sheppard to capture ‘the shifting, asymmetric, and path-dependent ways in which the futures of places depend on their interdependencies with other places’ (Sheppard, 2002: 308). As an analytical metaphor, wormholes allow

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us to acknowledge the non-Euclidian complexity of globally emerging multi-scalar positionalities and still accommodate the general understanding of a geographic, Euclidian globalisation; an understanding of globalisation that takes the map and the spherical coordinate system as taken-for-granted reference points (Sheppard, 2002: 323). Metaphorically taking up this idea from the theory of general relativity, transcultural wormholes synchronise narrative space-time and generate possibilities of transcultural passage. Yet, different from its understanding in physics, transcultural wormholes are more or less permanent semiotic passages between two space-times that can potentially be travelled. The Delhi–Bronx wormhole is a well-known, established and enregistered narrative link between the contemporary lived-experience in Delhi and the spatio-temporal origin of hip hop culture. The metaphor of wormholes allows us to imagine how narrators warp the interdiscursivity of chronotopes (Silverstein, 2005) and engage in cross-chronotope alignment (Agha, 2007b) and scale-jumping (Blommaert, 2007, 2010). In the narratives you will hear in this chapter, the wormhole connects contemporary Delhi with the Bronx of the 1970s/1980s. Narrators compare these chronotopes to one another and synchronise them by highlighting and erasing certain aspects of their difference or their apartness. In their wormhole travel, the Bronx of the 1970s/1980s becomes a myth (in Barthes’, 2000 sense) that can be invoked by narrators to make sense of their ‘own’ positionalities in the here and now and in the future. The Bronx as Myth

It is a generally accepted historical fact among global hip hop practitioners that the Bronx in New York City in the early 1970s is the chronotope that gave birth to hip hop. More precisely, a particular birthday party held by Cindy Campbell, DJ Kool Herc’s sister, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, South Bronx on 11 August 1973 is commonly credited to be the exact chronotope of hip hop’s birth. During this particular party, it is said, DJ Kool Herc first introduced a new technique of deejayin, which involved the use of two turntables and two identical records. Switching back and forth between the records allowed him to play small sections of the songs (known as breaks) over and over again to keep the party crowd going. These parameters of hip hop’s historiography have some discursive value for practitioners of the culture across the world. They provide hip hop with an ‘origin myth’ (Alim, 2009; Foreman, 2012) that

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can be imagined, mediatised and further mythologised as an ‘old school’ type of hip hop, which was pre-commercial, grassroots, inventive, spontaneous and therefore authentic. Chronotopic knowledge about the birth of hip hop also allows global practitioners of the culture to understand the emergence of hip hop as part of wider discourses, political processes and historical contexts, such as the Black emancipation movements of the 1960s and urban politics in post-Fordist America. Due to the post-industrial abandonment of infrastructures, services and resources, as well as the ‘white flight’ to suburbia, the Bronx became a symbol for the North American inner-city ghetto. In this post-apocalyptic scenario, the rich cultural labour of young African American, Puerto Rican, Caribbean, mixed and white dancers, musicians and artists created a form of cultural expression that was later (in the late 1970s and early 1980s) labelled ‘hip hop’. For excellent historical accounts of the Bronx in relation to hip hop, I refer readers to Chang (2005), Rose (1994) and Toop (1991). Media representations of the emergence of hip hop in the Bronx in the 1970s can be found in Ahearn’s (1983) classic film Wild Style, Walta and Cooper’s (2004) photographic documentation Hip Hop Files, Chalfant’s (2006) film-documentary From Mambo to Hip Hop and Luhrmann and Guirgis’s (2016) Netflix series The Get Down. As hip hop goes global, scenes around the world use these audio-visual artefacts of the Bronx to learn about hip hop’s history and draw comparisons with their own scenes (see also Nitzsche, 2012). In this comparison, they appropriate the powerful chronotope of the mythologised Bronx and make it their ‘own’. However, this appropriation does not happen without a transcultural negotiation and reformulation of the aesthetics, attitudes, authenticities and cultural practices of the Bronx myth to eventually synchronise them with their local, contemporary and future context. Over the course of my fieldwork, I encountered the Delhi–Bronx comparison countless times. The comparison came in many forms and had many functions; sometimes narrators would compare Delhi to New York, a hyponym of the mythologised Bronx, or they would compare another Indian city to the chronotope of the Bronx. The multifunctionality of the Bronx chronotope, I argue, lends mythical character to the Bronx, as also discussed below. The comparison initially caught my attention in an interview that I conducted in Berlin in August 2012, before my departure for Delhi. My interviewee was Zebster, a first-generation German hip hop legend, who, over the previous 30 years, had extensively laboured to promote, celebrate and document hip hop culture around the world (see Walta, 2012). During the Indo-German Year 2011–2012,

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several German national agencies, such as the Goethe Institut, supported Zebster and a group of European hip hop heads to organise events and network meetings in India (for an analysis of the Indo-German Hip Hop and Urban Art Project, see Singh & Dattatreyan, 2016). Four months after Zebster’s return from India, I interviewed him and the British Indian DJ Uri in the Hip Hop Stützpunkt (literally: Hip Hop Base) in Berlin and asked about their experiences on the subcontinent. Because DJ Uri was present, we conducted this interview in English rather than in Zebster’s and my native language of German. Zebster commented on his impressions of Delhi by comparing contemporary hip hop practices in India to a myth of the Bronx (here in the form of the signifier ‘New York’, a hyponym of the Bronx). Interview with Zebster and DJ Uri, Berlin 2012 {28:41–28:52} 01 02 03 04

delhi totally reminds me to new york in the seventies. and to see then let’s say THESE kids ((in India)). do something like the park jam for example. what happened let’s say thirty years before ((in NYC)).

Here, Zebster suggests that a specific historical moment can be re-experienced through spatial travel. Zebster’s experience of travelling to contemporary Delhi in 2012 triggers a re-experiencing of New York in the 1970s/1980s. Zebster, it should be noted, did not directly experience New York 30  years ago, ‘with his own eyes’, but he draws here on a mediatised image of the Bronx, which, however, he himself partly constructed through his celebrated book publication Hip Hop Files: Photographs 1979–1984 (Walta & Cooper, 2004). The practices of the hip hop kids (Line 02) in Delhi, who took part in public park jams that Zebster witnessed on his visit in 2012, remind him of a pre-commercialised phase of hip hop in the New York old school, where young people from the then devastated South Bronx utilised local parks, street corners and abandoned buildings to throw block parties and jams. The implication of this wormhole travelling is that the positionality of the emerging scene in Delhi today can be compared to the positionality of the legendary New York old school. The two chronotopes seem to share similar practices: the appropriation of neighbourhood parks and the built environment, as well as the attribute of spontaneity and grassroots cultural production. Cultural production and cultural development are generated by the kids – without interference from the media, the public authorities or the commercial world. In that sense, Zebster’s synchronisation of

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contemporary Delhi hip hop with a mythologised New York old school authenticates the Delhi hip hop scene. It renders Delhi hip hop as an underground scene affording alternative views of hegemonic globalisation and allowing the young hip hop heads in Delhi to position themselves at a critical distance from mainstream ideas of modernity. Similarly, Daku, the famous Indian graffiti writer and street artist, who has already appeared in Chapter 5, compares the beginnings of graffiti in the early 2000s in Delhi, and in Mumbai where he had lived previously, to New York in the 1970s: Interview with Daku, Delhi 2013 {07:29–07:48} 01 so we so basically for those initial years. 02 we are like how new york was in the beginning of graffiti. 03 like they used to paint like with car paint and just a few small rollers. 04 and all kind of like jugaad basically. 05 to get get things done. Here, Daku uses the notion of jugaad (Line  04), a well-known cultural concept in India to refer to a makeshift vehicle and more generally to a do-it-yourself attitude. This term is employed by Daku to hint at the fact that the early graffiti writers of India, just like the early writers in New York, had no professional graffiti equipment, but still got things done (Line 05) by creatively using whatever was available to them. The link to New York, arguably, authenticates his own jugaad approach when he first started as a writer in India and it also historicises Daku as someone who was part of the pioneering generation of old school graffiti writers and street artists in India. Rane, a Swiss Indian hip hop activist who I interviewed in Zurich, also compares the way graffiti is practiced in Delhi to New York in the 1980s. We conducted this interview mainly in German. Interview with Rane, Zurich 2014 {31:22–31:29} 01 02 03

und die ganze art wie graffiti ((in Delhi)) praktiziert wird. And the whole way graffiti is practiced ((in Delhi)). wenn man das so anguckt. When one looks at it. das ist genau::: wie:: in den achtziger jahren in new york. This is ju:::st li::ke in the eighties in New York.

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Similar to Zebster, Rane positions himself as an outside observer of Indian hip hop (when one looks at it, Line  02) to arrive at his conclusion that graffiti practices in Delhi today are just like graffiti practices in New York in the 1980s. This likening is done affectively through elongating the vowels (genau::: wie::). Rane’s explicit and affective comparison is a striking example of adequation (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004) in its historicising sense. What is more, Rane ends his narrative with a coda predicting a great future for graffiti in India: Interview with Rane, Zurich 2014 {32:31–32:35} 01 02

graffiti hat ein riesen potential in indien. Graffiti has a great potential in India. auf jeden fall. Definitively.

Evoking the Bronx, or one of its hyponyms ‘New York’ or ‘America’, is not merely a process that can be observed for understanding Delhi’s hip hop scene, nor only among hip hop travellers such as Zebster or Rane. The Bronx can be used as a comparative ground for anyone in any city in the Global Hip Hop Nation, which speaks to its mythical character. As Urban (1996: 42) notes, myth is ‘a distilled type that presents itself as decontextualized or polytextual, not serving the local interests of any of the participants in the replication process and hence being more readily replicated by all’. So, while discussing the ‘English Bombay hip hop sound’ with Mumbai emcee Enkore, New York is evoked as a way of describing the ways Mumbai’s hip hop sounds. Interview with Enkore, Mumbai 2013 {39:25–40:30} 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11

[…] in my opinion there’s (.) erm there IS an english bombay sound. and of what I have been able to get (.) OF it. is it’s a (3.0) very rugged sound. I wouldn’t call it dark I wouldn’t call it grimy. just rugged. just think of the trains you know. moving moving moving you know. like on on on. ((snaps fingers before every syllable)) that’s that’s the bombay (.) it’s very new york. (.) it’s very new york. if you think of it.

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12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

it’s er lyrics. lyrics play a big part. you know in the er west coast. in the u.s. it was you know the g-funk and you know the low riders and all that. but new york it was. you know just simple. you know rugged shoes. you know whatever. just (.) make sure your rhymes are on point. because that’s what LIFE is here. you know. it is as as always you know art depicts life. which is what life is here. if you SEEN it in bombay. you do one thing you move on to the next thing. ((allegro)) you do one thing you move on to the next thing. ((allegro)) you know.

After a three-second pause (Line 03) and a search for adjectives that best describe the Bombay sound, rugged, but not dark and not grimy (Lines 03–05), Enkore conjures up the city’s beat. Mumbai’s commuter trains become an epitome of the city’s fast rhythm, created by the rhythmic repetition of the word moving (Line 07) and then again by the rhythmic snapping of fingers before every on (Line 08), underlining the percussive style of the city experience. He then finally, almost deductively (if you think of it, Line 11), draws the comparison with New York (Line  10). It seems, while thinking about the best way to describe the Bombay sound, Enkore arrives at the signifier ‘New York’ as a descriptor. ‘New York’ stands for specific aesthetics – simple (Line 16), rugged shoes (Line 17) – and attitudes and practices – you know whatever, just make sure your rhymes are on point (Lines 18–19). The New York vibe is then first distinguished from the practices and aesthetics of the West Coast types of hip hop, the g-funk and low riders1 (Line  14), and then discovered in Enkore’s own lived experience in Mumbai (Lines  20–26). The New York vibe in this example, as well as in the previous examples by Zebster, Daku and Rane, seems to serve as ready templates with explanatory meaning-making force when talking about the hip hop scenes in cities such as Delhi and Mumbai – and probably elsewhere as well. This helps to understand one’s ‘own’ urban experience and situate the contemporary self within the history of hip hop and the culture’s moral framework of authenticity. In this sense, the myth of the Bronx is a tropic emblem. Blommaert (2015: 12) describes tropic emblems as having the potential to ‘instantly

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invoke a chronotope […] and bring chunks of history to the interactional here-and-now as context’. Thus, the myth of the Bronx does not merely represent a specific chronotope, but it also has the potential to invoke, or bring about, or entail a new contextual frame as it expands the positionality of the contemporary moment with a historical positionality of an idealised and mediatised image of the Bronx. Similarly, Agha (2007b) argues: Chronotopic representations enlarge the ‘historical present’2 of their audiences by creating chronotopic displacements and cross-chronotope alignments between persons here-and-now and persons altogether elsewhere, transposing selves across discrete zones of cultural spacetime through communicative practices […]. This process is not without ideological tensions and paradoxes. Communicative practices in the public sphere can equip people with a common sense of belonging (to a purpose, a group, a course of conduct) but also with a common sense of autonomy and freedom from the process that forges this sense of belonging. (Agha, 2007b: 324)

Agha (2015) reiterates this point in his discussion of kinship chronotopes (see also Eisenlohr, 2015; Rutherford, 2015). In the contemporary globalised moment, when traditional kin relationships are increasingly destabilised due to mobility and complexity, evoking chronotopes in languaging seems to allow people to build new solidarity bonds with people from other times and places. Picking up from this idea of kinship chronotopes, we can understand the wormhole travelling between the myth of the Bronx in the 1970s and contemporary Delhi as a way to imagine a postcolonial global hip hop family; a kin-like relationship between the forefathers in the Bronx and kids in Delhi. In the remainder of this chapter, I argue that travelling transcultural wormholes can also be transformative. In an encounter with history, people seem to always learn lessons that shape their own future. B-Boy Rawdr: To Know Your Future is to Know Your Past

Such transformative affordance is the theme of the following narrative by B-Boy Rawdr, a famous breaker in Delhi, who already made an appearance in Chapter  1 of this book. In the following excerpt, taken from the first minutes of our two-and-a-half-hour long interview, he says that only those few long-term b-boys who are dedicated to the culture will learn about its history. The historical study is necessary, he further argues, to know your future and build a name for yourself.

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Interview with B-Boy Rawdr, Delhi 2013 {16:35–17:34} 01 there are only few b-boys who will stick you know will not leave this dance form. 02 and you know (.) THEY will learn the history. 03 like who started this thing. 04 I’m still after the four years of my b-boyin. 05 just last night I was watching freshest kids. 06 it’s a hip hop documentary. it’s all a b-boy documentary. 07 err it has the footage from seventy three to eighty two and to nineties you know. 08 why? 09 because I want to know who started this thing. 10 this is what err (.) diamond d said in one of his songs. 11 er (.) “to know your past-” sorry “to know your future is to know your past.” 12 so you really need to learn first. 13 till the time you know who’s your father how are you gonna make a name? The spatio-temporal organisation of this narrative is remarkably complex. The narrator uses spatio-temporal deixis, such as various verb tenses (are, will, started, was watching, want, said, gonna), relative temporal adjectives (after, still, last night, first, till the time) and absolute time descriptions (seventy three, eighty two, nineties) to order narrative events and orchestrate historical narrative figures. Three narrative figures are constructed in the story world. First, the narrator constructs an idealised figure of the few b-boys who will stick to their practice and who are willing to learn the history of the culture (Lines 01–03); second, the narrator constructs himself in the story world as he narrates that he watched a hip hop documentary (Lines 04–07); and third, he constructs the narrative figure of the famous Bronx rapper Diamond D (Diamond D and the Psychotic Neurotics 1992), who speaks in a direct quote (Line 11) (on conversational sampling, see Roth-Gordon, 2009). These historical figures teach Rawdr about the (meta-)history of hip hop in America and globally and he applies this knowledge to inform his own future in Indian hip hop. The chronotope of American hip hop is accessed through two audio-visual artefacts of the culture, namely the documentary Freshest Kids and the song Stunts, Blunts and Hip Hop by Diamond D. These artefacts are metahistorical in the sense that they themselves put forward a historiography of hip hop. Both the

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documentary and the song are about how the culture was practiced in the past and who its main protagonists were. Many hip hop artefacts (such as songs, films and graffiti murals) can be read as metahistorical in that they remember the veterans of the culture and thus can be of educational value for younger practitioners. In fact, Nitzsche (2012: 185) thinks of such artefacts as providing hip hop scenes around the world with a ‘detailed audio-visual hip-hop manual’ that inspires them to develop their own understanding of what hip hop means and could mean for themselves. Finally, Rawdr’s narrative puts forward a pedagogical agenda for learning about hip hop history in order to understand his ‘own’ position in the future. This is the transformative affordance of synchronising voices, which will also be highlighted in the next narrative. The making of a name for yourself, then, becomes a historical project of knowing your past and knowing your future. MicMaster Aeke: The Onomastics of D2BX Crew

The next narrative inspired the title of this chapter. It is a narrative about the creative naming and renaming of the b-boy crew D2BX – Delhi to Bronx. The interviewee Aeke explains how the name D2BX did not always stand for ‘Delhi to Bronx’, but previously meant ‘Delhi to Bahadurghar Express’. Bahadurghar is a semi-urban area, approximately 30 km west of Delhi’s city centre. Bahadurghar has a big technical college which Aeke attended after graduating from school in central Delhi. During his school years in Delhi, Aeke had started b-boyin and he told me how he had been worried that he would not be able to continue with his b-boyin in the province. Luckily, however, he found a couple of young men in his class who were ready to learn breakin from him. After a few months of practising, they formed a crew and started travelling to battles in Delhi. On the weekends, they would take a regional coach, with the name ‘Delhi to Bahadurghar Express’, to commute between the outskirts and the city centre. They eventually decided to name their newly founded crew after that coach service. However, their name was misinterpreted. One day, a famous b-boy from New York found out about the young Indian crew and wrote about them on his blog. There, he misinterpreted the name ‘D2BX’ to mean ‘Delhi to Bronx’. The crew decided to adopt this new name. But before that could happen, they had to go through a process of learning. Before the excerpt starts, Aeke explains that self-produced dance videos of D2BX circulated on the internet. A legendary b-boy from New York found these videos and wrote about the young Indian crew on his blog.

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Interview with Aeke, Delhi 2013 {45:30–47:01} 01 Aeke: so there he didn’t know the meaning of D2BX okay. 02 I didn’t tell him from D2BX. 03 so he er whenever a new yorker or any person from bronx. 04 reads BX it comes to their mind it’s bronx. 05 Jaspal: yeah 06 Aeke: so you know he just made made up by his own that it’s delhi to bronx. 07 so he just he just put that name on his blog. […] 08 so till that time er we used to keep it delhi to bahadurghar express 09 till the time I was in college. 10 till the time I used to travel to bahadurghar actually. 11 so after that (.) I you know I just learned something. 12 that this whole name D2BX can stand up for many different things in hip hop. 13 so it’s actually different lessons that we’ll go through life. 14 so what we planned is. 15 like till the time we are in college we’ll be delhi to bahadurghar express. 16 after college- because at that time our target was going to bahadurghar. 17 Jaspal: yeah yeah 18 Aeke: now our target is learning more of hip hop. 19 so one day we have to go to bronx. 20 Jaspal: ☺ ahhh okay 21 Aeke: so now it’s ☺ delhi to bronx. 22 Jaspal: ☺ okay I see 23 Aeke: if we go one day and do really cool stuff in bronx. 24 after that we gonna change the name again. Lines  01–07 are the narrative orientation in which Aeke sets up his story by explaining that the videos they produced of themselves circulated on the internet and found their way onto a blog of a legendary New York b-boy. The b-boy blogger, however, was not able to decode the acronym D2BX as ‘Delhi to Bahadurghar Express’ but instead applied his common knowledge as a New Yorker and decoded it as ‘Delhi to Bronx’. In New York City, ‘BX’ is often used as an abbreviation for ‘Bronx’ on road signs, buses and trains. ‘BX’ has also been enregistered as a higher indexical order commodity artefact, for instance on ‘I ♥ BX’

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T-shirts, caps and mugs (see also Johnstone, 2009). The blogger circulated this new name on the internet. At the end of Line  07, a few seconds are left out during which one of Aeke’s family members steps into the room and briefly asks Aeke something, and Aeke answers briefly. From Line  08 onwards, he again turns towards me and begins with the story of the naming of D2BX. He explains how the decoding of the acronym has changed over the course of time and how he interprets these changes as lessons that we’ll go through life (Line 13). The name changes become meaningful as they correlate with the stages of life and the aspirations of the crew. To become a meaningful name, it is not enough that a New York b-boy legend (unknowingly) tinkers with the acronym. In order to appropriate this new semiosis in a transcultural way, Aeke and his friends have to first go through a process of learning (Line 11) and planning (Line 14). And so, in the remainder of the narrative Aeke and his crew appear as narrative figures. Taking the blogger’s misinterpretation as an inspiration, Aeke learned that D2BX can have multiple meanings (Line 12) and that these can represent lessons in the life of the crew (Line 13). With this realisation in mind, they made a plan (Line 14) and decided to synchronise their name change with their future aspirations. When the bus represented their target to go to college (Line 16), the Bronx now (Line 18) represents their target to learn more about hip hop. Lines 19–21 have the climax of the story. Here, the narrator construes the preposition ‘to’ (graphemically represented as ) as an omen, when he prophesises that a real journey to the Bronx would represent the pinnacle of their hip hop education. Lines 19–21 are thus the resolution in the Labovian sense (Labov, 1972b; Labov & Waletzky, 1967), prompting me to resolve the narrative tension with a smile voice ☺ ahhh okay in Line 20. After the tension has been resolved, Aeke adds a coda about the future story of the crew. If they ever get to do really cool stuff in bronx (Line 23), then they will change their name again (Line 24) and stimulate the development of the crew yet again. Aeke’s narrative synchronises the renaming of the crew D2BX in relation to the stages of personal biographies and aspirations. He uses the blogger’s misreading of the acronym as a life lesson and as an omen for a real journey to the Bronx. This scale-jump opens up a transcultural wormhole between hip hop’s chronotopic centre in the Bronx and the chronotopic peripheries of Delhi and Bahadurghar. Note that Aeke’s wormhole travel is not only nostalgic and historical, in the sense of going back in time, but it also repositions the future of the Indian breakers in the Global Hip Hop Nation, in India, in the Bronx and elsewhere. In the historical orchestration of voices, Aeke finds opportunities to construct

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his ‘own’ transcultural voice in the here and now and articulate targets for his and his crew’s future development. MC Eucalips: Indian Beatbox Tradition

Development – past and future – is also the theme in the next example. The narrative was recorded at a poppin and lockin3 jam in Delhi. At the time, the American beatboxer MC Eucalips was visiting Delhi and I was introduced to him by some of my research participants. On this afternoon, MC Eucalips and I went to the jam together, a basement gym space that the organisers had hired out for the day. We talked to a couple of visitors and dancers and also to Scientik, the organiser of the event, who will make an appearance in Chapter 8. Soon the poppin and lockin battles began and the audience formed a large cypher, a circle in which the dancers performed (cyphers are discussed in more detail in Chapter 7). After an hour or so, when Scientik, the organiser, announced a short break from the battles, MC Eucalips unexpectedly jumped into the cypher and simulated a few poppin and lockin movements. The audience, around 50 people, the majority of whom were young Indian men, laughed wholeheartedly, applauded and enjoyed the white visitor’s slightly gawky and unserious movements. Then, MC Eucalips addressed the audience. Before I could pull out my recorder and switch it on, he said that he was a beatboxer and explained that beatboxin, the production of percussion sounds with the mouth, had its beginnings in New York City. For socioeconomic reasons, he explained further, these early New York hip hop heads did not have access to records or hi-fi systems. So they began producing sounds with their mouths and bodies. In the narrative, Eucalips narrates the development of beatboxin across time, space and genre. He exemplifies his ‘history lesson’ with beatboxed sound snippets of each developmental step. In Line 18, in the resolution of the narrative, he unexpectedly codeswitches into Hindi, and thereby localises beatboxin as an Indian tradition. In the transcript, utterances in Hindi are underlined and English translations are in italics. The transcription of the beatbox performance uses symbols taken from the International Phonetics Association (2005) and is impressionistic and simplified and not verified by spectrum analysis. Recording on a poppin and lockin jam, Delhi 2013 {00:00–01:12} Field note

Just before I could pull out my recorder, MC Eucalips spoke to the audience. He said that for socioeconomic reasons, early NY hip hop

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heads often did not have access to recorded music and hi-fi systems. They started producing sounds with their mouths and bodies… 01 without the use of radios and all. 02 so they started to (.) listen to the sound of the radio (.) and copy them with their voice. 03 like ((beatbox)) b̤ʱmː b̤ʱmː tsk to to b̤ʱmː pʰtʰ pʰtʰ pʰtʰ pʰtʰ pʰtʰ pʰtʰ pʰtʰ pʰtʰ pʰtʰ pʰtʰ 04 ((audience cheers)) 05 and then from there (.) it developed and they started doing different styles of music. 06 like going from hip hop like. 07 ((beatbox)) sca ae ae scratching 08 to like dubstep. 09 ((beatbox)) b̤rʱmː tsak ↑brararararara b̤rʱmː 10 ((Audience cheers: ohhhhhhhhh, applause)) 11 yeah and now other people do lots of different types (.) of music. 12 like electro beat kar sakhta hain. like they can do electro beat 13 ((beatbox)) b̤ʱmː b̤ʱmː b̤ʱmː b̤ʱmː b̤ʱmː b̤ʱmː b̤ʱmː b̤ʱmː prrrro ↑mhmhmhmh 14 ((Audience cheers: ohhhh, applause)) 15 but basically the way I see beatboxin (.) 16 is it started in america (.) 17 but (.) 18 aapke hindustan mein bhi hai tabla bol. in your India there is also tabla bol. 19 ((Audience cheers loudly, applause, laughter)). 20 india mein beatboxin ka parampara hai. In India there is a beatboxin tradition. 21 ((Audience cheers very loudly, applause, laughter)). 22 tabla bol (.) aur south india mein solkattu hai. Tabla bol and in South India there is solkattu. 23 voh do beatboxin ka cheez hain. These are two things to do with beatboxin. 24 so aap log to asaan hi se sikh ((sakhte hain)) So you guys ((can)) learn easily. 25 ((Audience applause)) ((Performance continues)) MC Eucalips’s codeswitch into Hindi in Line 18 came as a surprise to me and members of the audience. How could the white visitor with

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an American accent when speaking English, also speak Hindi so fluently? Eucalips told me later that he was born and raised in India and acquired both English and Hindi during his childhood. MC Eucalips’s great-grandfather had emigrated from the United States as a missionary in late colonial times and for four generations his family’s home had been in Northern India. Now, MC Eucalips lives in Goa. It could be assumed that it is a discordance between his white skin colour/his American accent on the one hand and his ability to speak fluent Hindi on the other that makes the audience in this episode cheer, laugh and approve of his performance by giving him applause (Lines 17, 19 and 22). MC Eucalips’s codeswitch into Hindi in Line 18 could thus be interpreted as his strategy to engage in double-voicing or crossing, in which speakers create a disjunction between their ethnicity and the ethnolectal utterance to attend to situations in which the social order is disrupted or destabilised (Rampton, 1995, 1998). In a later conversation with me, however, Eucalips contested my assumptions that he had deployed the two languages strategically, but he also asked me what exactly I meant by ‘strategically’, which we discussed in detail. While it is not in my analytical remit to determine whether or not he intended this switch ‘consciously’, ‘strategically’ or ‘rhetorically’, his post hoc metalinguistic comment points to the normalising of codeswitching in urban India in general and in Eucalips’s personal translingual practices in particular. We all codeswitch in India all the time, I remember him saying once. Therefore, what our conversation revealed is that researchers might be fast to interpret certain language practices as strategic stylisations (Coupland, 2007) or as metaphorical codeswitching (Blom & Gumperz, 1972), yet speakers, when asked, might be much more likely to understand their own language practices as habitually styled or as situational codeswitches (on that point and a related discussion on asking participants about their own codeswitching practices, see Gumperz, 1982: 60–63; for a similar, more recent, discussion, see Lee & Dovchin, 2020; for a discussion of styling vs. stylisation, see Chapter 4). Even if MC Eucalips’s post hoc metalinguistic comments when we were reviewing the transcript together normalise his switch into Hindi in Line  18, the audience’s loud cheering and laughter suggest that they understood the switch in situ as a new and unexpected context; a type of crossing or metaphorical codeswitching. English is a widely used language in the Delhi hip hop scene and especially such ‘history lessons’ are often delivered in English, regardless of the skin colour or the linguistic background of the speaker. MC Eucalips thus first appears as an American who talks about how beatboxin developed in his homeland, the United States. This does not seem as something particularly noteworthy,

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as the audience’s applause is restricted to his beatbox performances and nothing else. The brief codeswitch into Hindi in Line  12 electro beat kar sakhta hain (they can do an electro beat) can be neglected in this analysis, not only because MC Eucalips speaks quite fast and slightly slurred in this line, but also because the phrase is immediately followed by a beatbox performance. The audience might not have noticed that MC Eucalips used Hindi in Line 12. In our collaborative viewing of this transcript, MC Eucalips mentioned that he himself did not even notice this codeswitch in Line  12 during his performance; in contrast to the codeswitch in Line 18. The switch to Hindi in Line 18, then, is much more salient than the one in Line 12 and also represents the climax of the narrative and introduces the resolution. From Line  01 to Line  13, the narrative is about the development of beatboxin by the early beatboxers in New York City, starting at a specific time in the past, which we, with some context knowledge, can interpret as the 1970s and 1980s and which lasts until the contemporary moment, now (Line 11). For every developmental stage of beatboxin, MC Eucalips performs a beatboxed sound sample with his mouth and body. The iconicity of these sound samples indicates a diagrammatical modernisation: old school beat > hip hop scratching > dubstep. The different genres represent three eras: from the old school beats inspired by funk music in the 1970s and 1980s, to ‘classic’ hip hop music and its emphasis on scratching and turntableism in the 1990s, to the most recent developments of wobbly basslines and slow rhythms called dubstep. These three genres create a historicity of beatboxin, which the narrator can draw on to construct a narrative figure of the historical beatboxers. Towards the end of the first part, it becomes less and less clear whether or not this narrative figure only denotes beatboxers from New York and in Line 11 at the latest, we can identify this narrative figure more generally as the community of beatboxers, which is no longer composed of just New Yorkers and beatboxers who are affiliated with the hip hop culture, but also other people (Line 11) who can do an electro beat (Line 12), a genre of beat that is not usually associated with hip hop culture. The temporal development of beatboxin thus parallels a spatial and also a sociocultural spread of beatboxin. In Line  15, MC Eucalips enters the resolution of the narrative by announcing that he will offer his own perspective on beatboxin. He first reduces the spatio-temporal complexity that he created in the preceding complicating action, by summarising that it [beatboxin] started in america (Line 16). Then, however, the narrator puts forward another, more localised, perspective on beatboxin and moreover he constructs himself as localised. In Hindi, he says that aapke hindustan mein bhi hai tabla bol

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(in your India there is also tabla bol) (Line 18). The switch to Hindi in Line 18 triggers loud cheering. Tabla bol literally means ‘drum speech’ or ‘speaking the drum’ and it is a North Indian traditional genre of vocal percussion that has been practiced for centuries. In that, it invokes an aura of the past. Crucially, the word bhi (also) in Line 18 adequates (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004) forms of Indian vocal percussion with forms of hip hop beatboxin and it functions therefore as the synchronising momentum of his transcultural voice. By comparing, adequating and synchronising tabla bol with beatboxin, MC Eucalips opens up a cross-chronotope wormhole in which the chronologies of different cultures can be synchronised in order to make transcultural meaning. The same kind of transcultural wormhole travels are evoked through the term solkattu (a South Indian traditional genre of vocal percussion) in Line 23 and the ancient Sanskrit word parampara (tradition) in Line 20, each of which is followed by loud cheering. The historical depth of Eucalips’s transcultural voice allows him to layer two chronologies of beatboxin and Indian vocal percussion, while, through the unexpected use of Hindi, making this layering relevant in the here and now; localising and synchronising it. The synchronisation of Indian traditions of vocal percussion with American traditions of beatboxin makes possible a new, hybrid, stage in the development of beatboxin, which MC Eucalips, in the minutes after the excerpt, also exemplifies, by mixing Indian mantra singing and tabla bol with Western hip hop drums in his beatboxin. Eventually, the synchronisation helps MC Eucalips to assume a position from which he can formulate a future pedagogical hypothesis for the young Indian hip hop generation. And so, the narrative ends with a pedagogical coda: the new fusing of American beatboxin and Indian vocal percussion will be easy for you guys to learn – aap log to asaan hi se sikh ((sakhte hain)) (Line 25). Such a future anticipation builds on the previously established synchronisation and displays the transformative meaning in this narrative. Like all the other narrators presented in this chapter, Eucalips prophesises the future development of hip hop in India. This does not remain abstract and purely discursive, but manifests in the future bodies and spirits of the young Indian hip hop generation; in the style of their vocal art, as in this example, or in a journey to the Bronx, as in the previous example, or in their dancing, as discussed in Chapter 7. Seti X: Deep Historicities of Hip Hop

My analysis of what I have labelled the Delhi–Bronx wormhole might give the impression that the spread of hip hop is conceived of

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by my participants as unidirectional; as a spatio-temporal expansion with the trajectory: the Bronx 1973  >  the rest of the world. However, MC Eucalips’s suggestion that aapke hindustan mein bhi hai tabla bol (in your India there is also tabla bol) points to the idea that tabla bol is also a legitimate genre of beatboxin that has existed in India for centuries. We observe here a shift from a singular understanding of hip hop’s history as being born in the Bronx in 1973 to a complex understanding of layers of historicity, what Pennycook and Mitchell (2009: 27) call the ‘coevalness’ of hip hop’s origins, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Global hip hop heads spatialise time by narrating pre-Bronx and also precolonial chronologies and synchronising these with a myth of the Bronx (for an account of similar historicising practices in Mayan hip hop, see Barrett, 2017). Put differently, the shift from history to historicity is crucial to demonstrate and critically analyse the ‘metanarrative of the immense cultural labor that Hip Hop heads engage in as they make a “culture” with a “history” and “traditions”, and of course, an “origin”’ (Alim, 2009: 7). The deep historicity of hip hop allows practitioners of the culture to travel wormholes between their ‘own’ worlds and the myth of the Bronx in the 1970s in multiple directions. Thus, while the narratives presented earlier in this chapter travel the transcultural Delhi–Bronx wormhole in the direction from contemporary Delhi ‘back’ into the Bronx in the 1970s/1980s, MC Eucalips’s narrative travels the wormhole from the Bronx ‘back’ into India’s ancient history of cultural and artistic expression. In this sense, hip hop is, as KRS-One and Marley Marl (2007) know, ‘an ancient civilisation born again’. Such pre-Bronx wormhole travel is also the topic of Seti X’s narrative below. Like MC Eucalips’s narrative, it is taken from a public performance. And like MC Eucalips, the narrator is a transnational hip hop traveller. Seti X is an American-Punjabi Sikh emcee born and raised in California. At the time of this recording, Seti X was travelling through India, exploring, for the first time, as he says before the excerpt begins, the Punjab, his motherland. Seti X had already visited India in 2012, the year before I conducted my fieldwork, and some of the local hip hop artists were eagerly awaiting his return. Others had reservations about his political and artistic influence in the subcontinent. No doubt, he was influential in the Indian hip hop scenes, not least because he produced several music videos in North America that gave shout-outs to Indian crews and his rap lyrics often presented India as the cultural homeland of hip hop. Seti X’s networks across the North American continent and also in the UK might have made many people in the West aware of the Indian hip hop scene in the first place.

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During his stay in North India in 2013, Seti X also came to Delhi to perform at Mayday, a Marxist bookshop cum café in Shadipur in West Delhi. On 1 May 2013, Mayday celebrated May Day, or Labour Day, and invited artists, poets, actors, academics and activists to give speeches and perform in the shop. On the wall right next to the performance space, visible to the audience, was a framed photograph of Karl Marx, acting as a kind of Bakhtinian superaddressee on that afternoon (Bakhtin, 1986). Next to the Marx picture was the shop’s coffee bar, which supplied the audience with deliciously smelling fair trade espressos and latte macchiatos. The audience at this event was a peculiar mix of approximately 80 people sharing the narrow spaces between the bookshelves of Mayday: Indian intellectuals and Marxists, a few celebrities, left-wing-oriented Westerners and a bunch of young hip hop heads from Khirki, South Delhi, who accompanied me to the event and also performed together with Seti X, since he had worked with them in the previous year. Also at the event were MC Eucalips as well as Delhi Sultanate and Begum X, the lead vocalists of the Indian ska band The Skavengers, who all performed together with Seti X and the young artists from Khirki. This hip hop/ ska session stood in contrast to the other performances and speeches of the evening, in so far as these hip hop and ska performers felt the need to specifically legitimise their presence at this event. Delhi Sultanate and Seti X both engaged in narratives about the history of ska/reggae/ragga and hip hop, respectively, and linked these histories to the struggle of the Indian subalterns, the Dalits, the scheduled castes and tribes, the workers and the common people; topics and groups that had been discussed throughout the afternoon and which were the explicit political concerns of Mayday. Seti X, a then 24-year-old Sikh, with turban and beard, sporting a Zulu Nation necklace and a black shirt with several fists punching upwards and the caption ‘Protectors of Hip-Hop’ printed on it, grabbed the microphone and stepped onto the performance space. Seti X began to speak about his first ever visit to the Punjab, and how this made him realise how little he knew about his own culture. Yet, he also mentioned that living outside of india (i.e. in the United States) made him understand a lot about other cultures, especially hip hop culture, which he described as the main culture that guides my spirit in this existence. He then gave some shout-outs to the organisers. Then, after a three-second pause, Seti X’s voice changed, it became louder, slightly higher in frequency. This style-shift marks a transition from performance to high performance, which involves several aspects of communicative focusing (Coupland, 2007). High-performative focusing

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is best recognised in the scriptedness of Seti X’s narrative. Unlike his previous narrative about his personal journeys to India, we now get a more de-contextualised narrative that adequates – compares quite literally – hip hop’s five elements with India’s ancient indigenous artistic and cultural practices. Recording at Mayday, Delhi 2013 {00:12–01:17} 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09

(3.0) so hip hop is a culture. it has FIVE elements. emceein compares to the poetry. deejayin compares to the drum. graffiti or street art compare to the kalakari. the kalakar who puts the writing on the walls for everybody to see. no (.) need for you to pay to go to a art gallery. the fourth element. the fourth is breakdancing can be compared to the indigenous dance moves of our people. 10 and the FIFTH element of hip hop that has been lost in the modernday context is (.) 11 KNOWledge. 12 when hip hop was founded as a culture (.) in nineteen seventy three in the south bronx. 13 afrika bambaataa kool herc and other pioneers. 14 who also have ancestry that come back to (.) this land as well. 15 as well as africa. erm. 16 you know founded it with these five elements. 17 hip is to know hop is to move. 18 hip hop is the movement of knowledge. 19 what we see nowadays on the radio and television about hip hop is not (.) the culture. 20 it is the commodified corporate version (.) of one of the elements of rap. 21 that’s what we’re seeing on television and stuff today. 22 so just remember that hip hop is a culture. 23 for the people. of the people. by the people. 24 so let me do some spoken word real quick. 25 and then I’ma do a couple songs (.) with some beats. 26 IS THAT OKAY WITH YA’LL? 27 ((Audience cheers)) ((Spoken word performance begins))

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The orientation in Line 01 makes the general argument of this narrative: hip hop is a culture. The remainder of the narrative can be read as an exposition of this argument. In Lines 03–09, Seti X provides a list of hip hop’s four elements, comparing each to indigenous Indian artistic practices: emceein compares to poetry, deejayin compares to drumming, graffiti writin and street art compare to the kalakari tradition and breakdancing compares to the indigenous dance moves. He then continues to explain the fifth element, knowledge (for an excellent discussion of the fifth element, see Gosa, 2015). He does not compare this hip hop element to any ancient Indian knowledge – he could have perhaps compared the fifth element to the Vedas (literally meaning ‘knowledge’) or other ancient Indian scriptures. It seems that mentioning ‘knowledge’ is enough to support his claim that hip hop is a culture (Line 01) in front of an Indian intellectual audience. Seti X instead evokes the chronotope of the South Bronx in 1973. The pioneers (Line 13) of hip hop founded hip hop as a culture (Line 12) with the five elements in mind, and they also understood the two terms hip and hop to mean knowledge and movement, respectively (Line  17) or the movement of knowledge (Line  18). This meaning of hip hop circulates widely in the Global Hip Hop Nation, at least since the release of KRS-One and Marley Marl’s (2007) influential song Hip Hop Lives, in which this formula (in a slightly different form though) was popularised and which I cite in the Glossary of this book. Thus, Lines 17 and 18 can be considered what Roth-Gordon (2009) calls ‘conversational sampling’, a quoting of rap lyrics in spoken interaction. In sum, the claim that hip hop is a culture (and not an ephemeral fad exploited by the mainstream) is supported by comparing the elements of hip hop with ancient Indian artistic practices, by highlighting that knowledge is a central part of hip hop and by evoking the origin myth of the Bronx in 1973. These three narrative strategies historicise hip hop and synchronise it with larger postcolonial and precolonial histories of India. Intriguingly, not just the five elements, but also the founders of hip hop culture – DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa – are localised when Seti X says that they have ancestry in India (Line  14). However, the hesitation markers that surround this utterance (micro pause, erm, you know) and his repair as well as africa (Line 15) perhaps indicate that the narrator cannot be sure either that this piece of information is correct or if the audience will understand the significance of what has been claimed. Seti X then juxtaposes this synchronised deep historicity of ancient India and hip hop’s old school with the shallow history of hip hop as depicted on mainstream television and radio, which is a commodified corporate version (.) of one of the elements of rap (Line 20). Seti X rejects

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such media representations of rap and frames them as inauthentic. He reminds his audience that hip hop is a culture. for the people. of the people. by the people (Lines  13–14), which echoes the general Marxist grassroots rhetoric of the afternoon. He then gets ready to perform his art, first spoken word then emceein on beats. He also passes the microphone on to Delhi Sultanate, Begum X and the Khirki b-boys to perform with him on stage. Later also, MC Eucalips joins them and makes beats with his mouth to which Seti X and the others freestyle. Conclusion and Discussion: Critical Historical Awareness

In this chapter, I have shown how an analysis of chronotopes and historicity can inform research into voice and narrative positioning practices. The Delhi–Bronx comparison was presented as a transcultural wormhole, which makes possible a synchronisation of various chronotopic voices for narrators to create for themselves unique historical positionalities and make arguments about the transculturation of hip hop in India. In the story world (Level 1), various narrative figures are made to speak from different chronotopes. In the interactive world (Level 2), narrators synchronise these historicised narrative figures and put forward their ‘own’ transcultural voices. This synchronising normalises the historical complexities that hip hop heads in India navigate. From this normalised positionality, the narrators can also express ideas about future goals (Level  3), which is why this chronotopic positioning practice can be called transformative – it transforms one’s own biography and future positionality in the Global Hip Hop Nation. The number of times my participants travelled the discursive wormhole to the Bronx of the 1970s/1980s was striking. The Delhi–Bronx comparison thus seems to be a widely recognised narrative strategy to construct a historical situatedness for the Delhi hip hop scene, and possibly for other hip hop scenes around the world as well. It was so prevalent in my data, indeed, that I would argue that the Delhi–Bronx wormhole is a more or less permanent passage between two chronotopes. It is a narrative device for a cross-chronotope scale-jumping that allows narrators to historicise their contemporary moment and envision their futures. By learning about the birth of hip hop in the Bronx in the 1970s, my participants also learn about the sociohistorical circumstances out of which hip hop emerged and to which it was a critical response. This appears to sharpen global hip hop heads’ critical awareness of world history. For instance, by learning about hip hop’s history, they learn about inequality, class and race in America. Crucially, they access this

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knowledge not only through mainstream academic ‘histories’ but also through hip hop’s own historiography; its metahistorical artefacts: documentaries, films and songs produced by hip hop artists that depict the immense cultural labour and struggle of African American and Latinx youth in the formation of hip hop from the 1970s onwards. Such detailed audio-visual hip hop manuals (Nitzsche, 2012: 185) not only inspired my participants to start their own scene in Delhi, but it also made them critically aware of hip hop’s historical situatedness in the postcolony and thereby allowed them to align their own postcolonial situatedness with that of the Black Atlantic, constructing what Osumare (2001) calls connective marginality. In fact, some of my participants told me that the study of hip hop made them go on to watch videos and read books about famous Black emancipation leaders, such as Malcolm X and other leaders of the Nation of Islam and the Five Percenters, that were mentioned by hip hop artists in their songs, interviews and documentaries. According to many participants, these Black histories are never mentioned in Indian schooling or media. Learning about these alternative histories of urban North America also made them more aware of local and regional South Asian issues, such as the never-ending Kashmir conflict, Indo-Pak relations and the status of Dalits, Muslims, Africans and other minorities in India. Such critical skills were partly informed by the study of hip hop’s origins and in that the Delhi–Bronx wormhole travelling is of undeniable pedagogical value for hip hop heads’ historical self-awareness. The synchronisation of historicities and chronologies allows narrators to assume a future positionality as active members of global hip hop. They take on responsibility in carrying forward the culture and they know that they are or will be in a position to teach younger generations the history in the future – each one teach one (on mentorship in Delhi hip hop, see also Chapter 8). In Chapter  7, I investigate how such historical knowledge and the transformation of futures occurs not only in oral narratives, but also in danced narratives. I suggest that embodied voices are historicised, othered and ideologised in the element of breakin – by far the most prevalent element in my ethnographic experiences in Delhi in 2013. I focus on an analysis of the semiotics of the moving (and standing) body of the b-boy to show how breakers construct a particular type of focused and cool masculinity that developed during hip hop’s inception in the Bronx but that has now been transculturally appropriated to become meaningful in the context of urban India.

7 Embodying Voices: Breakin Cyphers and the B-Boy Stance

Introduction

Almost all of the young men I met in the Delhi hip hop scene were dancers or b-boys or they were closely affiliated with breakin crews. On many occasions, the b-boys would invite me to hang out, talk together, eat together or conduct interviews in neighbourhood parks or on someone’s rooftop where breakin cyphers would take place. Breakin was like a backdrop for much of the hip hop interaction and socialisation that took place in Delhi, as I witnessed it during my research in 2013. Where breakers were, there was hip hop. The prevalence of breakin poses a thorny methodological challenge for my linguistic ethnography in this book. As an ethnographer, I feel it is imperative to write about breakin, given that breakin was so prevalent in the Delhi hip hop scene, and even emblematic of it. As a linguist who was trained to study ‘language’, however, I have little to no understanding of how to analyse the moving bodies of the dancing breakers. Instead of simply closing my logocentric eyes to breakin and not writing about the significance of b-boys in the Delhi hip hop scene in this book, I chose to accept this methodological challenge and ask what a linguistic (or better: a semiotic) analysis of the embodied voices of breakers in the interactive cypher, as well as their recontextualisation outside of the cypher, can tell us about the transculturation of voice in global hip hop. In particular, I am interested in finding out how breakers use their moving and standing bodies in interaction to construct particular types of masculinities that seem to be hegemonic in global hip hop cultures. I begin the chapter by briefly explaining the problem of logocentrism in sociolinguistics and hip hop linguistics. I propose that multimodal interaction analysis can help to open up our discipline to the study of embodied voices in the cypher. This is followed by a description of the breakin scene in Delhi in which I argue that the hyper-heterosexual 186

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masculine practices associated with breakin shape, and are shaped by, the b-boys’ moving bodies. The chapter continues with a detailed analysis of the interactive negotiation of embodied voices in competitive battle cyphers. I show how the various parts of a breaker’s turn-taking routines (which can be understood as danced narratives) allow for an orchestration of many embodied voices among which hegemonic masculine figures become culturally valorised and successful in the cypher. I argue that the final element of a breaker’s turn, the freeze, is similar to a narrative resolution and therefore sets forth a breaker’s ‘own’ voice and expects a response from the other. The archetypal form of the freeze is the b-boy stance – an iconic standing posture with one’s arms crossed, legs apart and head slightly tilted. In the final section, I consider the recontextualisation of the b-boy stance in other elements of hip hop. In its recontextualised form, the b-boy stance represents an iconic emblem that readily indexes membership in authentic hip hop culture. While the b-boy stance is here discussed as part of an analysis of the moving and standing bodies of dancers, I am inclined to also make the more general argument that all transcultural voices presented in this book are imbued with the b-boy stance; an urban, cosmopolitan, cool and focused masculine positionality that always remains authentic. Contesting Logocentrism in Hip Hop Linguistics

In Chapter  1, I suggested that global hip hop linguistics can take methodological and theoretical inspiration from sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and linguistic ethnography. I noted that these disciplines and research traditions are largely logocentric (Bucholtz & Hall, 2016) and deeply grounded in the continuing legacy of 20th-century types of structuralism and empiricism (Blommaert, 2013b, 2016b); predicaments that global hip hop linguistics thus inherits. By focusing on ‘language’, in the sense of empirically observable forms of speech and/or written texts, hip hop linguists are often drawn to an analysis of textual surfaces and, perhaps, the intertextuality and recontextualisations of rap lyrics and/ or freestyle rhymin. Taking such a logocentric view seems like an obvious choice for us hip hop linguists, as rap lyrics seem to ‘be’ language. Rap lyrics can be recorded, transcribed and analysed textually, i.e. with the toolkits most familiar to the logocentric hip hop linguist, and thereby empirically known. Most certainly, this has resulted in a range of fascinating findings about how rappers and rap fans in various localities around the world construct meaning through their lyrics and freestyles (e.g. Alim, 2006a; Bramwell, 2015; Hörner & Kautny, 2009; Westinen,

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2014), how they mix and remix languages to erode monolingual ideologies (e.g. Androutsopoulos, 2010; Pennycook, 2003a; Williams, 2017; Williams & Stroud, 2013) or, conversely, how they shift to standardised language norms for wider circulation of their music (Stæhr & Madsen, 2015) and how they creatively ‘play’ with language to propose alternative epistemologies to understanding their lives as marginalised and disenfranchised youth (Roth-Gordon, 2009; Williams, 2012). Despite these fruitful explorations into meaning, (re-)mixing, play, ideology and voice, global hip hop linguistics’ continued focus on spoken lyrics has led to an overrepresentation of the element of rap in our analysis of hip hop. We might therefore be oddly echoing mainstream imaginations that equate hip hop with rap (Turner, 2017). Hip hop culture, as it has been codified by its founding fathers and lived by hip hop heads across the globe, however, is not just – in fact not primarily – about rap music, but rather encompasses five elements or pillars: breakin, graffiti writin, deejayin, emceein and knowledge (see also this book’s Glossary of Terms and Seti  X’s narrative in Chapter  6). Typically, hip hop heads participate not just in one element but understand themselves as participating in a broader transcultural formation, which involves music, movement, art, technology, fashion, entrepreneurialism and spirituality. All of my research participants, even those who self-identified as rappers or emcees, were or had previously been involved in practicing other elements of hip hop culture, especially breakin, the dance form most closely associated with authenticity in hip hop culture. Rap music in India in 2013 was, in fact, a rather minor manifestation of the local hip hop culture. Yet, more recently, rap music is becoming visible to a greater extent, with an increasing number of emcees coming up in various cities, who have also begun to rap in Indian languages rather than in English (see also Bunty’s narrative in Chapter 4; Prabh Deep’s narrative in Chapter 5; see also Cardozo, 2020). A linguistic ethnography of hip hop culture in Delhi thus has to account for these ethnographic realities and relegate the study of rap lyrics to just one way of looking at hip hop culture. In order to emphasise this point and to counterweight the overrepresentation of rap lyrics in hip hop linguistics, I include this chapter in which I ‘linguistically’ (i.e. interactionally and semiotically) analyse the moving and standing bodies of dancers. Thus, this chapter advances an embodied sociolinguistics (Bucholtz & Hall, 2016) by exploring the transculturation of embodied voices in the breakin cypher. My analysis in this chapter draws inspiration from multimodal interaction analysis1 (Deppermann et  al., 2013b; Goodwin, 2007; Jewitt, 2009a; Norris, 2004; Porsché, 2018; Streeck

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& Henderson, 2010), an interdisciplinary approach that uses methods of conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics and applies them to an analysis of multimodality and non-verbal communication. Inspired by ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics, research in multimodal interaction analysis (although researchers do not always use this label) explores multimodality from the perspective of the interactants, as they attend to, make relevant, ignore, respond to and take up the multimodal signs of their interlocutors. Most multimodal interaction analysts use data that also involve spoken language and thereby understand speakers’ multimodal and embodied forms of communication as contextualising speech. Breakers, however, dancing in cyphers collaboratively construct meaning almost entirely without using their verbal voices. They rely entirely on their moving bodies to dance narratives, quote and stylise others’ moving bodies and normalise their ‘own’ transcultural voices in the resolutions of narratives. Analysing these somatic voices in danced narratives with the tools of multimodal interaction analysis is not an easy task, as you will notice when reading this chapter. While I try to capture some of the iconic shapes of the breakers’ movements in tracings of screenshots taken from video recordings of cyphers and battles, I also have to engage you in long, complicated descriptions about the breakers’ body movements and even speculative interpretations about how these embodied voices construct meaning in interaction. Despite these potential difficulties of describing the meaning and action of the dancing bodies, the multimodal interactive analysis revealed important insights into the organisation of turn-taking in the cypher as well as into the orchestration of intertextual figures in danced narratives. My interactional analysis of the somatic narratives in the breakin cypher suggests that dancers normalise their ‘own’ embodied voices by aligning with figures of hegemonic masculinity. In the final section of this chapter, I provide an analysis of the b-boy stance, a specific masculine standing pose that, in its recontextualisation in the other elements, readily indexes membership in authentic hip hop. I evoke the b-boy stance to succinctly capture this normalised correlation between masculinity and hip hop and thereby also expose hip hop’s overrepresentation of young heterosexual male bodies that has already been extensively discussed in hip hop scholarship (e.g. Bradley, 2015; Krims, 2000; Rose, 1994) and that was acutely pronounced during my fieldwork in India. I have met only one b-girl in Delhi and heard of one b-girl in Mumbai. Hip hop’s dance in India, as well as elsewhere, was – and remains – dominated by young heterosexual men. Women and openly non-heterosexual men are almost categorically absent from our culture.

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Critical research on rap lyrics has pointed out that the dominance of men in hip hop has led to a normalisation of what Connell (1987, 1995) calls hegemonic masculinity (for a critique, see Demetriou, 2001, see also Bourdieu, 2001), which in turn gives rise to and legitimises our culture’s notorious homophobia and misogyny (Cutler, 2010; Krims, 2000; Newman, 2009; Rose, 1994). This critical engagement with gender and hip hop can be further developed, I suggest, by taking into account constructions of hegemonic masculinity not only in rap music but also in the other elements of hip hop, such as breakin. In fact, one could even argue that rap derives its braggadocio and hyper-heterosexual competitiveness from breakin. Non-linguistic critical hip hop studies have begun to attend to questions of gender in graffiti writin (Macdonald, 2016; Monto et  al., 2013), music production (Schloss, 2004), breakin (Engel, 2001; LaBoskey, 2001; Schloss, 2009) and hip hop journalism (Panuzzo, 2014). Yet, global hip hop linguistics seems to lag behind and continues to focus on constructions of gender and sexuality in the textual element of rap and freestylin (for an excellent discussion of hegemonic masculinity in freestyle rappin in South Africa, see Williams, 2017). In this chapter, I explore what global hip hop linguistics, and in particular an attention to voice and narrative, can offer for our understanding of the construction of masculinities in the breakin cypher and in the recontextualised b-boy stance. Breakin in Delhi

Breakin, or b-boyin and b-girlin (sometimes referred to as breakdancing outside of hip hop cultural worlds), refers to a type of interactive and competitive dance that was developed among South Bronx youth in the early 1970s (Pabon, 2006) and is now a worldwide phenomenon (Fogarty, 2012b; Johnson, 2011; Osumare, 2002). Typically, breakin is practiced in an interactive circle (cypher) of dancers and other audiences. One breaker performs in the middle of the cypher for between 30 and 60  seconds. Then, the next breaker steps onto the floor and will try to outdo (battle) the previous breaker and so on. Breakin derives its name from the ‘break’ of a funk song. Breaks are the drum solos that occur within most funk songs, often right at the top and then again towards the end of the song. The most popular funk songs that are used for breaks, such as Apache by the Incredible Bongo Band or Give It Up or Turn It Loose by James Brown, were recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, between the years 1968 and 1973 to be precise; the years immediately preceding the birth of hip hop in the South Bronx in 1973 (for an account of the canon of breaks in breakin culture, see Schloss, 2006). When these funk songs were played in the clubs and in the parks and the breaks came on, the so-called

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break-boys and break-girls would get down on the floor for their downrock. The deejays, recognising the popularity of the breaks with the b-boys and b-girls, started using two turntables and two copies of the same record to switch back and forth between the turntables and repeat (loop) the break over and over again. The b-boys and b-girls flocked to those deejays who played the best breaks and created the smoothest and most extended loops. Arguably, this is one of the narratives of the birth of hip hop (e.g. Toop, 1991). Today these breaks appear in remixed form on songs, mixes and compilations especially produced for breakers. Every good hip hop record shop has a section with what is called breakbeats, i.e. cassettes, LPs and CDs that contain music for breakin. During my fieldwork in Delhi in 2013, breakbeats were as prevalent as they were during my time growing up around Frankfurt, Germany, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Whether played on amplified sound systems at jams or on someone’s boombox or phone in the park, the musical aesthetics of breakbeat music unite breakin cyphers across the globe. The way the body rocks to these breaks – perhaps naturally, perhaps through imitating others (see Scientik’s narrative in Chapter 8) – enregisters a global kinaesthetic body that can be indexed through the figure of the b-boy. Practice cyphers

When I would meet b-boys in Delhi to hang out for my research, they would usually take me to someone’s rooftop or terrace, to a ruin monument (see Figure  7.1) or to one of the many little neighbourhood parks. These parks were especially well-suited for breakin. They would often have an octagonal pavilion in the middle, acting as a well-defined cypher space, with an even, concrete floor, which the breakers would free from foliage or litter before they began their practice sessions. Usually, someone would bring along a mobile phone that they would place somewhere in the corner to play the breaks, which were, however, often hard to hear because of the loud caws of the many crows around, the droning noise of the surrounding megacity and the frequent low-flying aircrafts over South Delhi. These practice cyphers would, at times, also generate im promptu battles, but generally they would be collaborative circles where crewmates and their friends from the neighbourhood would try to improve each other’s movements and routines, by making verbal comments or engaging in, at times, long multimodal explanations about the ways a specific movement should be executed, using their bodies to demonstrate the desired posture or movement, while also verbally describing to each other what they should be doing to get it right.

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Figure 7.1  B-boy Gunjan (standing) and b-boy Rishi (posing in a freeze) practising on the 14th-century Satpula Dam ruin monument, Khirki Village (Photo by author, Delhi 2013)

Heterosexual masculine bodies

These practice cyphers arguably shaped my participants’ bodily hexis; their ways of moving, standing, sitting, watching their friends and several other forms of their homosocial interaction. The Bourdieuian term

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‘hexis’ can be understood as the bodily manifestation of a deep-structure habitus (Bourdieu, 2001: 64; see also Fröhlich, 2001), which in the case of the Delhi breakers was governed by heteronormative masculine imaginations that circulate widely both in India and in global hip hop culture. Even quantitatively, this heteronormative masculinity was more than obvious, as almost all my participants were male and none of them was openly not heterosexual. I only met one b-girl in Delhi and heard of one b-girl in Mumbai. This is a simple but important observation, because it suggests that the aesthetics, philosophies and social understandings of breakin culture in Delhi were shaped almost exclusively by young straight men. The b-boys I followed in India would typically sport dusty trainers, baseball caps, loose trousers, print T-shirts and strappings to protect their occasional injuries. This combination of attire conveys an image of a certain style that we could describe as a hard but relaxed, young, urban masculinity (for a related discussion of masculinity and swag in the Delhi hip hop scene, see Dattatreyan, 2020: 49–77). The figure of the b-boy epitomises this style and it offers young men growing up in urban India a unique and distinctive positionality within contemporary young Indian masculinities. The b-boys’ physiques were strong and toned, yet not as ‘pumped up’ as some of the young Delhi males who lifted weights in gyms (for an account of modern masculinity and gym culture in Delhi, see Baas, 2015). Breakers needed to be flexible and focused, rather than bulky and aggressive, light-footed rather than colossal, relaxed rather than narcissistic. My long-term ethnographic observations suggest that the b-boys carefully and constantly negotiated their masculinities vis-à-vis other versions of masculinity that circulated in India and globally at the time. The b-boys with whom I hung out during my time in Delhi even made careful distinctions between different masculinities available within hip hop. They often distinguished between a b-boy masculinity and a rapper masculinity. Sometimes, b-boys would laugh about and ridicule rappers – even if these were or had been b-boys themselves – for donning American-style hip hop outfits, sunglasses and fake jewellery or for throwing up US ghetto-related gang signs in their semi-professional music videos and online posts. Hence, rappers who knew that it was crucial for their claims to hip hop authenticity to stay immune from this ridiculing by the b-boy community, would take great care to avoid such stereotypical indexing of mainstream American rap aesthetics and to make references to b-boyin in their videos and their social media images and posts. As I will show in this chapter, the b-boy stance is a readily

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recontextualisable iconic index that allows the stancetakers, whether rapper, graffiti writer, deejay or hip hop scholar, to immediately evoke qualities of hip hop authenticity and position themselves as authentic members of global hip hop culture. Delhi’s old school

Breakin not only shaped the bodily hexis of my participants but it was also a way to situate themselves historically. The beginnings of breakin in Delhi were a prevalent topic in my interviews and interactions. Alignment with a past era of an old school Delhi hip hop seemed to authenticate their membership in the Global Hip Hop Nation. Many participants mentioned that they themselves, or someone they knew, were the first to start breakin in their neighbourhood or throw a jam somewhere in the city. Often, they could refer to a specific year for this premiere occurrence of breakin in Delhi or in another Indian city. Many of these accounts suggest that breakin in Delhi had started to become visible in 2006 and reached its initial peak in 2009. MicMaster Aeke told me that the scene was thriving in 2006 and 2007. He added: We are trying to revive it, the feeling from back then, and we’re trying to preserve it (field notes, p. 70), thereby constructing a type of Indian old school that stands as a beacon of an original scene available for revivalism. It also constructs a chronology for the Delhi breakin scene and Aeke and his crew’s own positionality within that chronology, as also discussed in Chapter 6. Similarly, Prabh Deep, in a recorded conversation that we conducted in his neighbourhood park in West Delhi, Janakpuri District Park, constructs a mythological historicity for his immediate locale. During the interview, we noticed a few breakers practising under a small pavilion in the middle of the park. Prabh Deep told me that five to six years before (i.e. in 2008 or 2007) this park was full of breakers. He continues to evoke a complex chronotopic orchestration of voices, which historicises the present by constructing a future positionality that looks back and recognises the historical significance of this park for Delhi hip hop: that hut ((pavilion)) (.) you can see (.) that is the root of new delhi breakers. after ten to fifteen years everybody come to see: this is the place where delhi- west delhi b-boys grown up (interview with Prabh Deep, Delhi 2013). Other accounts emphasise that breakin has in fact been practiced in India since the 1980s and 1990s. Bunty told me that the fact that these early Indian breakers did not videotape their performances does not mean that breakin did not exist in India before the digital revolution.

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When Bunty returned to India from the United States in 2002, he encountered breakers who could get down on the floor,2 which suggests that they had been practising for quite a while already (field notes, p. 24). In an interview, DJ Uri mentions that the attention that breakin received in mainstream media in America and Europe in the mid-1980s (e.g. through the Hollywood film Flashdance) did in fact also have an impact in India, but he also says that there was no real follow-up to this hype (interview with Zebster and DJ Uri, Berlin 2012). Kinaesthetic knowledge: Historicising the dancing body

The chronologies of Indian breakin created in these accounts are important resources for the construction of an Indian old school and this historicity also seems to enter the aesthetics of the body movements and routines of breakers in action. In her discussion of global breakin, Johnson (2011: 181) argues that ‘movement can carry history’ and that the different styles and techniques of breakin (what Scientik in Chapter 8 calls expressions, Line 16) are emically understood by breakers as straddling a binary of ‘old school vs. new school’. It has to be highlighted that what counts as old school and new school is starkly different in each imagined hip hop nation and contingent on each nation’s real and perceived history with hip hop. Yet, the binary old school/new school finds semiotic form in the moving, dancing and standing bodies of breakers. While observing some of the older b-boys in Delhi, I noted how they emphasised style itself and experimented with subtle and neatly executed movements rather than trying to show off with incredibly spectacular and flashy movements. Johnson (2011) furthermore argues that the old school vs. new school binary maps onto a style vs. technique debate. In a nutshell, this debate is evoked by old school breakers (whatever this means in a given context) to proclaim that style will always win over technique. Here, the terms ‘style’ and ‘technique’ are used emically, i.e. by the hip hop practitioners themselves, to construct an aesthetic opposition between individualism and creativity (style) on the one hand and the mechanical application of rehearsed movements (technique) on the other. Although style includes technique, it frames this technique as effortless, magical, unexpected. In relation to this supremacy of style, Schloss (2009: 78) notes that part and parcel of the b-boy persona is to ‘make extensive efforts to preserve your appearance, while at the same time acting unconcerned’, an attitude that Schloss (2009: 84) later summarises as ‘intense and yet totally in control’.

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It is precisely this ‘acting unconcerned’ – a type of masking the enormous physical labour that goes into making a movement seem effortless and not laborious – that makes it so hard for outsiders of the culture to recognise the historical and ideological values and aesthetical meanings of specific movements in breakin; the reason also, perhaps, why global hip hop linguists have not yet adequately attended to an analysis of breakin as a type of interactive and embodied meaning-making practice of hip hop. To adequately understand breakers’ moving bodies arguably requires time and historical knowledge about the culture and its aesthetics, controversies, morals and debates. Admittedly, as I am not a breaker myself – merely a fan – I do not have adequate kinaesthetic knowledge. However, it seemed to me that people with even less exposure to breakin than me, for instance sociolinguists who have heard my papers on Delhi’s breakin scene at international academic conferences, often found it very difficult to appreciate my interpretations of the meaning of movements in the cypher; especially when I presented these movements – as I also do in this book – only as still screenshots rather than as moving videos. Full-time breakers, like most of my research participants, we should imagine, are able to recognise a multitude of voices, polyphonic orchestrations and narrative statements in each turn that a breaker takes on the floor. Johnson (2011) calls this recognition in breakin ‘kinaesthetic knowledge’, a term which blends kinesis (movement) and aesthesis (sensation). With this term, she aims to ‘draw attention to what we do not see in the physical movement of dance that accounts for layers of discourse attached to moving bodies’ (Johnson, 2011: 192–193). She points out that such deep-structure recognitions inform breakers about the ways in which hip hop culture and breakin culture are known, understood or rather overstood (Chapter 8), and transmitted from generation to generation (see also Fogarty, 2012a). Similarly, in his ethnography of breakers in New York City, Schloss (2009) points to such kinaesthetic knowledge by deploying the emic term ‘foundation’. Foundation, he argues, ‘saturates movement with history and sets clear aesthetic boundaries for future innovation’ (Schloss, 2009: 51). Without foundation, the semiotic surface of the breakers’ moving bodies remains meaningless. Schloss (2009: 61) cites b-girl Seoulsonyk expressing this idea in the following way: ‘It’s like two people can do the exact same movement, right? […] And there is a huge difference. Physically, it’s exactly the same. But... one is loaded with these symbols and history. And [the other] one is just movement’ (original insertions). Style will always win over technique. The meanings of embodied voices are thus not fully accessible by observing the breakers’ moving bodies alone, as if they were some

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objectively readable semiotic surface. The breakers’ bodies are not words that we can decode semantically and that we could print on a page and analyse in a logocentric way. We can only access the meanings of breakers’ moving bodies through an analysis of the interactive interpretation, uptake and negotiation of kinaesthetic knowledge by the breakers themselves as well as other participants in the cypher. Interactive Flows in the Cypher

The cypher is where hip hop action takes place and Alim (2009: 1) therefore suggests that in ‘the ethnographic, microanalytic sense’ the cypher3 is ‘the fundamental unit of analysis in the interpretation of the Hip hop cultural practice’. In the remainder of this chapter, I deploy the conceptual toolkit of voice and narrative developed throughout this book to provide an ethnographically informed and empirically detailed multimodal interaction analysis of the interactive flows and the turn-taking organisation in battle cyphers. I draw on video material taken on two jams that happened in Delhi during and shortly after my fieldwork: Chakreis Jam and Del4Pol Jam. While I was physically present at Chakreis Jam, I witnessed Del4Pol remotely through YouTube (for a discussion on remote ethnography, see Postill, 2017). Chakreis Jam4 happened a few months into my fieldwork in 2013 in R.K. Puram, a district in South Delhi. I arrived at the venue, a basement of a Hindu mandir (temple), in the early afternoon. The street and the courtyard in front of the mandir were already filled with dozens of breakers and hip hop heads, some of whom I had already met before, waiting for the doors to open. The deejay was already checking the sound inside and the beats reverberated around the compound and out onto the street. Occasionally, some breakers, waiting in groups with friends, started moving their bodies to the music. Once the doors opened, the jam started with two hours of ‘open cyphers’, which offered many possibilities for me to socialise with people and get to know more people, as well as observe the breakers’ moves as they were warming up for the main events. Multiple cyphers were happening at the same time, groups of onlookers standing in a circle with breakers taking turns to perform in the middle. Cyphers would organically grow and shrink, depending on the quality and quantity of the dancing participants. Sometimes, when the onlookers in one cypher would cheer loudly, onlookers in other cyphers would turn around and sometimes leave their cypher and move over to the ostensibly more exciting cypher. Although these open cyphers were watched by many – including

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some young ladies that some of the b-boys I knew fancied, as well as by some international visitors from Germany and also by a number of digital cameras that members of the audience would unpredictably pull out of their pockets and hold up to document the performances – these open cyphers were similar to the practice cyphers that I witnessed in the parks and rooftops, in that a supportive, non-competitive and relaxed atmosphere seemed to prevail. The deejay, Sunz, a Korean-German veteran b-boy who was visiting Delhi at the time as part of the Each-One-Teach-One intercultural pedagogy project (also discussed in Dizy’s interview in Chapter 5), was spinning classic breakbeats on vinyl records on a set of professional Technics turntables – a rare sight in Delhi at that time. Three of his crewmates, Nicoroc, Reza and Danny, all German b-boys who would act as judges for the battle tournaments that were scheduled for the afternoon, were there too, casually dancing, chatting and posing for pictures with some of the Indian breakers and visitors of the jam. The atmosphere in these first two hours of open cyphering was very relaxed and people generally had a good time, talking, laughing, socialising, warming up, stretching, practising some moves or hanging out outside the venue to catch some fresh air or have a smoke. Interactive rules and voice channels in the cypher

When the more formal part of the afternoon commenced, the tension and the focus were heightened. When the emcee, MicMaster Aeke, announced that the battles were about to begin, the several small cyphers dissolved and one large cypher was formed. The deejay turned up the music and the judges took their seats. Aeke then called the first two competing breakers into the cypher and animated the audience to cheer and give it up for them. The battles were about two to three minutes long, each breaker receiving two turns. In front of the inspecting gaze of the judges and the camera-flashing audience, the breakers would get into battle mode and try to out-dance their opponents. The battles, both one-on-one battles and four-on-four crew battles, went on for about two hours. There was also an under-16 battle. During the one-on-one final, the high-stake main event of the jam, I retreated to a corner of the basement space and jotted down a few notes in my field diary which inform my descriptions here. I also sketched the drawings shown in Figure 7.2. Through these sketches, I hope that I show that the physical arrangements and the interactive flows in a battle cypher are highly structured and rule driven. The different actors in the cypher all represent different

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communicative factors and functions (Jakobson, 1960). In other words, the different actors in the battle assume different predefined roles and utilise different premediated channels or modalities to communicate with each other, resulting in an assemblage of rules in a battle cypher. On the Chakreis Jam, I could identify five different (f)actors and functions that shape the interactive flows in the battle cypher. These, I can say, have also been ethnographically substantiated through my observations of many other battle cyphers, both in India and elsewhere in the world. (1) The breakers do not have an immediate verbal voice. They use their moving bodies to interact with each other, almost entirely without using spoken language. Breakers use kinesic, proxemic, haptic, iconic and symbolic figurative modes of communication, and they draw on their kinaesthetic knowledge to interpret and negotiate the meanings of their embodied voices. (2) The emcee occupies the most immediate verbal channel, through the voice amplification of the microphone. The emcee, by using the amplified phonosonic voice, structures the individual battles, opens and ends them formally, intervenes when there is a problem and hypes up the audience. (3) The audience typically responds to the performance in unison, by cheering and applauding. The members of the audience can thus be regarded as one single communicative (f)actor. Sometimes, however, an individual audience member shouts something that can be heard across the entire room to which the emcee or the breakers or other audience members sometimes attend. (4) The deejay, similar to the breakers, has no verbal voice, yet the deejay communicates through the records she plays and therefore the deejay ‘speaks’ through the music. The deejay’s selection of specific breaks has direct consequences for the performance, and sometimes the success, of the breakers in the cypher. (5) The judges, similarly, do not have a verbal voice. The three judges use arm signs (right, left, crossed) to communicate their decision of the winner at the end of a battle. They usually stay silent and still during the battle, so as not to appear collusive. The breakers and the judges thus have embodied voices that find form in their non-verbal body movements. Their embodied voices are in many ways the most important and central voices in the jam. The audience, the deejay and the emcee, by contrast, have voices in the phonosonic sense.

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They constitute the sound scape of the jam (what I labelled ‘audio room’ in situ in the sketch in Figure 7.2). It is perhaps because of the high velocity of the audio room (the loud music of the deejay, the amplified voice of the emcee and the loud cheering of the audience) that the breakers’ phonosonic voices are muted in the battle cypher. Whether because of technical affordances and restrictions or because of historically developed symbolic regimentation, the breakers use their embodied voices to write ‘physical graffiti’ (Pabon, 2006) or danced narratives. The rules and channels of communication bring to light the ordered structure in the battle cypher. This order is ‘policed’ by the emcee, who has the loudest phonosonic voice on the jam through amplification of the microphone and who, as the master of the ceremony, also possesses the symbolic privilege to start, stop and interrupt a battle, tell the audience and dancers to move back to guarantee breakers have enough space for their embodied voices to perform in the cypher, make breakers abide by the rules or make them react in some other way. The emcee might also have some power over the deejay’s voice, as the emcee might sometimes tell the deejay to stop a record or play a (specific kind of) record. The deejay makes decisions concerning the selection of breaks and the transitions between breaks, which directly affect the breakers’ performances in the cypher, and this might have consequences for the outcome of the battle (see also Kimminich, 2010). The judges, finally, have the ultimate power over the outcome of the battle (Fogarty, 2019). At the end of each battle, the judges mobilise their kinaesthetic knowledge to reach a decision about the outcome. Often, the emcee makes the audience count down from three to one before the judges proclaim their decision by pointing their arms towards the breaker they think was the better contestant, or by crossing their arms in the shape of an

Figure 7.2  Sketches from author’s field diary (pp. 76–77)

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X, when they think it was a tie. They sit on chairs, often right in front of the deejay table, and they always have a clear view of the dance floor. This set up makes the deejay and the judges resemble an altar or royal box. These physical arrangements of bodies give material form to the orderly distribution of symbolic communicative power across (f)actors. This physical and symbolic orderliness is what distinguishes the interactive flows in the battle cypher at a jam from those we can observe in a practice cypher in a park. It seems to me, additionally, that the orderly structure and the particular roles of (f)actors of breakin cyphers also produce and reproduce hegemonic masculinity in breakin and by intertextual extension in hip hop. I will return to this at the end of the chapter. Intermodal vibes

As indicated with several arrows in Figure  7.2, the various voice channels and distributions of power in the battle cypher, however, also provide opportunities for spectacular interaction across modes. These intermodal flows are what breakers and participants might perceive as the vibe of the hip hop jam. In a Facebook chat with Aeke, the emcee of both the Chakreis Jam and the Del4Pol Jam, such intermodal flows or vibes in the cypher are discussed. The chat occurred after I had watched a couple of video snippets of the battles at the Del4Pol Jam5 on Aeke’s Facebook feed. As also mentioned in Chapter 3, after having left the field, I continued following the activities of the Delhi hip hop scene on the internet in an attempt to stay connected with my research participants remotely (see also Postill, 2017). I was fascinated with the ways Aeke emceed at this event, using freestyle rhymes to introduce the breakers and continuously hyping up the crowd. Excited about the excitement in the videos, I saw that Aeke was online and I wrote him a message, to which he instantly replied. In the following, I reproduce our interaction. Online chat with MicMaster Aeke, Delhi/Cardiff 2014 01 Jaspal: awesome emceeing at the del4pol event bro. just watched the video. i love how you handle the mic!!! 02 Aeke: Ha.Thanks bro..I swear I dont plan stuff when I go on the mic. These bboys I tell you,mad crazy.Just insane.These bboys make me do it.Such crazy vibe. 03 Jaspal: das wassup! keep it flowin. you got the good vibes in dilli [i.e. Delhi]. 04 Aeke: Mad crazy bro.So its like the DJs give the vibe to the bboys they give it back to me and I give it back to them.Intense exchange of art.

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05 Jaspal: haaa! that sounds like a quote for my book!!!!!! can i quote you on that? 07 Jaspal: thanks. it really reflects whats happening at a jam 08 Aeke: Yes...And not just one day..I am still in the same vibe...a jam keeps the vibe up for a week atleast...and before its gone another jam comes up. ((the interaction continues)) The online chat between Aeke and me conveys a taste of the excitement that both Aeke and I, a distant viewer of the spectacle, put forward when talking about the Del4Pol Jam and hip hop jams in general. We use vibe (Turns 2–4; Turn 8) to refer to the power that is generated from within the spontaneous activities in the cypher. This vibe, short for vibration, what Benjamin (1969) might have identified as the aura of the cypher ritual, expands across modes, from the musical to the physical to the verbal (Turn 4) and it seems to empower, almost possess, Aeke for days, until the next jam is due to happen and he can recharge himself with some of this power again (Turn 8). I mention this interaction with Aeke here and the theory of vibe that he puts forward to thickly contextualise the following analysis of the breakers’ non-verbal communication in the cypher. The cypher includes more than my analysis can reveal. The cypher is not just an interactive space in which empirically moving bodies, or embodied voices, orchestrate sociolinguistic meanings in some ideological play of indexicalities. We have to keep in mind that breakin means the world to the young dancers and audiences who actually populate and make the cypher. Like in Benjamin’s aura of the ritual, the spectators and actors present in the cypher are themselves moved by the movement of the bodies. Future research could productively explore further how the transmodal affective communication that occurs between the deejay, the breakers, the emcee, the judges and the audience, the vibe of a hip hop jam, empowers, uplifts and gives spiritual meaning to young people’s lives (for an analysis along these lines of the aura on jams in the UK’s grime scene, see Bramwell, 2015; for an analysis of the affective meanings of vibrations on open-air reggae and dancehall events in Jamaica, see Henriques, 2010). For now, I will focus my analysis merely on those empirically available sociolinguistic indexicalities of the embodied voices of the breakers, as they battle against each other in the cypher, using a multimodal interactional analytic approach.

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Global hip hop linguistics needs to first do some foundational groundwork when it comes to analysing breakers in action. Turn-Taking Organisation in the Cypher

To study the embodied voices of breakers in such an empirical way, it is necessary to investigate the actual practices of dance movements in breakin cyphers. The field of hip hop studies has begun to attend to such an empirical study of breakin cyphers (Dodds, 2016; Johnson, 2011; Kimminich, 2010; Schloss, 2009). I will contribute to this development by discussing the interactive turn-taking organisation in the battle cypher from a global hip hop linguistics perspective. This perspective, drawing from multimodal interaction analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and conversation analysis, allows me to reveal some of the minute details of how meaning is negotiated in the cypher and how turns are structured and recognised as turns by the participants themselves. I will pay particular attention to the final component of a breaker’s turn: the freeze, which in the olden days of the New York old school breakin scene, so it is said, was often performed by posing in the b-boy stance. A ‘turn’, as I use it in this chapter, marks a temporally bounded high performance (Coupland, 2007: 146–149) of the embodied voice on the dance floor in the middle of the cypher. Each turn can be seen as an embodied mini-narrative in which different figures appear in an orderly sequence and paint a positive picture of the self, and potentially a negative picture of the other (on the process of othering, see Chapter 4). Usually, only one breaker has the right, as it were, to hold the floor. This right, however, can also be challenged and negotiated, as we will see. The crews alternate in taking turns. When one crew has a legitimate turn, one of its dancers takes the floor for a high performance, yet both the crewmates of this dancer on the floor and their opposing crew, who all stand on the sidelines or perimeter of the cypher, have multiple opportunities to orient to the performance of the dancer in the middle. Also, the audience, the emcee and the deejay, but not the judges, can influence the high performance in the cypher. I call such performances on the sidelines peri-performances. Sometimes, these peri-performances merge with the high performance in the middle and therefore the meaning-making in the cypher is co-constructed through a range of simultaneously activated voice channels. For instance, in the final crew battle at Del4Pol Jam, which I study in some detail below, the emcee polices, on several occasions, the space of the dance floor. He frequently uses his amplified verbal

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voice and orders the crews to back up as they notoriously, in their excitement, intrude the high-performative space in the middle of the cypher, thereby challenging the right of the legitimate dancer to hold the floor. If the emcee does not step in immediately, sometimes members of the crews point their fingers at the intruding opposing crew and turn their heads to the judges/the emcee, and sometimes even use their phonosonic voice to shout out ‘heeey!’, so that the foul play of the other crew can be noticed and disciplined. Thus, the cypher is a highly contested, at times chaotic, space, where peri-performances on the sidelines merge with the high performance of the dancing breaker in the middle. The turn-taking organisation in the cypher, however, is primarily negotiated between the breakers themselves. Like verbal interactants, they employ several strategies to enter the floor, or to not give up the floor, or to invite the other crew to take the floor. Breakers draw on a standardised figurative grammar of breakin to negotiate this turn-taking in the cypher. The figurative syntax of a turn

In any breakin cypher, and especially in battle cyphers at jams, the breakers’ movements are often sequenced in such a way that they become recognised by other breakers and members of the audience as turns or as narratives. The standard (recognisable) sequence for one turn is depicted in Figure 7.3 (see also Schloss, 2009: 86). These four parts constitute the basic figurative syntax or grammar of each turn in the cypher. Breakers usually begin their turns in an upright position doing fast six-steps combined with movements of their shoulders, arms and heads (toprock). They then drop down, using their hands as support to do six-steps and other steps in close proximity to the floor (downrock). Then they blend into acrobatic, perilous and spectacular movements, like flares, somersaults, backspins or headspins (powermove) (the powermove depicted in Figure  7.3 is a somersault). They finally suspend the fast moving of their bodies and congeal in an intricate posture gazing over to their opponents (freeze) (the freeze in Figure  7.3 is a b-boy stance, although without arms crossed). This figurative syntax of breakin cyphers can, of course, be modified, individuated and intelligently subverted, yet, it has to be recognised in one way or another in order for a turn to be regarded as successful. As Johnson (2011: 173) notes, breakers, judges and audiences recognise

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Figure 7.3  The figurative syntax of breakin, screenshot tracings, Chakreis Jam (Video by author, Delhi 2013)

turns as ‘innovative, creative and above all complete […when…] b-boying’s key elements are all executed in a sequence and manner that makes sense’. But how is this sense-making of the turns and sequential figures constructed and recognised in the cypher? Turns as narratives

Schloss (2009) suggests that the turns we see in breakin cyphers narrativise the universal morals and ideological aesthetics of hip hop culture by means of which the breakers can construct and negotiate meaning and put forward their ‘own’ embodied voices. The details of any given b-boy set [or turn], then, build on deep aesthetic principles in order to make complex narrative statements. The general aesthetic provides a context or frame, and the actual movement provides the statement of the individual within that frame. Together, these two elements allow dancers to make concise, clear statements about who they are and their relationship to the world around them at that moment. (Schloss, 2009: 91)

Such embodied narrativisation in the cypher, Kimminich (2010: 87, my translation) points out, ‘continually creates new figures and techniques, which instantly become part of the collaborative repertoire and they also become the yardstick for further innovations and recombinations’. Thus, turns in breakin cyphers, analogous to the narratives I describe in this book, have a recognisable structure of beginning/ orientation, middle/complicating action and end/resolution and they orchestrate a multitude of embodied voices or figures that position the breakers’ ‘own’ dancing bodies in relation to the other, to previous

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narratives that have been exchanged and to hip hop’s history and aesthetic principles more generally. The turns of the competing breakers in the cypher thus also seem to constitute an incremental building up of mini-narratives, which are also intertextually connected and evaluated by the audience, the judges and the competing breakers themselves. The freeze as a transition relevance place

In the figurative syntax of breakin, the freeze, a brief stop of the movement, usually in an artistic or acrobatic posture that requires a lot of strength and/or balance, signals to the opponent that the current turn has finished, or as Schloss (2009: 91) argues, the freeze ‘is expected to bring the narrative to a satisfying conclusion’. The freeze can thus be understood as the resolution of the narrative which has the potential to express the dancers’ ‘own’ embodied transcultural voices. This freeze is often also combined with a gaze towards (a specific member of) the opposing crew. Dodds (2016: 71), who studies expressions of the face in battle cyphers, notes that breakers ‘might mark a significant pose, typically at the end of a dance phrase, with a hyper-engaged face, which acts like a period or exclamation point’. She adds: ‘Whether through a smile, a frown, or a penetrating stare, it signals a bravado and pride that works to underscore the spectacle of the freeze’ (Dodds, 2016: 71). The freeze in combination with the gaze thus acts as the symbolically recognisable end of a breaker’s turn in the cypher and it invites the opponent to take the next turn. In this way, the freeze is similar to a transition relevance place (TRP) (Sacks et al., 1974; Selting, 2000) in spoken interaction, such as falling intonation in spoken English. In terms of orchestrating voices in narratives, the freeze in breakin, analogously to the resolution in oral narratives, acts as a ‘story-exit device’ (Jefferson, 1978: 237) that marks the shift from the narrative world (Level 1), in which breakers orchestrate a multitude of embodied voices, to the interactive world (Level 2), when their ‘own’ transcultural voices come to the fore in the interactive world. Just like the narrative resolution indicates to verbal interactants that a storyteller has arrived at the end of her narrative and the floor is now open for other interactants to say something, the freeze and the gaze indicate that a turn is over and that the opponent is now required to step into the cypher and begin the next turn. However, such a description of the freeze as the TRP or a story-exit device in the cypher, reminiscent of conversation analytic approaches, only applies to the ideal world of Sacks’s no-gap-no-overlap

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turn-taking. In the actual turn-taking practices in breakin battles, things are a lot messier and more chaotic. Negotiating gaps in the cypher

The following analysis draws on an eight-minute battle between two crews, Project Street Dance (PSD) and Indians at the Del4Pol Jam. Both crews have already won several battles against other crews on this afternoon and they are now facing each other in a high-stake final crew battle, which is also one of the two main events of the jam, the other one being the subsequent one-on-one final. Thus, for both crews winning this battle means winning the entire competition and receiving the trophy and possibly some prize money, with which they would garner fame in the local and global hip hop community. At the start of this battle there are about 50–80 people in the room. PSD (on the left) and Indians (on the right) face each other, making a cypher and leaving a space in between them, which marks out the dance floor. Members of the audience surround the cypher, sitting in the first row and standing further back. The emcee, the deejay and the judges, as well as a number of VIPs (such as the director of the Korean Cultural Centre, where the event took place, and a few journalists) sit or stand on a small stage, overlooking the cypher. This is also where the camera is positioned and for this reason, we don’t see the emcee, the deejay, the judges or the VIPs on the screenshot tracings that I present below. Let us begin by focusing on an episode in which a freeze failed to be effective as a TRP although it was used as a story-exit device. Figure 7.4 captures the moment when a breaker from PSD ends his turn with a freeze, in this case a one-armed handstand combined with a gaze towards Indians. However, nobody from Indians takes the next turn. The floor is empty for 1.6 seconds. This gap is immediately attended to by another breaker from PSD, who enters the cypher space and first disses (disrespects) Indians with a smoking gesture (Figure  7.5) and then beckons them to take the next turn (Figure 7.6). The meaning of the smoking gesture (Figure 7.5) remains ambiguous. Perhaps, the PSD breaker intends to index that his crewmate just smoked or burnt (outdid) Indians and that they are now afraid to take up the challenge and enter the cypher. However, the gesture could also mean that the PSD breaker wants to indicate that the members of Indians crew are regular consumers of marijuana, that they are stoned, and therefore slow to recognise the freeze as a TRP and do not register that it is now their turn. Either way, the smoking gesture disses Indians because they

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Figure 7.4 Freeze

seem to be unable to compete with PSD or because they are unaware of the figurative syntax of turns in the battle cypher. The meaning of the beckoning (Figure 7.6) is not immediately apparent either. In my reading, the beckoning represents a humorous intertextual reference to the iconic figure of a Punjabi bhangra dancer; slightly squatting and hopping up and down while rotating both arms and hands. The importance of this reference to bhangra dancing will become clearer later in the analysis, when I will argue that this jocular intertextuality initiates a peri-performative series of iconic and ironic negotiations of masculinity throughout the battle. For now, it is merely important to notice that both the smoking gesture and the beckoning demonstrate

Figure 7.5  Smoking gesture

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Figure 7.6  Bhangra-style beckoning

that the breakers immediately attend to any gap that might occur in the turn-taking when a freeze successfully resolves a breakers’ narrative. By means of such embodied metapragmatic commentary on turn-taking, the breakers can display their knowledge of the rules of the battle cypher and deploy this knowledge to mark their kinaesthetic superiority over their opponents. Evaluating Figures of Dance

It is not only the case that breakers explicitly comment on the turn-taking organisation in the cypher, but they also evaluate the dance moves and the postures of their own crew members positively and they evaluate the moves of their opponents negatively. This peri-performative positive and negative evaluation of the breakers on the sidelines is meant to make the movements in the high-performative cypher accountable to the judges and the audience; furthermore, it helps them to diss the other crew and lower their confidence. This, again, displays breakers’ kinaesthetic knowledge of the figurative grammar as well as their attention to the aesthetic principles of breakin. Meyer (2013) describes similar ‘accountability’ marking strategies in boxing. He notes: A boxing match is therefore not just a competition of physical might, stamina and technical skills, but precisely also a competition in the art of presenting to the officials/judges during the physical contest the most clearly accountable actions. In contrast it is important to present the

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opponent’s actions, which could potentially be judged as hits, as clear flops in front of the officials. […] boxers do not just follow predefined rules, but they are also engaged in making their actions accountable in relation to these rules – i.e. visible, attestable, reportable, justifiable, accountable, etc. (Meyer, 2013: 35, my translation)

Such attention to rules seems to structure also the symbolic repertoire of battle cyphers which has evolved historically and gets oriented by the breakers’ display of their kinaesthetic knowledge. Marking accountability thus has the function to help, or influence, both the audience and the judges with the interpretation of movements in the cypher. Breakers in a crew battle, while they are standing on the sidelines waiting for their next turn, can either highlight the magnificence and correct technical execution of their crewmates’ moves and postures, or they can mark the incorrect execution of their opponents’ performances. Breakers use specific symbolic gestures like tapping their hands on the floor (Figure 7.7) or tapping their elbow to point out a faulty movement by their opponents and to make sure that an opponent’s movement that is – in their opinion – performed incorrectly counts towards their record of failed movements by the audience and judges. As the crew who has more positive accounts, in theory, wins the battle, the breakers are thus constantly engaged in such peri-performances of marking their own crew’s movements as positive and their opponents’ movements as negative. To ensure the positive accountability of their own crewmates’ movements, the breakers clap their hands or point their index finger (Figure 7.8; also Figure 7.4) at their dancing crewmate and

Figure 7.7  Marking negative accountability

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Figure 7.8  Marking positive accountability

they also sometimes shout approvals – one of the rare occasions when breakers make use of their phonosonic voice. Intertextual Figures

While this marking of accountability works for the symbolic repertoires of breakin, the iconic movements in breakin result in a different kind of uptake and orientation. Some movements cannot be understood through a historically evolved figurative-symbolic kinaesthetic knowledge, but rather through situated intertextuality. This intertextuality is iconic because movements resemble either well-known, recognisable social personae like a boxer, a kung-fu fighter or a go-go dancer, or because they mock the opposing crew by imitating their movements in an exaggerated and ridiculing way. Referencing martial arts

Hip hop at large and breakin in particular commonly make references to martial arts. So, also in this battle between PSD and Indians, we find several references to martial arts. Most unambiguously, martial arts get evoked when one breaker from Indians enters the cypher for the first time. He begins his turn not with the customary standard toprock, which consists of fast footwork while the breaker is in the upright, standing position, but instead, he begins with some shadow-boxing moves, throwing quick punches in sync with the music and bending his head and shoulders down and to the left and right as if he is dodging an opponent’s attack (Figure 7.9).

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Figure 7.9  Shadow-boxing toprock

The audience cheers loudly and thereby positively evaluates this intertextual reference to boxing. Through referencing the iconic figure of the boxer, the breaker takes a serious, cool and dangerous stance, supported by the hard masculinity associated with boxing. He then continues with his downrock, does a few powermoves on the floor, which, however, are not executed neatly and are subject to PSD’s repeated peri-performative marking of negative accountability by touching the floor with their hands. When he gets back on his feet, he looks over to PSD’s crew, signalling a TRP (even though the freeze was missing from his turn and his narrative was thus not spectacularly resolved). One breaker from PSD immediately takes up the TRP by entering the cypher. He steps into the cypher and first mirrors the previous breakers’ shadow-boxing moves (Figure 7.10) and then, suddenly, performs a spectacular flying kick, spinning his body high up in the air (Figure 7.11). This kick is reminiscent of karate or kung-fu. When he lands back on his feet, he gestures as if he was smoking a cigarette, a gesture that has been used in this battle several times already, perhaps to indicate that this move has just ‘smoked’ or outdone the other breaker’s performance. He then continues with his toprock and downrock, which merges with a few powermoves and he ends his turn with a freeze. Through the intertextual references to martial arts, the battle receives a more graphic turn than was the case before when the crews mainly negotiated their kinaesthetic knowledge by showcasing standard symbolic movements such as footwork, six-steps and flares, and marked for positive or negative accountability. Now, martial arts have been iconically brought into the cypher. The entertainment that these iconic references to popular martial arts culture provides also makes clear that the breakin battle is not merely an esoteric competition between athletes or

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Figure 7.10  Mirroring shadow-boxing

performers of a specialised discipline, but that it is also contingent on the value systems of the ‘outside’ world, from which it borrows some of its aesthetic values and narrative figures. These iconic indexicalities can be understood as what Kimminich (2010) calls the intercultural repertoire of figures in breakin, which are valorised through preconstructed personas, as well as social qualities and stances, like the hard, uncompromising character of Rocky Balboa or the legendarily swift and elegant movements of boxer Muhammad Ali, or other embodied aesthetics of popular kung-fu film heroes such

Figure 7.11  Flying kung-fu kick

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as Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. By loosely referencing such figures, the breakers take stances and evoke qualities of hardness, elegance and determination, ultimately aligning with specific forms of masculinity that support their ‘own’ masculine identities in the battle. The audience’s cheering suggests that these masculine identities are recognised and valorised by members of the cypher and that they thus entail an ‘effectiveness in’ (Silverstein, 2003) the ongoing understanding of the battle. Martial arts become an intertextual resource with which the breakers can push the performance in battle cyphers from a symbolic and esoteric to a graphic and direct understanding; or in Peircian terms, the meanings of these intertextual movements are semiotically highly motivated or iconic. Carefully seasoned iconicity

Nevertheless, it must be said that the directness of the intertextual iconicity is potentially risky and needs to be carefully seasoned. Iconic movements have validity in the breakin communities of practice only when they occur in between symbolic movements that showcase the breakers’ more esoteric skills and kinaesthetic knowledge of breakin culture. When iconic figures are overdone, or overcooked, they lose spice and validity in the cypher. For instance, minutes later in the battle, after the martial arts genre had already been negotiated for a while and the battlin breakers seem to have moved on to negotiate other things, one breaker from PSD tries to impress the audience and Indians with a couple of insinuated uppercuts and kicks. He begins to dance in close proximity in front of one breaker from Indians, the shadow boxer who initiated the intertextuality to martial arts, and then he insinuates an uppercut (Figure 7.12). He continues to make a movement with his hands as if his opponent’s head flew high up through the room (Figure 7.13) as an outcome of the power of his gestured uppercut. He looks up to the ceiling as he watches the imaginary head flying through the room and then turns around and continues with a downrock. At this point in the battle, this narrative dialogue does not seem to be very successful: the audience does not cheer at this reference to martial arts. Furthermore, one member of Indians smilingly attends to the narrative of beheading and reaches his arms up to catch his crewmate’s ‘flying head’ from up in the air (see Figure 7.14) and then proceeds to place it back onto his crewmate’s torso. I would like to suggest that this response to the insinuated uppercut ridicules the re-emergence of martial arts as an effective narrative

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Figure 7.12  Insinuated uppercut

resource at this point in the battle. Although this response ‘buys into’ the narrative of beheading, it co-constructs this narrative and gives it an alternative ending. Thus, the intertextual reference to martial arts is marked as ineffective at this point in the battle. The reversal of the uppercut’s effect therefore also intertextually refers back to episodes earlier in the battle, where martial arts had already been negotiated. The re-heading of the Indians’ breaker thus suggests that the earlier negotiation of martial arts had already produced much more exciting moves, such as the swift boxer and the spectacular kung-fu fighter, in sight of which, the insinuated uppercut at this point in the battle seems contrived and ridiculous. The insinuated uppercut therefore does not innovatively develop martial arts for the intertextual figurative repertoire in this battle. After this uppercut episode, there were no more references to martial arts for the rest of the battle, except, perhaps, for the very final finish-him move, to which I will return in a moment. If we follow this interpretation of the episode, it becomes clear that specific iconic movements are only valid at specific times in the battle. If they had been negotiated already, their reoccurrence at a later point in the battle is challenged and ridiculed. Thus, a battle, at large, is a co-constructed macro-narrative, where specific micro-episodes are negotiated and their resolutions become the ‘yardstick for further innovations and re-combinations’ (Kimminich, 2010: 87, my translation). This points to the innovative and creative ways in which breakers have to choose from their symbolic and iconic repertoires in order to remain hip, to remain up to date and relevant. Put differently, it is not simply the display of the perfect execution of symbolic figures or of showcasing masculinity through

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Figure 7.13  Watching the head fly through the air

iconic figures, but it is also about when, how often, in which sequence and against which contender these figures are performed. In short, iconicity needs to be carefully seasoned to be effective in the battle cypher, or else it might be mocked and ridiculed by the competing crew.

Figure 7.14  Catching ‘flying head’ from up in the air

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Negotiating Masculinity

The hard and masculine stances taken in this battle are, in fact, not merely constructed by referencing martial arts fighters, figures of hard masculinity, but they are also constructed by provoking the opponents by ironically referencing figures of soft masculinity; figures that are aesthetically and ideologically widely associated with ‘femininity’ or ‘homosexuality’ in hip hop cultural worlds. The go-go dancer intermezzo

In this battle, the figures of the go-go dancer and the crybaby are evoked to index soft masculinity. The figure of the go-go dancer (for a brilliant cultural analysis of go-go dancing, see Gregory, 2018) is constructed through circular movements with the hips and the lower belly.6 This rotating kinesis contrasts with the hard figures of the martial arts fighters that emphasise erect movements with the extremities. Whereas the hard masculine punches and kicks externalise the thrust of the impact away from the body, the soft masculine go-go dancing exposes the body of the dancer: the upper body reclines, the arms swing over the head, the legs stand slightly apart and the pelvis rotates, ‘attracting’ impact onto the body, as can also be seen in Punjabi bhangra-style beckoning discussed above (see Figure 7.9). The b-boys, of course, do not mean these references to figures of soft masculinity seriously. They are used hyperbolically and ironically as an othering device (Chapter 4) to provoke and mock their opponents and mark them as feminine or gay. Let us take a look at how the figure of the go-go dancer emerged in the cypher. After PSD and Indians engaged in their intertextual negotiation of martial arts, a six-second peri-performative intermezzo provides some interesting insights into the construction of soft masculinity as ironic mocking in this battle. This intermezzo unveils some of the ways in which hegemonic masculinity is normalised in breakin and hip hop culture at large. The episode begins after a PSD breaker finishes a turn somewhat unspectacularly, resulting in an ambiguous TRP. His last movement is not a freeze, but a small hop from his knees back to his feet, looking towards Indians, indicating a TRP, but yet not bringing his narrative to an exciting resolution. His unspectacular finish is subject to Indians’ marking of negative accountability. Two breakers from Indians touch the floor with their hands to mark their opponent’s TRP as incorrect according to the figurative-symbolic grammar of breakin: the turn lacks the freeze. One breaker from Indians also marks this incorrectness by clapping his hands above his head, ‘applauding’ his opponent’s turn, clearly in an ironic way (Figure 7.15).

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Figure 7.15  Ironic applause as marking of negative accountability

Another breaker from PSD attends to this peri-performance and steps onto the middle of the floor, mirroring the ironic clapping but in an exaggerated way so that it starts to resemble go-go dancing. He reclines his body, swings his left arm over his head, squats slightly, spreads his legs and dramatically rotates his hips (Figure 7.16). The breaker from Indians responds to this by stroking his hand over his stretched out face as if he was crying.

Figure 7.16  Go-go dancer and crybaby

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The peri-performative narrative between the ironic applauder, the go-go dancer and the crybaby emerged because of a gap in the turn-taking organisation, caused by an unrecognisable end to a turn. This gap is, however, instantly filled with meaning. It provided an opportunity for Indians to engage in peri-performative marking of negative accountability, symbolically by touching the floor, and iconically through ironic applause. This gradually transmutes into a negotiation of masculinity when another PSD crew member mockingly references go-go dancing and the breaker from Indians references a crybaby in response. The go-go intermezzo thus uses the gap in the turn-taking of the battle to deploy ironic and iconic intertextual references to figures of soft masculinity to display their ‘own’ hard masculinities. Finish-him masculinity

At that moment, the emcee announced that there was just one more minute to go in this battle. A breaker from Indians enters ruthlessly. It seems that he does not want to waste time and so he enters without toprock or downrock and delves right into the cypher with a spectacular powermove, a short and forceful flare (Figure 7.17). The audience responds with loud cheering, some members of the audience jump to their feet and the whole atmosphere heats up. The breaker then continues with a few six-steps in a standing position and then elegantly and smoothly slides to the back corner of the cypher on his knees, holds up his right arm, making a fist, and pulls his elbow

Figure 7.17  Entering with a powerful flare

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Figure 7.18  A phallic finish-him move

toward his pelvis; probably an iconic gesture that signals his sexual prowess and domination (see Figure 7.18). The phallic gesture occurs just in a moment when the fourth bar of the breakbeat pauses and there is silence in the jam for about 0.5 seconds. When the beat drops back in on the next bar, the audience cheers loudly and the members of Indians jump around happily (Figure 7.19), perhaps knowing that their crewmate’s phallic movement has just won them the crew finals. The phallic iconicity of the movement resembles a finish-him move, similar to a knock-out in boxing, the finishing move in wrestling or the special move in video games such as Mortal Kombat. After the finish-him move, the breaker from Indians continues with a downrock and a freeze, indicating that it is now PSD’s (final) turn. A member of PSD enters the cypher for the last turn in this battle and performs a perfectly executed handstand air-flare, which, however, no longer excites the audience. Indians are declared the winners of this battle. Why is this phallic evocation of masculinity successful in the eyes of the audience and perhaps also in the eyes of the judges? I would argue that it is successful for two reasons: First, it occurs in the moment in which the beat sets out on the fourth bar. The brief silence in the room seems to accentuate the meaning of the phallic gesture. This was certainly not planned by the breaker on the floor, and it might or might not have been planned by the deejay, yet it gives the impression that beat and dance

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work together in perfect harmony. There is an inter-modal flow between the deejay’s voice (the music) and the breaker’s voice (the moving body) which creates a powerful vibe (see Aeke’s theory further up) that is recognised as a successful performance. The fact that this intermodal vibe is so obscenely infused with phallicism suggests that the hegemonic aesthetics of masculinity are central to meaning-making, and success, in the cypher. Secondly, the phallic iconicity is carefully seasoned because it follows a perfectly executed powermove which demonstrates the breaker’s symbolic kinaesthetic knowledge and his esoteric and technical skills as a dancer. The display of sexual domination here seems effortless and cool, even stylish, rather than contrived or overdone, because it emerges just in the right moment: it catches the vibe. In sum, the young, cool, urban masculinity that the b-boy community seems to construct for themselves through their bodily hexis and their rockin bodies in the cypher needs to be carefully seasoned, and thus dialogically reflexive of the polyphonic multitude of masculinities available in hip hop and in India. The success with which such performances of masculinity resolve danced narratives in the cypher, suggests that the aesthetics and attitudes associated with the persona of the b-boy (cool, relaxed, unconcerned and yet in full control, always ready to battle) might represent some form of iconic template on which the b-boys that I followed in Delhi can model their ‘own’ embodied transcultural voices.

Figure 7.19  Indians cheer in excitement

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The Recontextualisation of the B-Boy Stance

The b-boy stance iconically represents this effortless and cool young urban masculinity. In early breakin culture in New York City of the 1970s and 1980s, so it is said, breakers would often use a particular standing posture – arms crossed, legs apart, head tilted – to index the freeze and the TRP in the cypher. This standing posture came to be known as the b-boy stance. The b-boy stance, the archetypal freeze, can also be appropriated by emcees, deejays and graffiti writers to readily index membership in authentic hip hop culture. Used outside of the cypher, the b-boy stance recontextualises the interactive function of the freeze, namely it brings a narrative to a successful conclusion and puts forward the narrator’s ‘own’ transcultural voice. In this recontextualised sense, the b-boy stance can be read more generally as ‘a grounded force of opposition […that…] conveys the message that we are powerful, and demand to be recognized as such, regardless of our economic or social status, strictly on the strength of our designated skill in the culture of hip hop’ (Angers, 2013–2015). Standing in the b-boy stance immediately indexes one’s ‘own’ powerful voice of hip hop that demands to be recognised on its ‘own’ terms. It says: I am hip hop. Emdin (2013) notes that the b-boy stance is frequently deployed by emcees, deejays, graffiti writers, hip hop heads and fans to metaphorically align themselves with breakin and by extension with authentic underground hip hop. He suggests that the recontextualisation of symbols associated with breakin even occasioned a semantic and pragmatic shift of the term ‘b-boy’ in the hip hop scenes. The term can now be used to refer not only to male breakers, but rather more generally to everybody who aligns with authentic hip hop culture. Over time the term [b-boy] was extended to include all those who are a part of hip-hop and are truly devoted to any one of the four elements. The complex dual use of the term speaks to the integral role that the art of dance and movement has in hip-hop, and speaks to the shared understandings across the subcultures [i.e. elements] of hip-hop. (Emdin, 2013: 89)

Similarly, Schloss (2009) finds that breakin is recognised in hip hop connoisseurship as the most authentic and least commercial of the four elements. Because of this recognition, a reference to ‘B-boying alone is enough to tip the balance’ (Schloss, 2009: 37) when one wants to index dissociation from the commercial versions of hip hop and align with old school and underground authenticity.

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In my own fieldwork, I frequently observed emcees, deejays, graffiti writers as well as breakers posing in the b-boy stance for photos and videos. Almost all my Delhi-based ethnographic interlocutors were (also) breakers, even if this was revealed only after some time. This was the case with Prabh Deep, who you have already met several times in this book, and who can be seen in Figure 7.20. When I first met Prabh Deep at the Snoop Lion concert in Gurgaon in early January 2013, he told me that he was planning to get into music production and we subsequently worked together to produce beats and record raps in our respective home studios (see also Dattatreyan & Singh, 2020). Months later, during our interview in his neighbourhood park in West Delhi, from which I cited above, we met some of his friends who were practising breakin. As Prabh Deep never told me that he himself was a breaker, I was surprised to see him suddenly jump into the cypher and perform a perfectly executed sequence of toprock, downrock, powermove and freeze. He later told me that he is of course a breaker, but that he wanted to concentrate on producing music in the future (interview with Prabh Deep, Delhi 2013). Prabh Deep soon also became interested in producing videos for his songs, so we reached out to Gabriel Dattatreyan, my coincidental anthropological collaborator in the field, who agreed to bring his digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) equipment and shoot a music video for Prabh Deep, which featured his friend Sun-J (a self-chosen stage name), who was also a breaker-turned-emcee, in the medieval ruin monuments of Hauz Khas Village in South Delhi. The two protagonists were keen to include scenes that show them breakin, in addition to scenes in which they rap into the camera. The scene captured in Figure  7.20 shows the two artists in the b-boy stance. It was filmed as a still (a.k.a. a freezeframe) with which the video ends. In this b-boy stance, the artists seem to resolve and evaluate the audio-visual narrative that they have created in the music video. By ending their audio-visual narrative posing in the b-boy stance, they seem to move into an interactive Level 2 positioning towards the world, expecting a response and showing fearless readiness for this response. Ending the music video with the b-boy stance thus not only iconically references b-boyin, but it also recontextualises the function of the b-boy stance/freeze in the breakin cyphers: the b-boy stance freezes narrative time and brings forward the narrators’/breakers’/emcees’ ‘own’ evaluative voice, which also anticipates a response from the other. It is a confident stance that assumes authorship over the orchestration of the many voices in the narrative world (Level 1) and now moves into the interactive world (Level  2) to positively evaluate this orchestration in fearless

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Figure 7.20  Prabh Deep and Sun-J posing in the b-boy stance for a music video shoot with Dattatreyan and a mutual friend (Photo by author, Delhi 2013)

anticipation of a future response. Prabh Deep and Sun-J here dialogically resolve the complex sociocultural and historical orchestration of the many voices they created in the music video. These were narrative figures of themselves as b-boys breakin in the ruin monuments, as emcees rappin into the camera or simply as young men sitting on a wall watching the setting sun over the medieval ruins. With the b-boy stance they signal that their audio-visual narrative has come to a successful conclusion. They exit their mediatised story fearlessly and wait for a (mediated?) response. Interestingly, Prabh Deep and Sun-J do not gaze directly into the camera, as was the case for most of the narrative world in which they rapped facing the camera directly. Posing in the b-boy stance, they now look past the camera, creating a dialogic scene in which their opponent is imagined outside of the frame and therefore cannot be attributed to the audience watching the video but rather to a fictive third-person opponent. This underlines the imaginativeness of the other in hip hop, who is not always to be understood as a real contender but as a purely imaginative other against which the b-boys’ ‘own’ selves emerge (see also my discussion of alterity and identity in Chapter 4).

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Discussion and Conclusion: Hip Hop’s Hegemonic Masculinities

In an attempt to balance out global hip hop linguistics’ logocentrism and over-attention to rap lyrics, this chapter has contributed to developing a multimodal interactive approach to understand some of the ways in which breakers’ embodied voices negotiate meaning in the cypher. This is important groundwork for global hip hop linguistics because hip hop practices are always mind, body and soul. Without embodiment hip hop is just hip. It seems to me that at the core of this embodiment is an ideologically sexualised figure of the African American or Latino, young, inner-city, marginalised male with whom every global hip hop practitioner has to enter a dialogic relationship. In the local uptakes of Black masculinities around the world (see e.g. Bucholtz, 1999; Partridge, 2013; Simeziane, 2010), young men and women don’t simply imitate American Blackness but they construct for themselves complex narratives that grapple with the question of what it means to be hip hop, but not Black and not from the ghetto (Judy, 2012; Turner, 2017). In their narrative search for answering this question, they orchestrate a multitude of voices through which they speak to local masculinities (like the bhangra dancer), globally emblematic hip hop masculinities (the b-boy) and masculinities available outside of hip hop cultural worlds (like the boxer, kung-fu fighter or go-go dancer). The b-boy masculinity shaped my participants’ bodily hexis, their ways of walking, dressing, looking, moving. When they would rock up in the parks for their practice session, with a boombox in their hand, an attitude on their face, checkin out the space and opening a cypher, the relaxed and cool masculinity took shape in their ways of standing and watching and commenting and joking among themselves. They were different from their age peers who had not been hailed by hip hop. Kids and passers-by would often stand, sit and watch how the b-boys moved their bodies to the beat. At times, some kids would try out a few moves themselves, in their own little cypher on the grass, learning to embody a different type of Indian masculinity, one that is neither ‘traditional’ nor recognisably ‘modern’ but sits ambiguously between a locally transgressive and a vernacular cosmopolitan embodied voice. Also, the atmosphere on the jam, the intermodal flows between different (f)actors – who are almost always male – seems to me to create a whole masculine vibe; a polyphony of male actors who speak in ritualised ways through their bodies, music and amplified voices to showcase their kinaesthetic knowledge, and evaluate each others’ moving bodies in the battle. Also, the talk about these battle cyphers draws on tropes of masculinity, as

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exemplified in the bro-talk between Aeke and me during my online ethnography. Most clearly perhaps, masculinity emerges in the intertextual iconic references to martial arts and to figures of hard masculinity and ironic soft masculinity. The cyphers I discussed in this chapter are thus not very different – at least in terms of their displays of hyper-heterosexual masculinity – to the cyphers one can view in hip hop’s historiographic materials from around the world. For example, the depiction of early New York City breakin culture in famous films like Wildstyle or Beat Street valorises phallic humour and references to male sexual pleasure (LaBoskey, 2001). And so, for the b-boys I met and got to know in Delhi, masculinity is not only a quantitative reality of their local scene. Masculinity is semiotically envoiced, or better embodied, in their narrative practices in the cypher. The indexical and ideological meanings of these narrative practices are readable – to an extent – by analysing the interactive flows and the semiotic surfaces of the breakers’ moving bodies. Their kinaesthetic knowledge of breakin, its historically developed and developing aesthetics and morals, however, has not been investigated in any deep ways in this chapter. This is work that still needs to be done in global hip hop linguistics. But let me assume, for now, that this kinaesthetic knowledge consists of epistemologies that can somehow be described as masculine too. It seems fair to say that the interactions in the cyphers that I have analysed in this chapter squarely operate within the realms of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1987, 1995); an ideology in which the domination of men over women and ‘less-masculine’ men is normalised and widely regarded as cultural capital in a society. In other words, displays of masculinity, if carefully seasoned, have an effectiveness in the success of winning a battle. In his analysis of freestyle rap battles in the Cape Flats in South Africa, Williams (2017) describes how hegemonic constructions of masculinity make hip hop an exclusionary culture: 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 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 viewing world a non-inclusive ideology of masculinity in Hip Hop […and…] also further impacts negatively on the

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role of women in Hip Hop, and efforts to centralize women’s already marginalized voices in the culture. (Williams, 2017: 169–170)

If such hegemonic masculinity plays a role in winning a breakin battle, it would be relevant to know to what extend b-girls can successfully perform and negotiate masculinity in the cypher. Future research could study b-girl battles and cross-sex battles to investigate if b-girls are subject to the same hegemonic masculinity as b-boys or if they find ways to subvert gender relations in hip hop and in society at large. An attention to homosexual and gender non-binary breakers – if they exist at all somewhere out there – would lead to additional insights into the construction and potential challenges of hegemonic masculinity in breakin and hip hop cultures.

8 Overstandin Voices: Methodologies for Hip Hop

Introduction

While the previous chapters of this book were about how narrators situate themselves in relation to global hip hop authenticity (Chapter 4), language ideologies (Chapter 5), history (Chapter 6) and embodied masculinities (Chapter 7), the narrative presented in this chapter reflects on hip hop itself. The narrator proposes methodologies for understanding himself in the world through hip hop. This reflexive practice is characteristic of the culture and it is associated with hip hop’s fifth element (Emdin, 2013; Gosa, 2015): knowledge of self and under/overstandin. The narrator in this chapter is Scientik, a famous hip hop dancer and dance instructor from Delhi. In his narrative, he puts forward methodologies for practising and studying hip hop dance and, more generally, he puts forward a combined methodology for feeling, understanding and overstandin hip hop. By unpacking the complexities of his narrative arguments, we get to understand Scientik as a full-fledged scientist, and more, a critical hiphopographer who goes beyond asking empirical and rational questions, and who is capable of developing his ‘own’ methodologies for hip hop. Scientik’s narrative moves from discussing embodiment in dance, to learning about hip hop’s history and finally to hip hop’s all-encompassing spirituality. His hip hop methodology, I will argue, is both an epistemology (a methodology of how he knows) and an affectology (a methodology of how he feels). I further show that Scientik’s methodology is affectological in two ways: it conceptualises affect as emerging both from the pre-discursive body (embodied feelings) and from his post-discursive encounter with knowledge (mythical feelings). I borrow from Rastafarianism and hip hop spirituality the notion of overstandin (see also Singh, in press) to discuss the emergence of such post-discursive affective stancetaking in narrative (for more on stancetaking, see Chapter 2). Overstandin, I suggest through my analysis, allows 228

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Scientik to construct transcultural voices and resolve his narrative by taking post-discursive affective stances that mythologise hip hop as both a way and a thing (echoing B-Boy Rawdr’s research question in Chapter  1) and imagines the creation of hip hop as a miracle. Before I present the narrative, I briefly distinguish between epistemic and affective understanding in stancetaking research and hypothesise the possibility of overstandin: a post-discursive affective stance towards one’s ‘own’ knowledge, which we can further conceptualise as ‘border thinking’ (Mignolo, 2000). I conclude with an ethnographic vignette, which I hope complements my artificial analytical voice that I develop throughout this chapter and book and bring back something of my ‘own’ ethnographic voice to more sincerely account for the narrator’s affectological development in time and space. Understanding: Epistemic and Affective Stancetaking

Understanding is achieved among interactants by taking stances (for overviews of stancetaking, see Biber & Finnegan, 1989; Chindamo et al., 2012; Englebretson, 2007b; Jaffe, 2009b). The literature generally distinguishes between epistemic stances and affective stances. Epistemic stances relate to speakers’ levels of certainty or evidentiality and their claims to territories of knowledge, while affective stances are usually conceptualised as speakers’ emotional involvement in the utterance and the hearer’s empathetic understanding.1 Although epistemic and affective stances can be analytically distinguished in this Cartesian fashion, they are inextricable in any interaction (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1989). While discourse studies and sociolinguistics have started to attend to affective stancetaking in the last decade or so, epistemic stancetaking is, by far, better understood. Let us begin, then, on familiar terrain. Linguistics shares with many other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities a logocentric view; a view that puts ‘language’ (logos) at the centre of our analyses. As linguists, we regard this to be self-evident. But until recently, we have not just been innocently focusing on languaging per se, rather we have rendered as normal a particular type of epistemic communication that is understandable, clear, rational, monoglot and so on, and which is, importantly, empirically available as a semiotic surface, e.g. an audio recording or a transcript. We can ‘see’ epistemic stances in transcripts because they are often constructed through semiotic surface phenomena. Lexical discourse markers, for example, I know, you know, I don’t know, I think, really?, oh, etc., help speakers to negotiate epistemic stances and manage

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their turn-taking in interaction (e.g. Kärkkäinen, 2003). Intonation also seems to play a crucial role in epistemic stancetaking. For instance, in English, falling pitch movements usually mark certainty while rising pitch movements usually mark uncertainty (Halliday & Greaves, 2008; see also my discussion of intonation in Bunty’s narrative in Chapter 4). Through empirical linguistic analysis of such discourse markers and contextualisation cues on the semiotic surface, we can demonstrate how languagers take epistemic stances and how they manage to (or don’t manage to) exchange claims to territories of knowledge and work towards mutual understanding. Epistemic stancetaking is perhaps best formalised for linguistic analysis in Heritage’s (2012) work on epistemic status and territories of knowledge. In Heritage’s framework, interactants recognise each other as having ‘more’ or ‘less’ relative knowledge (K– and K+ positions) and, based on this recognition, exchange knowledge claims until they reach mutual understanding or epistemic convergence (see also Kamio, 1997; Zuczkowski et al., 2017). Heritage offers the metaphor of an ‘epistemic seesaw’2 to describe how knowledge statuses are bounced back and forth between interactants until they reach relative equilibrium or are abandoned, i.e. until interactants signal understanding or move on to speak about a new topic. This is the driving force, an ‘epistemic engine’ in Heritage’s words, behind the turn-by-turn sequence organisation of interactive talk. Epistemicity, it seems from reviewing the stancetaking literature, lends itself well to a formalised and empirical linguistic analysis. In other words, we can readily ‘see’ epistemic stances, i.e. markings of degrees of certainty and evidentiality, in transcriptions of interactions. We empirical linguists are fully in our logocentric comfort zone. While epistemic understanding has been intricately formalised in interactional research, affective understanding is just beginning to be taken seriously in critical strands of sociolinguistics. Affect studies (Ahmed, 2004; Massumi, 2002; Wetherell, 2013, 2014) challenge the widespread notion that human expression is only an exchange of rational knowledge encoded in the propositional value of the sentence or utterance: ‘to attend to affect is to stress the limits of the immediately knowable and communicable’ (Wetherell, 2013: 351). Yet, attending to affect poses a significant methodological and empirical problem for discourse studies, because affect is often viewed ‘as a kind of “extra-discursive” event’ (Wetherell, 2013: 350).3 As something outside of or even before linguistic representation, ‘affect has been consistently set aside as an essentially unexplorable aspect of linguistic behavior, a residual category to which aspects of language that cannot be handled conveniently with

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extant linguistic models were relegated to be forgotten’ (Besnier, 1990: 420; for a more recent restatement of this observation, see Kiesling, 2018). Wetherell (2013, 2014) introduces the notion of ‘affective practices’ to set affect free from its unrepresentationable cage. Her practice-based approach situates affect in the interpersonal semi-routinised repertoires with which we recognise, categorise and develop meanings (Wetherell, 2014: 147). She says that affect finds representation in bodies and embodied practices as well as in ‘the mind, in individual lives, in relationships, in communities, across generations and in social formations’ (Wetherell, 2014: 147; for a similar view see Bucholtz et al., 2018). While multimodal interaction analysis (see Chapter 7) shows how affect can be represented in the body and in embodiment, it is less clear how affect might emerge in the mind and in the other categories that Wetherell lists in the quote above. I will return to this problem in a moment. Affective understanding can be described as an expression of empathy and collaborative sense-making. Even if the propositional content of an utterance or narrative is not fully clear or understandable in epistemic terms, interactants may help each other to make sense of the emerging ambivalence. We may use back channelling, laughter and body language to show empathy even if we don’t fully understand the other. (We can, of course, also use all these embodied devices to impede understanding, silence speakers and create ambivalence.) Most of the conversational narratives you encountered in this book clearly demonstrate such affective interaction and collaboration. There were moments of misunderstanding and epistemic misalignment which were resolved by collaborative speech and laughter. But affect as empathy and collaboration is not necessarily always fully represented on the semiotic surface, and it becomes even more difficult to represent affect in a transcript of an audio recording. This problem of the partial non-linguistic representation of affect encouraged researchers to look for affect in the body and in the embodied practices of participants (Bucholtz & Hall, 2016; Jensen, 2014; Wetherell, 2013, 2014). This somacentric view suggests viewing language in its first instance as an ‘embodied dialogical activity’ (Jensen, 2014: 1), not as a Saussurean structure of internally contrasting conventions (langue), as it is commonly done. Similarly, in their proposal for an embodied sociolinguistics, Bucholtz and Hall (2016: 174) critique the logocentric orientation of sociolinguistics, a view that conceptualises ‘the body as secondary to language’. They instead argue for a type of analysis that emphasises the body as ‘central to the production, perception, and social interpretation of language’ (Bucholtz & Hall, 2016: 173). They discuss how voice, body style and self-representation, discourses of the body, embodied motion

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and experience and the mediations between bodies and materiality and technology, can contribute to interactants understanding each other. The somacentric view makes an important claim for languaging research: the body as a site of semiosis might carry primary importance when we communicate and understand each other (see also Flores & Rosa, 2015, and the emerging field of raciolinguistics).4 However, the somacentric view poses a problem for the affective turn. By situating affect in the body and embodiment, the mind stays largely untouched by affect and it can progress unhindered with its epistemic project of pure reason. The somacentric view might therefore awkwardly reproduce the very Cartesian and Enlightenment legacy that it aims to critique. In this chapter, I therefore aim to complement the logocentric and somacentric views with a mythological view. I analyse affect as also emerging from the mind, or perhaps over the mind, in a post-discursive strategy I call overstandin, as further discussed below. Affect has also started to play a greater role in narrative research, but also here, it has largely been reduced to embodiment. Selting (2010, 2012, 2017) proposes an Affect Display Sequence for narrative analysis to account for the ways in which storyteller and story recipient negotiate turns and relationships through embodied displays of affect, such as laughter, agreement, facial expression and gesture (see also McIntosh, 2009). Using experimental methods, Voutilainen et  al. (2014) find that affective stancetaking in oral narratives brings about a range of psychophysiological reactions in the autonomic nervous system of both storyteller and story recipient, such as changes in heart rate, skin conductance and facial muscle activation. They further find that these involuntary body reactions intensify when affective stances in narratives do not clearly display either a saliently ‘happy’ or a saliently ‘sad’ emotional valence, but when they remain ambivalent (Voutilainen et al., 2014: 20; more on ambivalence in the analysis of Scientik’s narrative below). They hypothesise that this heightened intensity in the autonomic nervous system could be linked to the greater mental (i.e. cognitive) efforts of participants when decoding the narrative’s ambivalent affectivity. The current turn to affect in discourse studies, sociolinguistics and narrative research recognises that the body becomes a site for affective understanding in communication. As Chapter 7 on breakin and the b-boy stance has also demonstrated, multimodal interaction analysis reveals that gaze, posture, gesture and gendered bodies are all meaningful components in interaction. I argue in this chapter, however, that a turn to analysing the body and the embodied practices of languaging is not enough to account for affective communication. More problematically, an analysis

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of affect through the embodied practices of languaging reduces affect to the sub-rational, pre-discursive and corporal, and runs the risk of reproducing old Cartesian imaginations that separate the mind from the body. Can affect also emerge in the mind or even over the mind? Can it emerge in our cognitive efforts, as perhaps suggested in Voutilainen et al. (2014)? Or, asking the same question from a metaphysical perspective, is there a post-discursive realm of affective semiosis? And finally, politically, would it not serve the struggle for decolonisation and emancipation to show that the rational mind itself produces affect? The notion of overstandin, taken from Rastafarianism and hip hop, allows me to conceptualise how narrators may take affective stances towards their encounters with their ‘own’ knowledge, language, discourse or text. Overstandin: Post-Discursive Affective Stancetaking

Overstandin is a decolonial type of affective stancetaking in which the narrator reflexively encounters the ambivalence of knowledge, language, text or discourse. Instead of trying to understand and thereby succumb to language’s ambivalence, inexplicability or unsayability, the overstander takes an affective b-boy stance and enigmatically decodes that which cannot be understood. The term ‘overstanding’ was coined among Rastafarians in Jamaica in the 1960s (Franke, 2015) and was then taken up in the United States in the 1970s among early hip hop founding fathers and organic intellectuals such as Afrika Bambaataa. It is now part of a common jargon among practitioners of hip hop and Rastafarianism all over the world to index authentic membership in the cultures and articulate a higher-level reflexive understanding of the world (see e.g. Pichler & Williams, 2016: 571–574; Williams, 2016: 292). The term is an inversion of the metropolitan English term ‘understanding’5 and part of a larger set of morphological inversions found in Rasta talk, such as ‘trubary’ (from ‘library’) and ‘apprecilove’ (from ‘appreciate’) (Slade, 2018). Slade shows how such overstandings invert Babylonian (i.e. colonial) terms to enregister them as part of a Zionic (i.e. anticolonial) vocabulary. As discussed elsewhere (Singh, in press), such overstandings do not follow the logics of colonial modern knowledge systems and understandings of language, such as obeying the expert linguist’s etymology of the term ‘understanding’. Because it resists hegemonic knowledge, overstandin can also be understood as border thinking (Mignolo, 2000; Shilliam, 2015; Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2009). This is a type of decolonial thinking which originates in the epistemic hinterlands of the current modern-colonial world order.

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The epistemic hinterlands are not beyond the border of Empire, rather they are the border of modernity itself. The overstander sits on the fence, as it were, and overlooks the borderlands. The potential of resistance in overstandin lies in its power to contradict modern-colonial knowledge by subverting its forms, functions and circulations, while still using this knowledge to one’s tactical advantage. Like remixin (Chapter  5), overstandin is a tactic for strategic essentialism. As Mignolo and Tlostanova (2006: 218–219) summarise it: ‘Border thinking proposes how to deal with that imperial sedimentation while at the same time breaking free from the spell and the enchantment of imperial modernity’. But the term ‘overstanding’ is also used in semiotics and literary criticism (Booth, 1979; Culler, 1992) and theology (Sullivan, 2007). Here, overstanding is deployed – without acknowledging its etymology and Rastafarian roots – to create critical reading positions for analysts that go beyond asking narrow questions about a text’s meaning. Booth (1979) suggests that overstanding can tease out the plurality of meanings in a text. The critical reader’s agency leads to an ‘attack’ (Booth, 1979: 243) on the text, which exposes the text’s hidden hegemonic forms of false consciousness. In a similar vein, Culler (1992: 115) stresses that overstanding is not the same as overinterpretation or misinterpretation, rather overstanding asks ‘not what the work has in mind but what it forgets, not what it says but what it takes for granted’ (see also Sykes, 2001). As I articulate in more detail elsewhere (Singh, in press), overstandin is thus an upscaling of one’s reading position. The reader scales the text and stands over it. From her superior positionality she can reject the text’s inherent meaningfulness and recognise that she herself, with her entire complex subjectivity, determines what the text means; not without understanding what the text itself thinks it means or what it is meant to mean. This overstandin, we admit, is not entirely epistemic or rational; it is a ‘deliberate “misreading”’ (Booth, 1979: 242) of texts which then leads to a feeling of critical superiority; it is a post-discursive affective stance. Rather than being encoded in the body or in the embodied practices of languagers, overstandin is an affective stance that emerges in one’s reflective encounter with one’s ‘own’ mind. While the somacentric view situates affect in the hop, overstandin situates affect in the hip. Scientik’s Narrative

Scientik (a self-chosen stage name) is a hip hop dancer and dance instructor from Delhi who I interviewed in April 2013 in a neighbourhood park in West Delhi where young breakers would meet and practise

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their dance moves. As discussed throughout this book, at the time of my fieldwork, the Delhi hip hop scene was just beginning to form and become recognisable as a scene. There was much debate about how to authentically practice hip hop in Delhi, what it meant to appropriate global forms of hip hop in India and how to make sense of the world through hip hop. The interview with Scientik was no exception. In the five episodes I present here, he narrates his vision for a hip hop methodology: how to practise hip hop dance, how to study hip hop’s history and, more generally, how to make sense of the world through hip hop. He concludes his narrative by calling the creation of hip hop a miracle, thereby mythologising hip hop as a thing and a way, and as something that is beyond his understanding. As a teenager, Scientik started off with breakin and then discovered poppin and lockin, a type of hip hop dance that developed on the US-American West Coast. He is also a deejay and a graffiti writer. At the time of the interview in 2013, the then-19-year-old Scientik had been practicing the elements of hip hop for the previous five years and had recently started teaching younger dancers from his neighbourhood. Our interview took place a few yards from his flat in West Delhi, in a small neighbourhood park, equipped with a small pavilion that was used by youth and children as a b-boy cypher on this afternoon. Scientik and I sat on the edge of the pavilion, watching the young breakers dance and practise while conducting our interview. Occasionally, he would turn to his younger protégés and advise them on the execution of particular moves – they, in contrast, never interrupted our interview. I selected approximately three minutes of continuous narrative talk ({25:50–28:46}) from our 90  minute-long interview. These three minutes can be loosely divided into five narrative episodes, separated by my questions and evaluations. I present and analyse each of the five episodes separately. Episode 1: Different bodies, different expressions

Before the first excerpt sets in, Scientik mentioned that he always tells his younger protégés not to watch too many videos of breakers and rappers on the internet, as they might become too influenced by them. Instead, they should listen to the music and simply experience their own bodies in relation to what they hear. I showed interest in this pedagogical advice, since it somewhat contrasted with other accounts I had collected, in which the internet was accredited as one of the main sources of information for the young Indian hip hop generation.

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Interview with Scientik, Delhi, 2013, Lines 01–23 {25:50–26:27} 01 Jaspal: 02

okay. this is interesting. so you ask them not to watch videos but [listen to the] music carefully. 03 Scientik: [no:: no videos.] 04 “just be yourself.” 05 “the way you walk, the way you should dance.” 06 “the way you should talk, the way you should dance.” 07 Jaspal: okay I get it ya. 08 Scientik: you know. 09 why? 10 because (.) we have different bodies we have different face. 11 I might have different feets of him. 12 Jaspal: ya 13 Scientik: for example it’s a boom boom bap (.) boom boom bap. 14 one guy may feel like doing THIS? ((moves arm in one way)) 15 Jaspal: yeah 16 Scientik: one guy feel like doing this. ((moves arm in another way)) 17 Jaspal: yeah 18 Scientik: you know. 19 everyone has a different way of responding to music. 20 that’s why we have different expressions. 21 Jaspal: this is some deep shit man @@. 22 yeah you’ve you thought about that. 23 you know you thought about that whole thing. Prompted by my interest in his advice to young dancers to not get inspired by videos on the internet and instead concentrate solely on the music they hear (Lines 01–02), Scientik puts the body and the embodied experience of feeling at the heart of his pedagogical methods of teaching dance. The argument is that dancing is not something you can study or inform yourself about, for example through watching videos of other dancers on the internet. Instead, dancing is understood as an affective response to music (Line  19). Scientik compares dancing to just being oneself, to walking and to talking (Lines 04–06), three sets of skills that many humans can do effortlessly, habitually and seemingly without thinking. He further suggests that the differences in bodies, the different faces and different feet we have (Lines  10–11), engender different feelings of responding to music, which then leads to different forms of

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stylistic expressions (Lines 13–20). Rather than mimicking premediated movements off the internet, which might not match the dancer’s body and ‘natural’ ways of moving to a particular rhythm (for instance, boom boom bap (.) boom boom bap), Scientik’s pedagogical method expounds the body in active responsivity (Bakhtin, 1986) to music. It furthermore understands the recognition of physical differences and feelings as the starting point for learning hip hop dance. In short, Scientik formulates a somacentric pedagogical method here. In Lines 13–16, Scientik also uses his own body as a semiotic agent. He first mimics a typical hip hop drumbeat with his mouth boom boom bap (.) boom boom bap (Line 13). This beat is clearly inspired by 1990s New York underground hip hop, a genre which is often onomatopoeically referred to as ‘boom bap hip hop’. The vocal percussion of the beat is thus partly drawing from an enregistered intertextuality with classic hip hop eras that enjoy widespread recognition for being authentic. Furthermore, in the subsequent lines, he uses body language to exemplify his argument. He ‘quotes’ the body language of two hypothetical dancers: one guy may feel like doing THIS? ((moves arm in one way)) and one guy feel like doing this. ((moves arm in another way)). The two shifters THIS? and this are indexically anchored in Scientik’s body movements; they gain meaning only when looking at how Scientik moves his body while uttering THIS?/this. As this interview was not video-recorded, I do not have empirical validation for the exact shape of Scientik’s embodiment. Yet, while transcribing our interview, I remembered how he, as we were sitting on the edge of the pavilion, moved his arms, neck, head and upper body in two contrastive ways to visually quote the movements of two dancers in his narrative. It is important to note that his somacentric pedagogical methodology, which emphasises the body and responsive feelings, is linguistically constructed through epistemic stances of high certainty. Taking on a narrative figure of the teacher in this first episode, Scientik assumes K+ positions (Heritage, 2012) when theorising the body and the feeling as the primary loci of learning how to dance. For example, he takes a stance of high epistemic certainty when he determinedly says no:: no videos (Line  3). The formula of his pedagogical method that he presents in Lines  04–05 is also articulated from an epistemically superior position, deontically specifying what his protégés ‘should’ do. Also, his rhetorical question why? (Line 07) and his immediately following answer mark his stance in this episode as epistemically certain and in control (similar to the enhanced epistemic stance that Bunty created through dialogic summons–answer sequences, discussed in Chapter  4). In Lines  21–23,

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I evaluate his narrative argument by acknowledging his epistemic certainty and valorising his deep thinking: this is some deep shit man @@. yeah you’ve you thought about that. you know you thought about that whole thing (Lines 21–23). Episode 2: Studying and practising

My positive evaluation is a prompt for Scientik to continue with his second narrative episode, in which he discusses a methodology for his own practice and study of dance. Echoing the thorough rationalisation that I recognised in my positive evaluation (Lines 21–23), Scientik begins to reveal that he analyses hip hop a lot (Line 24) and then explains his methods for his own dance practice (Lines 26–40). Interview with Scientik, Delhi 2013, Lines 24–40 {26:27–26:55} 24 Scientik: 25 Jaspal: 26 Scientik: 27

I I analyse hip hop a lot. yeah yeah yeah for example my whole da:y. I’m- I at least spend seven to eight hours a day (.) for hip hop. 28 I just practise for forty-five minutes one hour. 29 that’s it. 30 but? 31 that one hour practice is:: (.) correct you know. 32 Jaspal: uhum 33 Scientik: why? 34 because the previous seven hours (.) 35 I (.) kept that for (.) studied36 in studying HOW to practise HOW to dance WHAT to dance to. 37 then when I dance? 38 it’s you know = 39 Jaspal: = okay = 40 Scientik: = the direction is correct. Scientik’s logocentric methodology for his own daily practice routine, which consists of seven hours theoretical study and one hour practical application, stands in stark contrast to his somacentric pedagogical methodology that he describes in Episode  1, where he instructs his younger protégés to prioritise the body’s affective responsiveness

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to music, rather than studying other dancers on the internet. Surely, he is slightly older than his protégés and has some experience in dancing and perhaps has even already found his own unique style of dancing so that he is now in a position to study others without getting too influenced by them. However, Scientik does not make this clear in his narrative and so this interpretation is only implied in the context of our interaction. The methodological discrepancy between his own logocentric methodology of studying and practising hip hop dance (Episode  2) and the somacentric pedagogical suggestions he makes for his protégés (Episode 1) seems to require some legitimisation. The but? in Line 30 can be seen as an epistemic marker that attends to this legitimisation. It structures his argument in Episode 2 through polyphonic orchestration. But is a classic marker of polyphony (Angermuller, 2014; Ducrot, 1984), which presents the utterance preceding it as given information. I’m not a x-ist, but…, of course, is a template example of such polyphony. Two voices with different epistemic positions regarding the givenness and newness of the information emerge. The x-ist comment that will follow the but is mitigated by the voice of givenness of the utterance preceding it, which appears as non-negotiable or obvious. By using but? (Line 30), Scientik mitigates the methodology of physically practising merely one hour per day, while theoretically studying up to eight hours a day, as given or obvious. What follows but? is the proposition that this seven-to-one hour ratio allows him to practise correctly. In Line  32, I signal some confusion with his argument: uhum. He seems to sense my confusion and elucidates that his seven-hour in-depth study of HOW to practise HOW to dance WHAT to dance to (Line  36) ensures that his direction is correct (Line  40) when he finally dances. His repetition of his argument makes me signal some empathetic understanding: okay (Line 39). What was at stake here for me, was his use of the normative label correct (Line 31, 40). This is the new information that follows the but? of his argument, legitimising the discrepancy between his own and his protégés’ methodologies. The term correct seems to index a prescriptive approach to hip hop that, again, stands in contrast to the open affective responsivity he argued for in Episode 1. It is perhaps therefore that I find his argument less convincing in the real-time unfolding of the interview. My back channelling uhum (Line  32) and okay (Line 39), although epistemically affirmative on the surface, signal my confusion and epistemic non-understanding. I thus inquire further into his methodology for hip hop study.

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Episode 3: Hip hop connects everything

In the third episode, we learn that Scientik’s study of hip hop goes beyond watching videos of dancers and rappers on the internet. For him, the study of hip hop is all-encompassing. Interview with Scientik, Delhi 2013, Lines 41–67 {26:55–27:35} 41 Jaspal: yeah so how do you study? 42 Scientik: uhum 43 Jaspal: do you just watch stuff? 44 do you read stuff? 45 Scientik: first thing. 46 Jaspal: music? 47 Scientik: I just see ANYthing and try to relate that with hip hop. 48 anything. 49 Jaspal: anything? 50 Scientik: geography (.) for example. 51 geography. 52 you go to different places. 53 you’ll see different weathers. 54 different (.) you know land forms. 55 like with hip hop. 56 you go to different places. 57 you’ll see different- you’ll see different (.) styles. 58 you’ll see different people. 59 different religion. 60 you know. 61 but. 62 we’re connected to one thing (.) hip hop. 63 and if you’re going to different places different weather. 64 you’re connected to one thing (.) nature. 65 you know. 66 this is a67 connect everything. The third episode begins with me making a few suggestions about possible resources for Scientik’s hip hop studies. My suggestions reference, roughly, the topics discussed in Episode 1: reading books, watching videos, listening to music (Lines  41–46); encounters with hip hop’s texts and historical meta-narratives (see also discussions in Chapter  6).

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However, he does not engage with my insinuated intertextuality and reveals that the primary strategy (first thing, Line 45) of his hip hop study is this: I just see ANYthing and try to relate that with hip hop. anything (Lines 47–48). The studying here goes beyond hip hop’s texts, it is rather an encounter with the world through the lens of hip hop. In this type of study, hip hop appears as a myth, a decontextualised Jungian archetype (Urban, 1996) that can be related (or tried to be related) to anything. Hip hop is here, hip hop is there, hip hop is everywhere. Scientik’s methodology thus emphasises the mythical qualities of hip hop as a general, even universal, epistemology through which one can see anything. His emphasis on ANYthing and his repetition of the word (Lines 47–48) seem to make me, the interviewer, wonder in situ if Scientik here uses a mere figure of speech, an exaggeration, or if he, in fact, means literally anything. I therefore clarify by asking: anything? (Line 49). He continues by picking, seemingly at random, a conventional academic subject: geography (.) for example (Line  50). In Lines  50–64, he then constructs an analogy between hip hop and geography through a carefully composed ethnopoetic arrangement (Hymes, 1996), which could be itemised in this way: Geography Different places Different weathers, different land forms Connection: one thing = nature Hip hop Different places Different styles, different people, different religions Connection: one thing = hip hop What is perhaps the most striking aspect of this adequation (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004, 2005) of geography and hip hop is that the unifying/connecting force is called nature for geography and hip hop for hip hop. What might appear as a circular argument for outsiders of the culture in fact points to the reflexivity of the fifth element (knowledge of self and under/ overstandin), and more generally it points to the science-mindedness of hip hop (Emdin, 2013): hip hop is both the culture and the science of the culture (similar to the double meaning of ‘history’, famously recognised by Hegel, 2001[1837]: 76). Whereas the study of nature is called geography, the study of hip hop is not different from the culture of hip hop. The fifth element points to hip hop’s reflexive science-mindedness and

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allows Scientik’s ethnopoetic argument to gain social value in the narrative as it unfolds. In a weaker reading of Scientik’s ethnopoetics, we could at least establish that global hip hop is imagined as a universalising and cosmopolitan force that connects and supersedes stylistic, national/cultural/ ethnic and religious differences. However, in Scientik’s evaluation in Lines 65–67 (you know. this is a- connect everything) the transitivity of the verb to connect is not clear. It is unclear if he means that hip hop connects all people, religions and styles, or if he means that hip hop connects to everything (such as geography, as also suggested in Line 50). The narrative remains ambivalent. Episode 4: Put it over head

In the next episode, Scientik further explains his methodologies of studying and then resolves the narrative. He begins by narrating that he studies hip hop’s history by watching the pioneers (Lines 68–75). He then claims membership in three elements (dancin, graffiti writin, deejayin), and also says that he knows a lot about the fourth element (emceein) (Line 82). The bits of knowledge he gains from these studies and practices are then appropriated and developed (Lines  84–91), seemingly effortlessly. This is where Scientik moves from epistemic understanding to affective overstandin, I would argue. But let’s see what you think. Interview with Scientik, Delhi 2013, Lines 68–91 {27:35–28:15} 68 Scientik: and then I watch (.) that guy called bam. 69 KRS 70 ken swift. 71 big OGs. 72 kool herc. 73 childéric. 74 Jaspal: okay 75 Scientik: all these cats you know. 76 some (.) like first thing. 77 I lea:rn (.) all the basis of all what it is. 78 I’m a musician. 79 I’m a- I’m a graffiti writer. 80 I’m a dancer. 81 emceein? 82 I never (.) did emceein but I heard a lot of rap.

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83 so I know a bit bit bit of everything. 84 and whatever common thing I found? 85 I just = 86 Jaspal: = okay = 87 Scientik: = ☺ showed them up. 88 ((claps hands twice)) 89 and put it over head. 90 Jaspal: ☺ aha 91 Scientik: and develop it you know. Scientik begins to resolve his narrative by saying that after realising that hip hop connects (to) everything, he watches (perhaps on the internet) historical figures of hip hop, the founding fathers of the 1970s and 1980s, the big OGs (Line 71), original gangstas.6 He mentions DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican selector (deejay) who came to New York City in the early 1970s and started playing music with two turntables, revolutionising deejayin. He also mentions Childéric, a pioneering hip hop dancer from France; Ken Swift, the legendary New York breaker often considered ‘the epitome of a b-boy’ (Schloss, 2009: 29); the founder of the Zulu Nation Afrika Bambaataa (that guy called bam, Line 68); and tha teacha KRS-One. As discussed in Chapter  6, these invocations of hip hop’s historical figures carry transformative potentials because learning about the past positions Scientik as a future participant in the Global Hip Hop Nation. The historical study informs Scientik’s methodology of studying, which has two parts. An elementary step of epistemic understanding: like first thing. I lea:rn (.) all the basis of all what it is (Lines 76–77). Scientik here refers to the four elements of hip hop: music production and deejayin, graffiti writin, dancin and emceein, the latter which he never practiced himself but knows much about (Line 82). In this elementary step of epistemic understanding, he knows a bit bit bit of everything (Line 83). He then formulates an affective overstandin: and whatever common thing I found? I just ☺ showed them up. ((claps hands twice)) and put it over head. and develop it you know (Lines 84–91). This formulation is highly enigmatic and ambivalent. Due to its ambivalence, perhaps, it is affectively powerful in the interaction (see Voutilainen et  al., 2014). The meaning of these resolving lines, his ‘own’ transcultural voice, can be interpreted in multiple ways. Allow me to make some interpretations. Scientik seems to say that his partial knowledge of all of hip hop’s elements (knowing a bit bit bit of everything) allows him to find commonalities (Line 84). (He also

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elaborates on this in the next episode.) He continues in a smile voice and says that he ☺ showed them up, he then claps his hands twice and continues to say put it over head (Lines 87–89). When I had first started analysing his narratives a few years after we had had conducted our interview in 2013, I had interpreted his utterance showed them up to mean that he somehow humiliated these common things he found or made them look like fools. To ‘show someone up’, after all, means just this. Based on this interpretation, I thought that he here formulated for himself a b-boy stance, trying to express that he is ready to battle (or ‘attack’ in Booth’s sense) just about everyone and everything, including his ‘own’ knowledge. This interpretation seemed to fit well with my general argument around transcultural voices that I was trying to build at the time and that you have read about at length in this book. However, when I returned to India for a short visit in October 2018, I met up with Scientik again. I showed him the transcript and talked him through my analysis and asked him what he thought of my interpretations. He said that I was entirely wrong and that he had used the phrase showed them up to simply mean ‘to show’ or ‘to show them’ (field notes II, p. 34). He had used this phrase back in 2013, he contemplated in 2018, to mean that he brought his hip hop knowledge into his mind, conjuring it up, so to speak. This, he explained, is also expressed in the next utterance put it over head. While I had previously thought that he meant that he put his knowledge above his head,7 i.e. that he is overstandin knowledge, he told me that it just means ‘put it in my head’ (field notes II, p. 34), suggesting understanding. It would be easy to dismiss his ‘wrong’ use of English prepositions and idioms (and my wrong interpretations!) to the fact that English is not his (nor my!) first language, but I think that this would take away from Scientik’s intuitive and creative use of spontaneous languaging while narrating here. The ‘up’ in ☺ showed them up and the ‘over’ in put it over head, I would contend, are ad hoc indexes that affectively (perhaps semi-consciously) express some kind of superior reading position that we could call overstandin; although this is far from explicit here. His ‘corrections’ five and half years later are illuminative not only because they offer Scientik’s ‘own’ analysis of this narrative resolution and thereby remind us of the importance of ethnographic monitoring in the interpretation of linguistic data (as also critically discussed in Chapter  3), but also because they normalise his transcultural voice in the narrative in a post hoc encounter with his own transcribed discourse. By challenging my overinterpretations in our collaborative viewing of the transcript, he, in 2018, presents himself as someone who uses language and expressions in uncomplicated ways and he thereby takes

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back ownership over the interpretation of his narrative talk five years prior. However, Scientik, in 2013, had already achieved some degree of normalising in situ. The just (Line 53) normalises Scientik’s resolution as affectively effortless (see also Manmeet Kaur’s narrative in Chapter  4). Also, the smile voice, as well as the clapping of his hands, to perhaps percussively signal readiness and enthusiasm, normalise these utterances by imbuing them with an affective paralinguistic quality of effortlessness. The smile voice is interactively contagious, as evident in my smile-voice back-channelling ☺ aha (Line  54), which suggests that I accept and co-construct his affectively effortless and normalising transcultural voice. Episode 5: The creation miracle

In the final narrative fragment I present, which could be considered the coda (Labov & Waletzky, 1967) of Scientik’s narrative, the epistemic fully surrenders to the affective. Scientik here says that he does not know how the four elements unify into one culture (Line 92). He says that for him hip hop is a culture or a way that is unparalleled (Lines  100–101) and he even emphatically expresses his disbelief that something like hip hop could have ever been created (by humans?): nothing CAN be created like this (line 103). He ends the narrative by calling hip hop a big miracle (Line 106). Interview with Scientik, Delhi 2013, Lines 92–106 {28:15–28:46} 92 Scientik: a:nd (.) I don’t kno:w how all these four art forms got created together. 93 there’s a lot of common things and. 94 it’s all one. 95 for example. 96 for me. 97 I can relate my graffiti to rap. 98 and I can relate my dancin to deejayin. 99 anything man. 100 for me there’s no culture like this. 101 there’s no way. 102 Jaspal: yeah 103 Scientik: nothing CAN be created like this. 104 Jaspal: yeah 105 Scientik: I don’t know HOW it got created. 106 you know it’s: a big miracle.

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Scientik’s knowledge of the commonality, oneness and relatability of the four elements that he describes in Episode 3 and that he reiterates in Lines  97–98, is ultimately presented as unknowable (Lines  92, 105). The appropriation and development of knowledge described in Episode 4 now appears as an opportunity to recognise the unknowable in hip hop. The creation of hip hop as a culture or a way cannot be fully expressed in epistemic terms, as Scientik’s final evaluation it’s: a big miracle (Line 106) also suggests. I would like to argue here that it is precisely Scientik’s inability to rationalise the creation of hip hop in clear epistemic terms and his reliance on evoking the miraculous that allow affect to enter his narrative at this point. His disbelief that a culture like hip hop could ever have been created at all also makes explicit the unknown in hip hop’s origin myth and consequently also in the transculturation of hip hop in India. Compare this to Seti X’s narrative in Chapter 6. Seti X narrated the origin myth with high epistemic certainty, even though he hesitated and thereby expressed his unknowing but then immediately concealed his lack of knowledge by continuing his narrative in formulaic ways. Scientik, in sharp contrast, makes his unknowing explicit here. The unknown, in fact, can be detected throughout Scientik’s narrative, as well as in our collaborative viewing of the transcript years later. Recall, for instance, the qualitative discrepancy between rationalising a hip hop methodology for his own study and practise (Episode 2) and a pedagogical methodology he instructs his younger protégés to adopt (Episode 1). Also, hip hop’s mythical relatability to anything, exemplified by Scientik’s ethnopoetic adequation of geography and hip hop (Episode 3) and his effortless connection of all the hip hop elements, even if he misses out on practicing one of them (emceein) (Episode 4), and his reformulations of two of his utterances in the narrative transcript five years later, all point to gaps in knowledge and different scales of knowledge, some of which seem to be based on epistemic understanding, others which are more affective. This epistemic sketchiness allows him to appropriate and develop knowledge when he formulates his ‘own’ transcultural voice (Episode 4). In all these instances, epistemic and affective stances co-exist in contradictory as well as cohesive ways. It is thus not only the coherences that characterise this narrative (Linde, 1993) but also its ruptures and ambivalences. In Scientik’s methodology, as in any good methodology, the unknown is reflected upon rather than brushed away or simply overlooked. Understanding and overstandin, knowledge and feeling, hip and hop, work in complementary ways to make his methodology meaningful, sincere and operationalisable for his life as a five elemental global hip hop scientist.

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Conclusion and Discussion: Border Thinking

In my analysis, I showed how Scientik seems to narrativise three methodologies (two affectologies and one epistemology) for practising and studying and living hip hop: feeling, understanding and overstandin. All three methodologies pervade his narrative, but in each of the episodes one of the three appears to be emphasised. He begins by putting forward his pedagogical approach to teaching hip hop dance where he stresses the importance of a pre-discursive affective feeling emerging in the dancing body in response to the music. I have shown that he narrativises his somacentric approach to pedagogy with stances of high epistemic certainty, while he also relies on his own body as a semiotic agent to construct meaning. His narrative then moves on to spell out the methodology for his own dance practice and his study of hip hop’s historical figures. These logocentric middle episodes demonstrate Scientik’s thorough linguistic rationalisation, his discursive epistemic understanding. Yet, they also begin to complexify epistemic understanding, as evident in the many misunderstandings and interactional misalignments between him and me as well as in the gaps in knowledge he expresses. He ends his narrative by delving into a more spiritual reading of hip hop as a (way/thing) culture. Here, knowledge breaks down completely and affect seems to take over. In the resolution, he normalises his ‘own’ transcultural voice; a normalising which in this case stays enigmatic and ambivalent. It is precisely this ambivalence that seems to index and intensify his post-discursive affective overstandin in the interaction and resolve the narrative tension. This overstandin seems to enter the narrative as a mythical feeling of knowing the unknown and communicating the uncommunicable. It would seem accurate to say that affective stances enter Scientik’s narrative when epistemic stances exit it. If an epistemic breakdown occurs, the meaning of an utterance relies ‘more’ on its affective dimensions and if epistemic certainty is signalled, the meaning of the utterance relies ‘less’ on its affective dimensions. We could thus formulate the following rule: K– => A+ and K+ => A–. However, this formalisation would underestimate the ability of affect, and indeed perhaps it would underestimate the ability of the human psyche to live with complexity, contradiction and ambivalence (Nakassis, 2018; Tateo, 2018). While the epistemic seesaw (Heritage, 2012) pushes interactants to reach epistemic convergence and thus valorises the equilibrium of knowledge as the intended outcome or intention of interaction (effective communication), affective communication challenges this very epistemic equilibrium by reintroducing the unknown, the unsayable, the feeling and the

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ambivalent, thereby opening up possibilities for the articulation of one’s ‘own’ transcultural voices. With my turn to affect in this chapter, I aimed to de-emphasise the importance of epistemicity in sociolinguistics and discourse research and mutatis mutandis in global hip hop linguistics. Furthermore, I wanted to show that recognising the body as a site of semiosis is not enough to account for the complex ways in which affect enters narrative, and language and communication more broadly. A non-embodied and hyperrational type of affectivity seems to enter the resolution of Scientik’s narrative. This is an affective stance towards an encounter with one’s ‘own’ knowledge. I proposed to play with the decolonial notion of overstandin as shorthand to represent such higher-level affective stances (see also Singh, in press). Decolonial scholars have suggested that colonial knowledge systems are neither suitable nor precise enough to represent postcolonial realities, fight mental slavery and foster the emancipation of the people. Arguing against the colonial epistemic systems, some scholars make a case for border thinking (Mignolo, 2000; Shilliam, 2015; Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2009). This is a type of thinking that originates in the epistemic hinterlands of the current world-order of Empire (Hardt & Negri, 2000). Border thinking emerges not beyond the border of Empire, in the savage mind (Lévi-Strauss, 1966) of some uncolonial realm, rather it is in itself the border of thinking. The postcolonial subject thus sits on the fence of the episteme, occupying a third space of enunciation (Bhabha, 2004). From her superior positionality she overlooks the borderland, momentarily even trespasses the border, unseen. She is Black, subaltern, after all. Importantly, such border thinking cannot reverse modernity or disregard colonial knowledge. Empire already anticipates its critique and is prepared to simply not care and carry on. What border thinking can do, however, is open up a space of contradiction which is based on the inherited colonial legacy, inasmuch as the colonial epistemic system is its terra contradictionis, to articulate a third space of enunciation and engage in transcultural practice, supporting the cause for emancipation by transgressing and transposing (in the sense of disfiguring) the ontology (the claim for real existence) of the border itself. Overstandin, I would argue, is such border thinking. Scientik makes relevant epistemic understanding achieved through formalised ways of studying and learning, only to be able to subvert this understanding by overstandin it, by effortlessly appropriating and developing this knowledge in a hip hop style. The hip and hop, the knowledge and the involvement, work in conjunction with each other to orchestrate a contradiction

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in the active reception of interactants. This contradiction, ambivalence, rupture, etc., makes room for affect to enter logos in unfinished ways. The affectology remains semi-represented on the semiotic surface and its understandings stay ambivalent. Such ambivalence and non-empirical languaging generate the contradictions necessary for border thinking. Importantly, then, the contradictions are not only to be read as interactants’ epistemic gaps caused by the global inequalities created in colonialism and intensified in the current age of Empire (such as Scientik’s and my restricted access to the English language), but also through a spiritual affectology found in movements such as hip hop. The contradictions in narrating and understanding are always purposefully, and thus agentively, deployed as tactics of subversion of colonial knowledge. This agency allows Scientik to overstand hip hop’s affective and epistemic methodologies, its universal relatability and its creation miracle. And this agency allows me, the listening researcher, to begin to understand hip hop’s power as a combined epistemology and affectology that shapes the bodies, the minds and the spirits of young people across the postcolony. Colonialism and its continuing instalment of the Enlightenment logic of reason and logos across the globe have disparaged affect as a signifying force. The interview I conducted with Scientik for my academic research is no doubt an instance, and even a celebration, of such a coloniality. Put on the spot by the Western researcher wielding a recording device and seeking to extract information for the European academy, Scientik finds himself in a position to rationalise his experiences with hip hop through spoken language and narrative. This seems to require a communicative regime (a logos) in which coherence and epistemic logics govern our active reception. As a consequence, our interactive moves, such as our turn-taking and the types of arguments we are making, are subject to epistemic evaluations. Of course, Scientik is very familiar with this particular epistemic regime. He is an urban, educated, media-savvy young man growing up in 21st-century Delhi, not a ‘savage mind’ untouched by the Western civilisation the early anthropologists sought to encounter, even if his voluntary participation in my ethnography has involuntarily placed him in what Trouillot (2003) calls the ‘savage slot’. Nevertheless, his narrative, like many others I collected during my fieldwork, somewhat resists, even if subtly, an adherence to the epistemic regimes entailed by the formal research interview and makes room, i.e. creates epistemic gaps, for affective communication to become meaningful in narrative talk and research. And we do so via the complementary epistemologies and affectologies of hip hop: feeling, understanding and overstandin.

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It is a matter of making affectologies prominent in our analyses as students of language and communication in globalisation, if we want to account for the complex data we collect in the Global South, and perhaps elsewhere, in relatively ethical and more or less accurate ways. By deploying the notion of overstandin, the text you see before you is a feeble attempt to point to such affective communication. Surely, this book’s use of the printed text of the genre ‘formal academic writing’ makes it almost impossible to accurately represent affect, as this genre hinges so much on explicating epistemically. I hope, nevertheless, that you can find some relevance for your own border thinking and feeling in between, or under, or even over, the words that I am typing. Perhaps for this reason, I felt the need to end this chapter with an ethnographic vignette of my meeting with Scientik five years after I had first met and interviewed him. Most of this vignette is directly lifted from my field diary, which I wrote during a bumpy auto (motorised rickshaw) ride following our meeting. I made minor editions due to research ethics and added a few sentences to provide readers of this book with the context necessary to follow the vignette. I hope this vignette can add an affective contextual layer that helps readers to appreciate the significance of Scientik’s methodologies that I tried to spell out in this chapter. Vignette: Five Years On 18 October 2018, Delhi

After an intense week of meeting up with people, I finally got Scientik on the phone. I was so happy to hear his voice after five years again. The interview I conducted with Scientik in 2013 had been an incredibly important source of information for my research. His narrative about different methodologies for hip hop was intimately known to me because I had analysed it and reanalysed it over several years. His narrative also accompanied me to a few conferences across Europe where I presented parts of it. After five years I was finally able to meet up with the narrator again. He had recently moved out of Delhi to one of the sprawling satellite towns of the National Capital Region. I took an auto from central Delhi and went on my way. The journey took around one and a half hours. I arrived at a newly developed high-rise apartment block. The area was semi-developed and none of the roads but the main one had been paved yet. While I was waiting for Scientik to pick me up from the guarded gate, I could see the makeshift basti (shanties) of the construction builders,

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road workers and estate service staff on the opposite side of the road. When Scientik arrived, we greeted each other heartfeltly. We started talking about my journey and about Hong Kong where I live now, while we were taking the lift up to his family’s apartment. As we entered the apartment, I was greeted by his mother, father and uncle, who all sat comfortably in the living room. After a few minutes of greetings and small talk, Scientik suggested that we go to his room. His room was tidy, sparse, a simple mattress flipped up against the wall. A MacBook Pro on the desk, a few books. I notice a yoga mat under his desk. He brings two wooden chairs and arranges them in a way that they face each other. We sit. He sits very uprightly, looks calm. He starts talking, falls into monologues. He says that he has retreated from the Indian hip hop scene. He hardly ever goes to events at the moment. He still practises his dance but hardly ever battles. He got into yoga. He’s working on a project which he said he will show me later. He studies. I ask What? He says Philosophy. I get super excited like I always do when someone says they study philosophy because I studied philosophy myself and loved it. He shows me his books, History of Religions, Introduction to Eastern and Western Philosophy, Logics, English. He says that after getting into Eastern philosophy, he doesn’t really get much out of Western philosophy. We talk about philosophy for a while, the Vedas, the Upanishads, Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Vivekananda. I’m happy for him. He seems grounded and settled. We talk about hip hop. About corrupted views in hip hop. How education needs to play a bigger role in hip hop. How kids need to balance hip hop skills and education. How one side can take over and kill the other one. We talk a bit about individual people in the Delhi hip hop scene (I bring them up). He has only good things to say about them. No hatred from his side. There’s a lot of kindness coming from his eyes. He seems almost old. He started embodying the habitus of a guru or a sage, I thought. He says let’s have lunch. I agree. He goes to prepare and picks me up a few minutes later. We eat. Vegetarian. He says that he likes to eat at home only. Outside food is dirty. Alcohol, meat, he left these things. Or rather they left him, as he emphasises. After lunch, we go back into his room and stand on the balcony for a while. Twenty-five water buffaloes pass by down on the dusty road, as I invite him to come and visit me in Hong Kong. He says not in the next five to ten years. He is happy in India and doesn’t want to be anywhere else. He’d rather spend money on Ken Swift (the epitome of the b-boy who also featured in his narrative) to come to India, so that everybody in Delhi can learn from Swift, than Scientik going abroad to search for experiences for himself only.

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He says that the only place he wants to visit is Mount Kailash. I ask Why Kailash? He just smiles and looks at me ☺ ‘Why Kailash?’ huh? and then begins to fall into a long monologue about the spiritual significance of this mountain for the world. I begin to understand that he has no more aims. No goals. Everything comes to him. We go back inside. I read him the passage that I had selected from our interview (the narrative you have read as well). He laughs before I had even started to read and says that he spoke from a different position back then. I read. He keeps saying Yes, that’s correct. I arrive at the end and he realises that back then he had in fact already been on the same path that he is on now. It was and is all about unity in difference, he explains. Yet, back then, he says, he only talked about unity in difference in the four elements of hip hop, now he recognises unity in difference in everything. The mosquito – and he points to one sitting on the curtain by the open door to the balcony – and he: they are one and the same. Fire and water are connected. Everything is eventually connected. Atman (the individual soul) is Brahman (the world soul). He said, hip hop got him here. He then opened his laptop and showed me his new video project. It is a nine-part video assemblage of him dancing in different styles to different types of music and in different places. It was still in the making but he showed me some raw cut versions. The video assemblage had a structure typical of Indian philosophy, he explained. Three stages: gross (seed), subtle (tree) and subtlest (flower). These three stages each have further three fractal distinctions of granularity – beginning, middle, end, or, birth, life, death – leading to a nine-part representation of the cosmos. He introduces his video project proudly as something he wants to be timeless. It begins with a section on the origins, titled Know your Roots. We see him poppin and lockin between animals and old farming machinery in the rural village from where his family comes. The next video is shot in his neighbourhood in South West Delhi where he grew up and the third one in this first series is shot in his neighbourhood in West Delhi, where we had conducted our interview five years earlier. He shows me a few more videos of the second and third stages. One is about feminine and masculine sides of dance; creativity and rehearsal. They are all really well made. I feel honoured to have been able to get a sneak preview. We keep exchanging interesting ideas for another hour or so, before I make my way home. It was great seeing him finding his balance. He looks good, healthy. I feel that hip hop lives; transmutes into all kinds of directions. He drops me off at the main road. He flags down an auto for me. He doesn’t barter with the driver. We wish each other well. It’s all good.

9 Conclusion

Introduction

As its main contribution, this book has developed the notion of transcultural voices for an interdisciplinary field I call global hip hop linguistics. This approach takes inspiration from linguistic ethnography, discourse studies and sociolinguistics to describe and critically analyse the narrative practices of global hip hop heads as they make meaning of the transcultural flows in their local and virtual environments. My deployment of such concepts as transculturation, voice and narrative aim to respond to the central research question that ‘I’ asked in this book: Why are people from different cultures getting down to one way/thing? This question, originally formulated by one of my research participants, B-Boy Rawdr, allowed me to take you on a hiphopographic journey through some of the narrative practices of the breakers, emcees, deejays, graffiti writers and spiritual knowledge seekers who I met in Delhi and who you met on these pages. The voices and narratives you heard here were produced by people dedicated to hip hop culture who were kind enough to open up to the visiting researcher and tell him about their lives. In our ethnographic encounters, we constructed dialogues, told each other narratives and aligned our epistemic, affective and deontic stances across scales of otherness and our-own-ness, of historicity, of globalisation, of language ideologies, of masculine embodiment and of hip hop spirituality. We listened to each other’s stories in order to get to know each other, make friends and plan futures together. This book is the result of a promise I had made to my participants: to rep them in dope ways. As discussed in Chapter  1, Rawdr’s research question suggests four things. The following are four ways to think about hip hop in Delhi:

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(1) Cultural unification: Hip hop is a unifying force that supersedes cultural difference. (2) Thing/way: Hip hop is thought of as both a dynamic practice (way) and a reified culture (thing). (3) Indexicality: Hip hop’s forms of languaging (e.g. getting down to; dope; put it over head) index and make socially meaningful cultural aesthetics and moral logics. (4) Narrative: Rawdr’s question was posed in a reflexive narrative that occurred in an ethnographic interview encounter. I then further rationalised that these four ways of looking at hip hop in Delhi could be operationalised or analytically interrogated in the following four ways: ( 1) How can hip hop overcome cultural difference in globalised Delhi? (2) Why is hip hop understood both as a thing and a way? (3) To what extent can hip hop languaging normalise social positionalities and understandings of the world? (4) How are the above three questions narrativised by the participants themselves? My ‘own’ four research questions complement Rawdr’s original question in that they address another audience, namely academically trained readers who claim to be comfortable with the jargon that I deploy in this study. However, occasional codemeshing and translingual writin tactics were deployed to open up interpretative spaces and transcultural reading positions. Through this hiphopographic representation, I hope that you, the readers of this book – whoever you in fact might be – will have answered these four questions for yourself already. Or better, perhaps you would want to disagree with some of the responses that I offered. Or even better, you will have asked your ‘own’ questions as you flicked through the book, reading some passages or looking at the pictures. The dialogic texture of this book, I hope, allowed us to hear many voices in the narratives that I collected in Delhi and represented here. In some ways, I tried to ask you, Why should your voice not have been part of my orchestration? The polyphony we created invites us all, and perhaps especially my research participants and B-Boy Rawdr, to respond to my ‘own’ voice in any way that you can. Please challenge my ideas, expand them and develop them. You know.

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How Can Hip Hop Overcome Cultural Difference in Globalised Delhi?

Not just in Rawdr’s interview, but in almost all the interviews that I conducted in Delhi and elsewhere, hip hop was imagined as a unifying force that can overcome cultural difference. For example, in Chapter  4, when Manmeet Kaur suggested to BabaAbna and me to make a fucking raw song!, she imagined authentic underground hip hop collaboration as a way to connect cosmopolitan emcees from different parts of the world. Recording a song is not merely a practice that connects emcees from different cultures, but it is also anticipated that it connects to potential future audiences. Seconds later, when she narrates her experiences with Indian artists commenting on songs posted on their social media profiles, she describes her active reception of dope underground hip hop songs circulating in the digital networks as provoking thoughts in her (Line 19). Thus, the connectivity of hip hop is not only about the embodied encounters between heads in the cyphers, studios, on jams and walls, but it also extends into the mediatisation and circulation of underground music and other cultural artefacts. Mediatisation is also the theme of Bunty’s narrative in the same chapter. His plans to temporarily discontinue the b-boy centre and open up a music-recording studio aim to attend to a disconnect (Line 43) that existed in India at the time of my fieldwork. There was a big b-boy scene in Delhi, but there isn’t [wasn’t] that music (Line 42). His plans to focus on facilitating the production of an Indian version of hip hop music attends to this disconnect. And Bunty was right in his anticipation. Seven years later, local language rap is huge in India, not least because underground hip hop has entered the Indian popular media sphere with the immense success of the Bollywood film Gully Boy (Akhtar, 2019). Prabh Deep’s narrative, presented in Chapter 5, envisions hip hop’s power to overcome cultural differences. His sweet little message is that english and punjabi is not a separate thing (Line  59), that it is a combined and de facto the SAME thing (Line  61). This translingual statement indexes his cosmopolitan vision to overcome cultural difference. Yet, his translingual remix is complexified when he expresses his determination to always represent himself in Punjabi and his plans to write a verse in Urdu just to show the love to the pakistani peoples out there (Line  82). These language ideological remixes at once challenge and reproduce ethnolinguistic reifications to emphasise translingual understanding through flow and represent oneself and show solidarity with other communities marginalised by coloniality. The strategic

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essentialism of remixin also seems to be at play in Daku’s attempts to enregister Devanagari in graffiti writin and in Dizy’s discussion of embodied relationships that can transcend language in intercultural hip hop pedagogy. The historical wormhole travels between contemporary Delhi and the myth of the Bronx in the 1970s that I discussed in Chapter 6 overcome chronotopic difference. Understanding the past, both the local past and the mediatised hip hop historiography, becomes a way for hip hop heads in India to make sense of the here and now as well as the future. But the Bronx is not merely an abstract myth that is blindly copied by Delhi youth. Rather, the narrative wormhole travel to the birthplace of hip hop seemed to offer my participants a new transcultural perspective on their own life and position in society. In the orchestration of historical voices, the Bronx was mythically translated into an omen of future hope. The hip hop possibility finds form in linguistic and musical metadiscourses, such as the naming of D2BX Crew (Aeke’s narrative), the embodiment of Indian beatboxin traditions (MC Eucalips’ narrative) as well as the explanation of historically developed morals and values of hip hop to cultural outsiders (Seti X’s narrative). The analysis of the embodied practices of breakers in the cyphers in Chapter 7 is another way to understand hip hop’s transcultural connectivity. The moving and standing bodies of the b-boys come together in homosocial relationships that emphasise collaborative competition. Together with the other (f)actors in the cypher, they create the auratic vibe of the jam, which brings young people together across caste, class and ethnic borders. By battling each other, the b-boys seem to make embodied claims about their kinaesthetic knowledge and thereby negotiate particular forms of hyper-heterosexual masculinity and show themselves as b-boys. Accordingly, they claim citizenship in the Global Hip Hop Nation and enter into moral and aesthetic relationships of connective marginality. The b-boy stance is a mediatised iconic index that instantly evokes this connection with authentic morals and old school aesthetics of global hip hop culture. Connectivity also seems to be a central tenet in Scientik’s methodology (Chapter  8). Hip hop connects (to) everything (Lines  62, 67). And more, hip hop connects all its elements together (Lines 92–99). This has spiritual significance. Years later, in our follow-up interview, Scientik had come to the realisation that it is not only the elements of hip hop that are connected but also the natural elements of fire and water as well as all life forms, e.g. the mosquito and he are connected. Yet, his ethnopoetic

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adequation in his narrative remains ambivalent enough to be battled, developed and put over head. The polyphonic narratives collected in this book help us to understand how the connective marginalities of transcultural hip hop are normalised as they are imbued with meaning in Delhi. Political, cultural and spiritual connections across the Global Hip Hop Nation become locally meaningful not in the simple appropriation of hip hop’s forms and moral aesthetics but rather in the complex formulas of appropriation (such as samplin, othering, remixin, synchronising, embodying, overstandin) that can be summarised under the overarching banner of transculturation. The trans- opens a queer wiggle room of meaning for ambivalence and misunderstanding to become appropriate for the practice of border thinking and for the transformations of futures. The third space is a locus of enunciation (i.e. a transcultural voice) that has in itself no primordial meaning but can only offer shifting, switching, witching, floating but never empty signifiers to grapple with contemporary coloniality and normalise hip hop cosmopolitan connections across the postcolonial margins. The hip hop polyphonies that we heard in the narratives presented in this book therefore offer no finite solutions to any problem, yet they help us to imagine a future in which we can overcome cultural difference by getting down to one way/thing: hip hop. Why is Hip Hop Understood as Both a Thing and a Way?

Several narrators have imagined hip hop as both a dynamic practice (way) and a reified culture (thing). Not always with clear intentions perhaps, but the frequency with which hip hop was referred to as a way and a thing was certainly notable in my encounters with narrative interviews when listening to them back home in my armchair. In this section, I propose a few reasons as to how this dual understanding could become socially meaningful. The first reason pertains to the logics of samplin and appropriation. In Chapter 2, I quoted DJ Uri saying that hip hop is about putting your own spin on things. Your own way you know (Lines  16–17), which echoed Grizzly Adams’ earlier definition of hip hop (Line  02) to take whatEVER music you like (.) and (.) do it in (.) your way. present it in a special way (Lines 03–04). This practice-centred appropriation of things is unstoppable, as Bunty says in Chapter  4: like the b-boys are there they’re gonna do their thing. no matter what. you know no one is gonna stop that (Lines 39–41). Doing was also emphasised in Dizy’s philosophy of transcendental understanding in Chapter  5. Even without a mutual

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language, we can understand each other what we are doing (Line  69). This approach to hip hop is unfinished, spontaneous and, as Daku put it in Chapter 6 in relation to graffiti writin, it is a kind of like jugaad basically. to get get things done (Lines 04–05). A second reason for understanding hip hop as a thing/way has to do with chronotopic positioning practices. In their engagements with hip hop’s past artefacts (things), hip hop heads open up paths (ways) to understanding their here and now and envision their futures. In Chapter 6, B-Boy Rawdr discusses how he learns about hip hop’s history because I want to know who started this thing (Line 08) and then adds that this learning is important for his future in hip hop: till the time you know who’s your father how are you gonna make a name? (Line 12). Aeke further complexifies such historical learning and future hopes, when he narrates the deeper pedagogical significance of his crew’s name: this whole name D2BX can stand up for many different things in hip hop. so it’s actually different lessons that we’ll go through life (Lines 12–13). Similarly, when MC Eucalips recognises two ancient traditions of Indian vocal percussion, namely tabla bol and solkattu, as beatboxin, he points to the pedagogical significance of such synchronisation: voh do beatboxin ka cheez hain. These are two things to do with beatboxin. so aap log to asaan hi se sikh ((sakhte hain)). So you guys ((can)) learn easily (Lines 23–24). The culture’s history finds form in the embodied practices of hip hop heads, whether in beatboxin or in breakin. In Chapter 7, I used the notion of kinaesthetic knowledge to reveal such embodiment of hip hop’s history in the interpretation of dancing bodies and I pointed to the hegemonic masculine substance of such embodiment. Thirdly, the understanding of hip hop as a thing and a way allows for affective overstandin to become culturally meaningful. In Chapter 8, Scientik resolves his ‘own’ epistemological and affectological methodology for teaching, practising and understanding (through) hip hop by evoking the miraculous. Hip hop could not have possibly been created by humans; it is, in Aristotelian terms, the first unmoved mover. This makes hip hop exceptional among all other cultures: for me there’s no culture like this. there’s no way (Lines 100–101). More generally the dual understanding of hip hop as a thing and a way speaks to the theory of the remix, or thing-mix, that I discussed in Chapter 5 in relation to the citationality of language ideologies. The prevalence of the conceptualisation of hip hop as a way/thing could thus render all the transcultural voices you heard in this book as remixes. In each chapter, these remixes were constructed differently: prosodically, language ideologically, chronotopically, somatically and methodologically.

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The remix, then, can be (re-)conceptualised in global hip hop linguistics as a way of mixing such cultural and linguistic things, yet this mixing also creates a new thing. To remix (Latin: res miscere), then, means to simultaneously understand hip hop as a thing, a unifying cultural centripetal force that accentuates oneness and unity, and as a way, an agentive, diversifying, centrifugal moment of appropriation. The dual understanding of hip hop as both a dynamic practice and a reified culture creates the preconditions for articulating one’s ‘own’ transcultural voices. Thus, to answer the research questions with a minimalist principle: hip hop is understood as both a thing and a way to allow for transculturation to take place. Situated between centrifugal forces and centripetal forces, transculturation is more complex than simple processes of acculturation and deculturation can describe. Transculturation is neither an adaptation of cultural things nor is it a creation of entirely new possibilities ex nihilo, rather it involves both thingification and waylaying at the same time. In this book, I have shown how narrators achieve such transcultural ambivalence in their polyphonic samplin, strategic essentialism, chronotopic synchronisation, embodiment and overstandin. To What Extent Can Hip Hop Languaging Normalise Social Positionalities and Understandings of the World?

The styles of speaking of hip hop heads from around the world sample and appropriate aesthetic principles and moral logics from the mediatisation of African American hip hop language. This does not necessarily mean that all global hip hop heads sound exactly like African Americans when they speak – in fact this would often be regarded as ridiculous, inauthentic and even disrespectful. Rather, what happens is that certain African American terms and expressions alongside their cultural connotations get appropriated and sampled by global hip hop heads and made socially meaningful in their local context. These lexical borrowings include such terms and phrases as dope, fresh, getting down, freeze, diss, beef, b-boy, style, cypher, fake, old school, peace, homie, underground, beatbox, nigga (see Dattatreyan, 2020, for an account of how Somalian refugees in Delhi negotiate their use of this global appellation of hip hop Blackness), and they might also include taboo registers that are loosely indexical of African American English but not exclusive of it, such as fuck, shit and motherfucker. At times, these key signifiers of African American hip hop cultural experiences might also undergo slight changes in form, as exemplified in Scientik’s creative use

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of put it over head, and thereby become translingually meaningful for the expression of highly localised experiences. At other times, American hip hop terminology is translated into Hindi equivalents. One example would be the Hindi term mast, meaning fat, or phat if rendered in hip hop orthography, in an ameliorative sense. During my time in Delhi in 2013, mast was often used as a way to say that something was dope or good. However, in my follow-up visits in 2018 and 2019, I no longer heard this term being used. It seems that languaging in hip hop scenes is constantly in flux. The hip hop lingo that develops in Delhi and in any scene around the world (as well as in the writin tactics used in this book) is not merely used to sound like a hip hop head. Using such expressions indexes cultural citizenship in the Global Hip Hop Nation, which means that hip hop-inflected perspectives of seeing the world and responding to social situations shape the moral aesthetics and cultural logics of global hip hop practitioners. In that way, the social positionalities and role relationships that become available to my participants and their hip hop peers are markedly different from the positionalities, morals and aesthetics that dominate the mainstream culture in urban Indian. Hip hop languaging therefore allows Delhi’s hip hop heads to differentiate their ‘own’ ideological positionalities from conventional and majoritarian norms and perhaps challenge or subvert some of the social expectations regarding their positionalities as young migrant men growing up in 21st-century urban India. It seems to me that hip hop as a social perspective of the world allows young urban practitioners to position themselves in complex ways within contemporary discourses of modernity that circulate in Delhi. The English language plays a crucial role here. English became part of a marker of a particular positionality these young men occupied for themselves in Delhi. But it was not English per se that they sampled and appropriated and often normalised as part of their habitual linguistic repertoires; it was a hip hop-inflected version of English. Using such English hip hop lingo in their everyday talk, distinguished my participants from their age peers who would have accessed English only through school and foreign media, if at all, or, if they were privileged, through international travel and diasporic family networks. Access to hip hop-inflected Englishes through consuming American rap music and mediatised hip hop artefacts or through interacting with international hip hop travellers who came to visit Delhi, allowed my participants to imagine themselves as part of a globally unfolding culture of verbal expression and resistance. Although some of my participants told me that they ‘learned’ English mainly through hip hop and that they were able to deploy this linguistic

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competence to secure jobs in the global neoliberal marketplace or gain entrance to higher education institutions, their hip hop Englishes were also neither clearly indexical of ‘modern’ middle-class aspirations nor were they associated with (post-)colonial elitism in Delhi. Rather, their hip hop Englishes can be said to index a vernacular cosmopolitanism and authentic connectivity between marginalised communities across the postcolony; at least for those who are able to recognise a linguistic difference between hip hop-inflected Englishes and standardised fantasies of Englishes. Imposed on the ethnographic encounters by the visiting researcher who could speak only very basic Hindi, such hip hop Englishes became an unescapable datum in my research. Every interaction in which I engaged and which I recorded therefore became deeply infused with forms of English and their indexical field of global hip hop’s ideologies, morals and relationalities. My identity as a heterosexual cis male was another ethnographic and relational static fact in my research, which deeply affected the languaging practices that you saw represented in this book. The ways of homosocial speaking, the bro-talk, between the researcher and his research participants, most of whom are also straight cis men, that you heard on these pages normalise masculine positionalities, perspectives and understandings of the world and of hip hop. As marginalised and cosmopolitan migrants, we made our ‘own’ voices heard through hip hop languaging. And we were able to overcome cultural differences across nation, race, caste and class, but we were not so actively engaged in incorporating voices from women, and less so even from homosexual men or gender non-binary and queer people. The young men you met in this book did not, and could not, transform Delhi’s hyper-masculinist and patriarchal vibe in the same ways as they were able to transform the city’s media, linguistic landscapes and social makeup. Heterosexual masculinity seems to be something like a hyper-norm for any hip hop cultural expression anywhere in the world. This basic realisation should not be seen so much as a critique of hip hop culture (if there exists such an essentialised thing at all) but as an invitation for all hip hop heads from around the world to become acutely aware of gender and sexuality when practicing hip hop. In the epilogue of this book, I pick up this idea again. How are the Above Three Questions Narrativised by the Participants Themselves?

All of the above is not my ‘own’ science, of course. I might have found academic literature, intelligent-sounding words and erudite forms

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of expression in order to support the narrative I told you in this book; however, my participants knew all of this before I had reached out to encounter them. The narratives they told me were documents of their knowledge of and experience with hip hop transculturation. This not to say that their narratives were not co-constructed by me, the visiting researcher, or that they are decontextualisable factual reports of past events as they really happened. But it is important to recognise the high levels of reflexive epistemicity with which my participants in Delhi narrated processes of transculturation in global hip hop. The narratives that we exchanged and that I selected for this book were about hip hop’s unifying force: how people from all cultures can get down to one thing/way. As I explained above, understanding hip hop as both a way and a thing allowed for transcultural negotiations of authenticity, history, ideology, bodies and spirituality. The narratives often contained hip hop languaging to index certain cultural aesthetics and moral logics that make the orchestrations of different voices or narrative figures that populated the story worlds (Level  1) socially and culturally meaningful. In the interactive worlds of the ethnographic interviews (Level 2), my participants often seemed reflexively aware of the social meaningfulness of their narrative talk. As I showed, in several narratives the interview context itself became narrativised and interviewer and interviewee appeared as narrative figures in the story worlds. Perhaps, my participants were even more aware of the affordances of narrative than I was during our interviews, since I had not thought about studying narrative until after my fieldwork in Delhi had been completed. In any case, what I hoped to show through my analyses in my study is that the genre of interactive oral narrative seems to allow narrators to order events and figures in time and space and take evaluative stances towards these events and figures. The structural well-formedness of oral narrative talk was utilised by my participants to eventually put forward their ‘own’ voices; which are really only normalised oppositions to or alignments with a multitude of others’ voices. In the narrative resolutions, the narrators’ transcultural voices emerged as the normalised outcome of their orchestrations of the sampled voices that spoke in the complicating actions. The narrators’ ‘own’ voices entered their Level  2 positioning. Here, interviewee and interviewer negotiated their interpersonal relationships with each other. My participants were surely also always reflexively aware of the wider circulation of their voices through my research. They knew that the interviews we conducted were part of a larger ‘research project on hip hop in Delhi’ and so they might have been cautious about how they

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represented their identities (Level 3). We must not forget that they were themselves actively engaged in building a public persona as hip hop artists and they knew that representation can help them to make a name for themselves in global hip hop cultural worlds. The ethical problems of anonymisation that I described in Chapter  3 reveal my participants’ reflexive awareness of identity and representation. We must therefore expect that all of the transcultural voices that we heard in this book must have been carefully constructed because my participants were acutely aware of the fact that the visiting researcher would walk away from the encounter, with their voices captured on his recording device, and represent their identities years later to other audiences that had not been present in the field and knew nothing about them and only little about their culture. Concluding Remarks

In spite of my ruminations on identity constructions here, I employed the concept of transcultural voices to challenge beliefs that a speaker has fixed ideas in his head – having an identity – that can be transformed into messages or that speakers have a biological-psychological foundation that can be analysed in linguistic terms. Instead, this book followed Bakhtinian epistemologies and developed a polyphonic methodology to understand speakers’ voices as being the result of narrative dialogues with others’ voices. The unified speaker, who utters in a synchronic, localised and clearly delineable context, might be an object of study for the structuralist scientism that ventures to sample people speaking and then analyses the identities they have or, better, project or index. The type of voice-in-narrative analysis developed in this book, however, I argued can achieve clearer results from analysing how speakers themselves sample many voices and orchestrate them in their dialogic narratives to ultimately normalise their ‘own’ transcultural voices. Transculturation leaves room for overstandin (see also Singh, in press). The appropriation and orchestration of the many voices that construct normalised positionalities for the narrators and their audiences do not stop with the limits of epistemic rationalising. Affective mythology can enter the transformative positionalities that the narrators construct for themselves. Consider the misinterpretation of the name D2BX, the simultaneous challenging and reproduction of language ideologies or the mythical explanations of hip hop’s creation. In the construction of transcultural voices, ambivalence and contradictions are not so much obstructions but rather conduits for social and cultural meanings.

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It was this ambivalence that I sensed so often and so powerfully during my ethnographic encounters with the people in the nascent hip hop scene in Delhi and that enthused me to work on this book over the course of several years. There was something unknown that needed to be researched and written about, even though I was well aware that hip hop rebuffs total analysis. Rather than just understanding what the young Indian hip hop generation do through semiotic and discursive action, I became more and more interested in what they cannot do, or what they struggle to formulate because systems of understandability are flawed. I am unsure if linguistic ethnography, sociolinguistics and discourse studies are the best research strategies to do such work. It seems to me that our logocentric, empiricist and structuralist foundations make us shy away from ambivalence, affect, the unknown, myth. We might feel uncomfortable with the interpretative ventures into the heteroglossic deep structures that I proposed in this book. Even the fact that I felt compelled to posit something called ‘deep structure’ reveals something of my ‘own’ nervousness when encountering the ineffable, thereby perhaps even contributing to normalising the empiricism in our contemporary academic knowledge industry.

Epilogue: Gender, Again

In late March 2020, five weeks before I was due to submit the manuscript of this book to Multilingual Matters, four of the six rapists and murderers of Nirbhaya were hanged in Tihar Jail, Delhi. One had committed suicide in jail and another was released because he was a juvenile when he committed the crime in December 2012. I saw images of Indians celebrating the execution of the criminals, of Nirbhaya’s parents making victory signs with their fingers and of the four faces of the rapists. Some of my friends from India who participated in this study posted statuses on Facebook expressing their happiness with the executions. I, personally, felt drained, instantly overwhelmed, distressed and to some degree apathetic about the rapists’ deaths, even when I empathised with Nirbhaya’s family and her friends and understood that it was important that their voices were heard by the Indian justice system. The story of Nirbhaya coincided with the story of this book; at least temporally. My narrative ends here but her narrative has to continue. I believe that hip hop can help with this. Not in the sense that some rappers make songs about women’s safety or rape, but in the sense that a more gender-inclusive hip hop culture could create safe spaces in which young people can voice, narrate, embody, negotiate and ultimately transform the gendered and sexualised futures of urban India. If hip hop is so good at breaking down social barriers between nations, languages, classes, ethnicities, races, castes and age groups as the narrators in this book claim, I don’t see why hip hop should not be able to do the same for the other dominant social categorisations of our globalised world, such as gender, sexuality and ability. This would require us to normalise (perhaps by overreppin?) the few women, and the extremely low number of non-heterosexual men and queer people in hip hop. But it would also require us all to unlearn some of the sedimentations of patriarchy in our thinking and our social acts. In other words, we need to grapple with 265

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the hegemonic masculinity that occupies our minds and our intentions when socialising with hip hop heads of a gender to which we feel sexually attracted. With this agenda in mind, I became increasingly comfortable with thinking, talking and writing about gender and sexuality in hip hop over the time of putting this book together, for which I thank the many women and queer people in my private and professional life who engaged me in numerous enlightening conversations. On one of my follow-up visits to India in 2019, I met with Manmeet Kaur again. This was an encounter that left a particularly profound impression on me. So, allow me to end this book with writing about some thoughts that my ethnographic relationship with Manmeet provoked in me. After we first met during my trip to Mumbai in 2013 (see Chapter 4), Manmeet married and moved to Chennai with her husband. But the couple soon divorced and Manmeet moved to Goa. There, she spent two years playing gigs in cafes, jamming with bands and building networks with musicians from both India and abroad. These cosmopolitan connections eventually brought her to Europe, where she toured in Germany, Belgium, Spain and France (the UK did not grant her a visa, so she had to cancel her gigs and radio appearances in London, Bristol and Glasgow). Over the years, I followed her career online and we occasionally wrote each other messages or liked our respective social media posts. And so, in late 2019, when I was planning a follow-up trip to India, I reached out to her again and asked her if we could hang out and catch up. She kindly offered to host me for two days in Chandigarh, where she lived with her parents at the time. I accepted her offer and made my way to Chandigarh, a city in the Punjab, 250 km north of Delhi. My own identity as a member of the Sikh diaspora and my knowledge of Punjabi culture (especially food) possibly helped me to build rapport with her parents and we all cooked and shared meals together, played with the dogs and talked at length about our respective family stories, about politics, about history and about hip hop. While spending time together at her parents’ house, I soon sensed that Manmeet had grown tired of the hip hop scene in India as well as globally. She told me numerous stories of people with whom she had fallen out because they didn’t pay her for gigs, or because they behaved inappropriately behind her back and so on. I felt sad that she seemed disillusioned with hip hop and couldn’t envision a future as an artiste anymore. However, a series of coinciding serendipities, which I can only describe as ethnographic magic, happened during my two days in Chandigarh. She received two phone calls. One was from her friend who lives and works in Berlin, who told her that she had been shortlisted for a

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year-long artist’s residency in Germany. The second call was from the manager of the famous British Asian fusion musician Talvin Singh, who said that Talvin was stopping by in Delhi the next day and wanted to meet with her to discuss the possibility of a future musical collaboration. The two telephone calls immediately transformed our interactions from being about telling narratives of negative past experiences to planning how we could manage to meet Talvin in Delhi. Although she was persistent in her refusal to let me pay for our air travel, her parents and I finally persuaded her, and we booked a flight to Delhi for the next morning. While travelling to Delhi, we discussed how she would enter talks with Talvin Singh, what she could expect, what she could ask for, etc. It felt that my role had shifted from ethnographer and friend to something like a manager, although I explicitly told her that I have no experience with managing artists and that I’m generally not a very business-minded person. Nevertheless, she asked me to accompany her to the meeting with Talvin over dinner and wine in Delhi’s posh Khan Market, during which I was silent for most of the time to allow the two artists discuss their respective biographies, musical tastes, sound aesthetics and plans for a future collaboration. During the following days, Manmeet and I spent many hours together, talking, sitting on the balconies of our single rooms in the YMCA on Jai Singh Marg in New Delhi, playing beats on her Bluetooth speaker, occasionally rappin and watching tribes of monkeys traversing the urban landscapes that we overlooked. We also moved through the city to enter various hip hop spaces together, such as jams, freestyle cyphers and meet-ups with musicians, dancers and artists. For example, we went to Muhammadpur in South Delhi to record a song in Sun-J’s studio, which used a hard-hittin beat produced by DJ BC, a friend of mine from Germany, and which featured verses by Manmeet, Sun-J, MC Sarkar and me. Manmeet also invited MC Sarkar, Sun-J and me to act as background extras for a video she was scheduled to shoot at a chai stall in central Delhi. The visual materials we produced on this sunny afternoon sipping sugary milk tea out of clay cups would later become one part of the music video for the song Revolutionärer 1. Çay, by the emcee and producer LMNZ from Berlin, which features Manmeet Kaur, Edd Abbas from Beirut and Efsun from Istanbul, who all shot segments of the videos in their respective cities. We also went to hang out with MC Freezak and MC Akshay Tashan and kicked some rhymes with them in the medieval ruin monuments of Satpula Dam and Khirki Masjid. We also hung out with the hip hop photo journalist Sahil Saxena, as well as with Nebla, a German friend of BabaAbna’s who we had first met in 2013 and who happened to be in Delhi again for work.

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In our journeys through the city, I got a sense of how difficult and frustrating it must be for Manmeet to navigate these hip hop-inflected spaces, which were all dominated by men. In almost every hip hop event and space we visited, she appeared to be the only woman. But I felt it wasn’t just the quantitative preponderance of men that inhibited the freedom with which she could move, speak, act and perform. The Indian hip hop scene seems to share with hip hop culture at large an idea of femininity that is accepted only when it is sexualised and becomes available for the imaginations of heterosexual male pleasure and/or romance. For this reason, perhaps, it seemed to me that hegemonic masculinity was manifest in Manmeet’s ways of responding, or not responding, to situations in which gender and sexuality could have become relevant issues. What I mean by this is that it was not so much the case that the men with whom we interacted in the hip hop spaces we visited spoke down to her as a woman or treated her overtly disrespectfully, or that they did not listen to what she said or silenced her when she tried to say something (although this happened too!), it was rather the case that the potential of a gender-heteronormative sexual relationship between a young woman and hip hop’s men seemed to be implicated somehow in every step she took, in every word she said or rapped and in every dialogue she initiated or rejected. Her ‘own’ voice was constantly responding to a voice of the other, which potentially sexualises her or discriminates against her on the basis of her social gender. Whether or not the men we met intended such sexualisation is of little significance here. Hegemonic masculinity manifested in her constant attention to responding to the potential of sexualisation by the masculine heterosexual majority with which she surrounded herself on her hip hop adventures around the world. In a telephone call I had with her just as I was finishing the write-up of this epilogue, we talked about our respective experiences of hegemonic masculinity in the week we had spent together in Delhi in 2019. During this telephone call, she revealed that it was my presence as a trustworthy male hip hop companion who she had known for many years that created the possibility for her to enter male-dominated hip hop spaces and respond to masculine regimes within these spaces in ways that she could not have done without me. She said that my company made her feel more confident to speak back at men when she thought they silenced her or when they made her feel uncomfortable. Yet, my presence did not, of course, cancel out the hegemonic masculinity that was prevalent in these spaces, but it provided her with a momentary sense of protection against potential sexualisation by other men, so that she gained confidence that she would be able to construct a dialogic scenario in which she could interact with these men on the level of

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human or artist, momentarily easing the threat of heterosexual possibility. If my presence allowed female research participants to be momentarily desexualised in hip hop spaces, this then also means that my representation of gender and sexuality can only draw from ethnographic encounters in which I, a cis male hip hop figure, have played a dominant role in reproducing or momentarily suspending masculine hegemony. There can be no representation in this book without hegemonic masculinity at play. On one occasion during our week-long expeditions through hip hop spaces, Manmeet and I visited a rap cypher in Green Park in South Delhi, which was frequented by around 20  young men, who were standing around a large speaker that they had hooked up to someone’s phone to play loud American hip hop beats over which they rapped. As Manmeet and I rocked up, together with Sun-J, MC Sarkar, Sahil Saxena and Nebla, we were immediately greeted and invited into the cypher. After some time standing in the cypher, listening to the emcees’ freestyles and verses, which were mostly in Hindi, I began to drop some rhymes in German. But I messed up proper. I then looked over to Manmeet and pointed my finger at her, inviting her to take the next turn. She hopped on the beat and dropped some dope freestyle rhymes in English. Yet, after a few seconds, some of the other emcees in the cypher started talking to each other. Their chatting on the cypher’s perimeter obviously distracted her and so she started to directly address the nattering emcees in her freestyle rhymes: Listen brother you need to see You got to be silent when another emcee speaks I listen to myself and the brothers that are around me Seducing the masculinity within which I have found me

Some young men in the cypher reacted by exclaiming uhhhh, anticipating, perhaps, that this calling out constituted a diss and that a verbal battle would ensue between Manmeet and the male emcee who she was addressing and rapping at. She, however, finished her rhyme with these two lines: I am here just to be your sister, man I listen to your verse and then go crazy

Manmeet then put a big smile on her face, folded her hands in an Anjali Mudra and bowed her head in salutation. She then looked at me and pointed her arm towards me, inviting me to take the next turn, which I did. The cypher continued as normal.

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Her tactical warding off of a potential battle with a male emcee was achieved by evoking a hyper-polite and out-of-register customary and respectful traditional hand gesture as well as by showing her potential competitor respect for his previous verse which, she said, made her go crazy (i.e. inspired her to rap in dope ways). It is implied in her show of respect that if the male emcee had been polite enough to listen to her raps, he too might have been inspired, which he failed to do. Furthermore, her use of just normalises her presence in the cypher as a legitimate female emcee who should be treated like a sister. However, these deep readings of her freestyle rhymes were perhaps not immediately available to the participants in situ. In a simpler reading, her tactics indexed that she wasn’t in battle mood and just wanted to make the deontic point that emcees should listen to each other when rappin in the cypher. This was only one of the instances that I witnessed where Manmeet had to respond to men interrupting her and ignoring her. Manmeet, like many women I know, has developed tactics and narratives to deal with such silencing by men. Sadly, such experiences of losing voice in the cypher might not even be the biggest concerns for female hip hop heads. Over the one week we spent together in Chandigarh and Delhi, I listened to Manmeet’s many stories about her terrible experiences with sexual harassment and overt gender-based discrimination in the hip hop scenes, both in India and in Europe. I let her talk as it seemed to me that it helped her to voice her experiences and I was happy to act as a listening ear. But frankly, sometimes I wished I was able to forget some of the things that she told me and it is part of my ethical commitment as a hiphopographer that my representation of her experiences here must be restricted only to what I can say about our ethnographic encounters with hegemonic masculinity in public hip hop spaces such as the cypher in the park. But this book cannot end on a fearful note. The fearlessness with which Indian women have faced discrimination and violence in society has always impressed and inspired me. If there is a place in which hip hop learns to finally deal with gender and sexuality, then it might be in India and perhaps in Delhi, the rape capital of the world. Let me put this out as a final thought: If the myth of the hard masculinity of the North American ghetto undergoes transcultural transformations in order to become locally authenticated wherever hip hop sets foot, then Indian femininity could be the locus of this transcultural authenticity for Delhi hip hop. In other words, Indian women could be successful in appropriating – samplin – Black American masculinity in transcultural ways to finally allow hip hop heads in Delhi, and indeed globally, to address and redress our gendered and sexualised complexes.

Notes

Chapter 2 (1) On protests in North India, one often hears the Hindi slogan awaaz do, which translates to ‘give voice’. Speakers at protests use this slogan at the beginning or end of their speeches and the protesters repeat it in unison, often raising their arms while shouting it out with elongated vowels. In this call-and-response routine, the notion of voice (awaaz) is used in its social sense. Here, the notion of voice indexes a deontic demand for the social and political recognition of the injustice that the protest aims to make visible. (2) Nakassis (2018) provides a smart discussion on the inherent ambivalence of indexicality. (3) I introduce ‘semiotic surface’ and ‘heteroglossic deep structure’, aware of the uneasy reactions these terms might engender in the non-generative linguistics research community. Chomsky’s (1965) transformational grammar, which functional, sociolinguistic, pragmatic and metapragmatic approaches generally reject, understands ‘deep structure’ as an abstract base-component that transforms into several phrase markers, which eventually generate the ‘surface structure’ of the concrete sentence in a natural language. On a basic level, I use the terms ‘heteroglossic deep structure’ and ‘semiotic surface’ in analogy to Chomsky’s terms to grasp the social and physical understanding of voice (see also Pêcheux, 1995 for a related deployment of the Chomskyan terms ‘deep structure’ and ‘surface structure’). Yet, the Chomskyan term ‘deep structure’ also functions as a constant reminder for readers of my book to appreciate the fact that ethnographers cannot speak ‘objectively’ or ‘from nowhere’. Although I use – unlike Chomsky – ‘real’ examples of text fragments that I accumulated ethnographically while engaging with the Delhi hip hop scene, my research – like Chomsky’s – is not free from intuition, speculation and empirically unsupported interpretations. This is so because the understandings of deep-structure meanings in texts are by definition devoid of empirical evidence. To say ‘deep structure’ is to take an anti-empiricist stance. The employment of the concept of deep structure invites critical reflection on the interpretative work of linguistic ethnographers, as well as of participants, rather than concealing this interpretative work and rendering it as empirical evidence (for a similar critique, see Wortham, 2001). Goffman’s (1974) frame analysis perhaps represents a more comfortable authority for introducing the terms ‘semiotic surface’ and ‘deep structure’ in my research than Chomsky’s transformational grammar. Although Goffman (1974: 41) explicitly dissociates his perspective from Chomsky’s, I would 271

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argue that the epistemological imagery of the two authors is not unrelated. Both begin with the complexities they encounter in the world, what Goffman (1974: 10) calls ‘strips’ of ‘ongoing activity’ and Chomsky (1965: 16) calls ‘surface structure’ or the ‘string of phones’. In an attempt to understand how the phenomenological surface or activity is interpreted, acquired, learned, passed on and made sense of by humans, both Goffman and Chomsky theoretically postulate underlying structures, systematicity and rules for transformation; sociological ones and grammatical ones, respectively. The main difference between the two scholars, then, is that Goffman studies the sociocultural system, which includes language (see also Goffman, 1981) while Chomsky confines his inquiry to an abstract linguistic system (langue). Their metaphorical conceptualisation, however, bares traces of the same Enlightenment epistemology. This epistemology was first spelled out in Kant’s (1996[1787]) Critique of Pure Reason, which attempts to reconcile British empiricism and continental rationalism. Elsewhere, I have discussed how Kant’s metaphysical philosophy can inform discourse analysis (Singh, 2012). (4) Whereas the terms ‘style’ and ‘stylish’ were sometimes used by my research participants to refer to a quality of their hip hop practice, especially breakin, as I also discuss in relation to the style vs. technique debate in Chapter 7 (for an in-depth analysis of ‘style’ as an emic category, see Nakassis, 2016b), ‘style’ is also a scholarly category to understand subcultural practice (Bourdieu, 1984; Hebdige, 1979) and sociolinguistic variation (Bell, 1984; Coupland, 2007; Eckert, 2000; Labov, 1972a). (5) Three terms are used in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and linguistic ethnography and related disciplines that roughly mean the same thing: stance, positionality and point of view. While ‘positionality’, derived from Foucault’s (1972) ‘subject positions’, is often used in discourse studies (Davies & Harré, 1990) and narrative studies (Bamberg, 1997; Deppermann, 2013a), ‘point of view’ (point de vue) is often preferred in Francophone traditions of linguistics (Angermuller, 2014; Ducrot, 1984; Nølke et al., 2004) and ‘stance’ is often used in Anglophone sociolinguistics (Englebretson, 2007a; Jaffe, 2009a). These terms are also used in divergent ways in other research traditions. ‘Point of view’, for instance, is used in some narratology research (Hühn et al., 2009). Other related terms are ‘appraisal’ (Martin & White, 2005), ‘footing’ (Goffman, 1981), ‘face’ (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Goffman, 1967), ‘perspective’ (Graumann & Kallmeyer, 2002), ‘role’ (Sarangi, 2010) and in fact ‘voice’ (Ducrot, 1984). For overviews of such terminological questions, see Chindamo et al. (2012), Deppermann (2013a), Englebretson (2007b) and Jaffe (2009b).

Chapter 3 (1) Non-residential Indian is widely used as a synonym for diasporic Indians. (2) I thank Harriet Lloyd for making me aware of this point. (3) The ‘armchair’ is a common metaphor in anthropology to refer to the preMalinowskian and pre-Boasian study of cultures and civilisations in the late 19th and early 20th century. Deeply entrenched in the European project of complete world domination during that time, the early anthropologists sought to document, describe and understand those peoples who had still been untouched by Western civilisation. The colonial encounter between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘savage’ made it possible, so goes their theory, to look back in time, as it were, to a prehistoric stage of human civilisation; one that the European race must have come from as well. The Black and brown bodies, their tantalising dances, their exotic rituals and strange habits, were

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therefore something like a mirror image of a previously uncivilised self. This produced synchronic evidence for a European chronology of civilisatory stages from savagery to barbarism to full civilisation. The cultural anthropologists theorised such things at a safe distance from the proverbial ‘jungle’, sitting in their comfortable armchairs in European universities, from which they got their name. They usually never ventured out to the colonial peripheries to do fieldwork on distant islands of the Pacific, in the forests of South America and Africa or in the Arctic ice, but rather relied on travel writing, colonial documents and scientific expeditions. (4) Bhangra is a type of traditional Punjabi folk music and dance that was revived in the UK in the 1980s where it fused with reggae, hip hop and Western dance music (Sharma, 1996). This type of UK-bhangra is also popular in the subcontinent. (5) A widespread stereotype presents Punjabis as tall and physically strong, while not being the latter, I am maybe a little above the general average in height. (6) This was fundamentally different with some of the hip hop heads I met in Mumbai, who all spoke English among each other and used English as a language for their spoken word poetry and rap music.

Chapter 4 (1) The question of authenticity and race in US-American hip hop culture is surely a complex one, deeply intertwined with the history of slavery and its dehumanising commodification of Black labouring bodies. In a brilliant essay, Judy (2012: 113) arrives at the conclusion that ‘the question of nigga authenticity is not a moral question but is about the very possibility of being human: it is a strictly existential matter. In wanting to understand what it is to be a real nigga, it is crucial to remember that humans are the entities to be analyzed. To be a nigga is ontologically authentic, because it takes care of the question of how a human really is among things. Niggadom, then, is a new dogmatics – that is, an attempt to formulate an ontology of the higher thinking called “hip hop science”’. So, it is in fact not authenticity as such or Blackness as such that gets globalised when hip hop is appropriated outside of the US-American Black urban cultural context, but rather it is a complex interrelation between the two categories, which global hip hop practitioners have to grapple with when they formulate their ‘own’ transcultural voices. McLeod (2012) further clarifies that claims of authenticity within hip hop discourse operate in what he calls a ‘conceptual framework of semantic dimensions’, which in sociolinguistic terms could be called an indexical field (Eckert, 2008). McLeod lists six dimensions that seem to play a role in claiming hip hop authenticity. Many of these indexical oppositions play out in my discussion of authenticity in this chapter, as well as in my discussion of historicity in Chapter 6 and hard masculinity in Chapter 7. Semantic dimensions

Real

Fake

Social-psychological

Staying true to yourself

Following mass trends

Racial

Black

White

Political-economic

The underground

Commercial

Gender-sexual

Hard

Soft

Social locational

The street

The suburbs

Cultural

The old school

The mainstream

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(2) In this chapter, I use the label ‘Hindi’ as shorthand for the complex polyglossic situation in Northern India, which involves several dialects and registers of Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, as well as Englishes. By ‘Hindi’ I thus mean a Northern Indian lingua franca, what had been called ‘Hindustani’ by India’s republican architects and language planners, such as Gandhi and the first prime minister, Nehru (Ghose, 1993: 216). The label ‘Hindustani’ has fallen out of use more recently, which is why I prefer to use ‘Hindi’. However, by using this label I do not wish to refer to an ideologised variety of ‘pure’ (suddh) Hindi that is currently being politically exploited to envision a Hindu (read, non-Muslim) India by the ruling populist right wing in the country. (3) The lower and upper cut-off points to measure Hertz in speech have to be set for each individual speaker as well as for each stretch of speech. Women often have a higher pitch range compared to many men. In Manmeet Kaur’s narrative, all of her tonal movements range between 200 and 700 Hz. In Bunty’s narrative, in contrast, his male voice produces tonal movements that range between 90 and 220 Hz. Because my own male voice operates within a pitch range similar to Bunty’s, I have included intonation graphs for my utterances in his narrative, but not in Manmeet’s narrative, as this would have required changing the pitch settings and could possibly have led to confusion with readers. (4) Zan is an Indian rapper. (5) Wazulu is an Indian hip hop music producer.

Chapter 5 (1) Pondicherry, now called Puducherry, used to be a French colony in the Tamil-speaking south-east coast of Southern India. As is the case for the entire south of India, Hindi, the one dominant language of Northern India, is not widely spoken in Puducherry. Dizy’s comment that she encountered communication problems because her students could not speak Hindi, her own first language, thus shows the linguistic divide between the Indo-European north and the Dravidian south. English is the panIndian lingua franca that is usually used to overcome this divide. While it is not the case that French is spoken widely in Puducherry instead of English, her observation that her students could speak little English probably says more about their underprivileged class and caste position and their ensuing restricted access to ‘valuable’ English education than about the colonial history of French Puducherry.

Chapter 6 (1) G-Funk is a style of hip hop beat with elongated bass and synthesiser sounds. Low riders are automobiles with modified tyres and hydraulics. Both are epitomes of US-West Coast hip hop culture, which accentuates slowness and lowness and stands in ideological opposition to New York’s fast pace and ruggedness. (2) It does not become clear from Agha’s (2007b) discussion, whether he uses the notion of ‘historical present’ to mean a rhetorical figure in writing and in speech, a.k.a. the narrative/dramatic present, or to mean the historicised contemporary moment more generally. In my understanding, the idea that chronotopic representation has an enlarging effect works for both meanings. (3) Poppin and lockin is a style of hip hop dance that did not develop in New York City like breakin did, but in Los Angeles and the US-American West Coast. In Delhi,

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recently, more and more poppers and lockers have emerged and they are starting to create a scene that is complementary to the much bigger breakin scene in the city.

Chapter 7 (1) In her handbook on multimodality, Jewitt (2009b: 28–39) distinguishes between three types of multimodal studies. First, a social semiotic approach to multimodality (associated with research by Kress; van Leeuwen) is mainly concerned with how modes become resources for meaning-making. Loosely drawing on systemic functional linguistics, the social semiotic approach focuses on the sign producers’ intentions, which can be identified by analysing the choices the modal network system offers. Secondly, multimodal discourse analysis (associated with research by O’Toole; O’Halloran) is also concerned with choices, yet it does not focus on the sign-makers in the same way that the social semiotic approach does, but instead explores ‘ranks’ in the multimodal discursive system in use and the social context this system is embedded in. Thirdly, and this will be the strand I also employ in this chapter, multimodal interactional analysis, or henceforth MIA, (associated with research by Norris; Jones) puts at the centre of investigation the interaction between multimodal sign-users. Drawing from symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and interactional sociolinguistics, this approach makes no claims about the systemic meaning of modes, but understands multimodal meaning as emergent in the interaction and as constantly negotiated and co-constructed between interactants. (2) Getting down on the floor is an essential skill for breakers. It means that dancers use their arms and legs, as well as their back, their head and their shoulders, to carry out movements close to the floor. This is called downrock and will be explained below. (3) The cypher is a collaborative and competitive zone for embodied and verbal hip hop cultural interaction. The cypher (sometimes spelled cipher or cipha) derives from the vocabulary of the Five Percenters also known as the Nation of Gods and Earths, an offshoot of the Nation of Islam. In Five Percenters’ spiritual terminology, the cypher refers to a group of members who stand in a circle on street corners and parks and take turns to ‘drop science’ and (re-)interpret politics, the world and God (Allah, 2010). In hip hop, the cypher refers to a circle of dancers or emcees who perform in competition with each other (see e.g. Alim, 2006a, 2009; Dodds, 2016; Fogarty, 2012b; Johnson, 2011; Newman, 2005; Streeck & Henderson, 2010). The cypher is where the hip hop community comes together and exchanges art, styles, meaning and ideologies, not without friction and antagonism though. Alim (2006: 97) describes the cypher as both ‘communal and competitive’. In my ethnographic fieldwork, I have observed that breakers typically emphasise community in the practice cypher and competition in the battle cypher, although the boundaries between these two types of cyphers are not always clear-cut. However, it became clear over the course of my fieldwork that the battle and the practice cypher each afford different interactive norms. The practice cypher is less competitive and more experimental and supportive than the battle cypher. In the battle cypher, in contrast, breakers dance against each other to win the audience’s admiration and the judges’ approval and garner recognition in the Global Hip Hop Nation through the battle’s audio-visual circulation on the internet. The cypher can also be understood in a metaphorical sense. In this metaphorical sense, the cypher refers to global connectivities (Mitchell, 2001), or ‘connective marginalities’ (Osumare, 2001), which link hip hop places, times and practices through a shared – yet always contested – sense of historicity,

276  Notes

aesthetics, morals and lifestyles, as also shown in Chapter 6 and spelled out in detail by Pennycook (2007a), and succinctly captured with Alim’s (2009) concept of the Global Hip Hop Nation. Spady et al. argue that the communicative practices in the micro-analytic cypher form a template for relationships and connectivities across the metaphorical global cypher: In the same way that local Hip Hop artists build community and construct social organization through the rhyming [and dancing] practices involved in tha cipha, Hip Hop communities worldwide interact with each other (through media and cultural flow, as well as embodied international travel) in ways that organize their participation in a mass-mediated, cultural movement. (Spady et al., 2006: 11, cited in Alim, 2009: 1)



This chapter, although focusing on the literal usage of the cypher, also contributes to our understanding of constructing hip hop’s global connectivity. Particularly my analysis of the recontextualised b-boy stance will provide further insights into the construction of a global cypher through a mediatised intertextuality between the young male Indian body and the historicised and globally available figure of the authentic b-boy. (4) Chakreis Jam was collaboratively organised by the Indian hip hop platform One Circle World and a group of German breakers who came to visit Delhi during my fieldwork. The blend ‘Chakreis’ derives from the Hindi word ‘chakra’ and the German word ‘Kreis’, both meaning ‘circle’ in English and in this particular usage they refer to the circle of dancers or the cypher. (5) Del4Pol Jam took place six months after I had left Delhi, in spring 2014. The jam was a charity event to raise funds for the world-famous Polish breaker b-boy Cetowy. Cetowy was injured in a severe accident the year before, which paralysed his body. His family and friends published videos on the internet and called for donations to finance the expensive rehabilitation that Cetowy required. One Circle World responded to this call and contacted the Korean Cultural Centre who agreed to host an event in the performance space in the basement of their newly refurbished building in New Delhi. Without going into a detailed analysis of the transcultural significance of this event, let me merely mention that the hip hop charity produced in the Del4Pol Jam reversed the usual charitable financial flows from the economically wealthier north to the financially poorer Global South. The Delhi scene getting together and raising money for a Polish breaker orthogonally situates global hip hop solidarity against dominant centre–periphery discourses of the global economy. South Korea, through the agency of the Korean Cultural Centre, enters this reversal as an economically thriving Asian Tiger which had in the past already promoted breakers through institutional support. As a consequence, the last decade had seen numerous victories by South Korean breakers in international breakin competitions. (6) Go-go dancing is typically associated with ‘sexy’ female or male dancers who are hired to animate crowds in dance clubs, discos and gay clubs. Alternatively, this figure could be characterised with the social persona of a rodeo rider, associated with cowboys and perhaps ‘sexy’ cowgirls, riding a bull-riding machine. Taking this route of interpretation, the indexicalities of this movement could be associated with discourses of American ‘white trash’ which had been continuously negotiated in American hip hop. Interestingly, the basic step of breakin, the six-step, was developed from the square dance, associated with cowboys and cowgirls; however, the breakers of the Bronx made it funky and less static by accentuating their movements to the off-beat.

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277

Chapter 8 (1) As a third category, we could add deontic stances, i.e. stances that evoke a moral obligation and describe what the world should or could be like at any given point in the future, the past or in hypothetical time (see also Chapter 4). A detailed investigation of deontic stances and their relation to affectivity and epistemicity exceeds the scope of this chapter; however, I do believe that such an investigation could yield rewarding insights into the temporal transformation of emotions, bodies and knowledge in the future. (2) Heritage’s metaphor of ‘seesaw’ appears to me strangely, even uncannily, reminiscent of the notion of ‘seeing’ in both the present and past tense. I am reminded here of the ocularcentric tendency of Western philosophy (Nakassis, 2018). (3) This view comes from the philosophical tradition of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), who, drawing on Spinoza, situate affect within the unrepresentationable, the pre-discursive and the visceral. From the same tradition, Massumi (2002) also obtains his idea that affects are not representable signs but rather relational intensities, which, however, open up the possibility of future resignification and resistance to conventionalised sign meanings. (4) Flores and Rosa (2015), for instance, show that African American schoolchildren fail to be heard by the ‘White Ear’ of their teachers as producing US-American standard language (certain hegemonic types of White, middle-class, US Englishes), which is valorised as ‘correct English’ in the US-American school system, even if the Black children’s articulations and pronunciations in class match those of their White peers. The White Ear seems to be overruled by the White Gaze which recognises the skin pigmentation of the speakers. The voice of the speaker is muted and their race is foregrounded when the White Ear evaluates a particular register of English. As a site of meaning-making, the body here gains primacy over logos. Importantly, thus, the White Ear hears from an affective position, rather than an epistemic one, or else it would hear the ‘correct English’ coming out of the mouth of the Black child. A ‘feeling’ that the version of English offered cannot be correct due to a visual recognition that the speaker is Black was added, somehow. The White Ear’s affective position is thus mediated by the White Gaze; a mediation it denies (as myth) in order to not appear as overtly racist. This denial is the principal warranty that the teacher objectively assesses ‘only’ language – nothing less, nothing more. (5) As I elaborate elsewhere (Singh, in press), the creation of ‘overstandin’ rests on a folk etymology of the English word ‘understanding’ to comprise the two morphemes {under} and {standing} and to thus mean ‘to stand under’. More generally, it rests on a widespread spatio-scalar metaphor that assigns prestige to concepts relating to top, high, up and over, and stigma to bottom, low, down and under (for a reading of these metaphors of spatial oppositions as sexualised and gendered cosmologies, see Bourdieu, 2001: 7–22). For sure, the academically trained philologist might be quick to identify the Rastafarians’ folk etymology as a misinterpretation and point out that the prefix ‘under-’ in the word ‘understanding’ (Old English understandan) derives from the Proto-Indo-European root *nter which is theorised to mean ‘in between’ rather than ‘under’. This is manifest in Sanskrit antar, Ancient Greek entera or Latin inter. Thus, the modern English word ‘understanding’ in fact comprises the morphemes {*nter} and {standing} and means ‘to stand in between’. Even if the expert’s etymological analysis is accurate and scientifically valid, it might hold little purchase in the synchronic analysis of citizen sociolinguists. This is perhaps so because the prefix

278  Notes

‘under-’ in ‘understanding’ (deriving from *nter) is homographic and homophonic with the very common English stand-alone word ‘under’ (with synonyms such as beneath, underneath, below, down, less than, inferior to, etc.). This reading is supported by the fact that English and other languages also use ‘under’ in this meaning of below, as a prefix to semantically express inferiority: ‘underclass’, ‘underdog’, ‘Untermensch’, ‘underachiever’ are a few examples. In light of this common morphological practice, the Rastafarian folk reading of ‘understanding’ to mean ‘to stand under’ and thus ‘be inferior’ is a valid synchronic suggestion. Moreover, the postcolonial folk etymology is pertinently meaningful considering the sociohistorical context and unspeakable logics of the genocide, slave trade, plantation capitalism and White supremacy that were the economic backbone of the European colonisation of Jamaica, the Caribbean and the Americas at large. This history disqualifies any modern European knowledge (such as pointing to the ‘actual’ etymology of the term ‘understanding’) to be worthy of contributing to the emancipation of postcolonial subjects from the mental slavery that continues to subjugate Black people (see also Mignolo, 2000; Shilliam, 2015). ‘None but ourselves can free our minds’ said Marcus Garvey, quoted in Bob Marley’s (1980) famous Redemption Song, and it is in this spirit that overstandin becomes a significant strategy in the quest for postcolonial identity. (6) In hip hop terminology, ‘OG’ stands for ‘original gangsta’ and refers to a respected long-term practitioner of the culture. (7) I further elaborated that the phrase put it over head perhaps signals a type of superrationality or it is (also) a loose intertextuality to KRS-One’s (1997) song Am I over ya head?, which uses fast, perplexing rhyming structures to confuse an imaginary adversary: Huh? What? Where? Who? What? / What are ya thinkin about? / When who says what when how / You can’t maybe follow my style. The phrase put it over head is not easily translated into standard English registers and I have never heard this phrase before, neither in Delhi, nor elsewhere. I’m afraid that interpretations about its potential meanings derived from a history of conventional usage are not possible. put it over head seems to be Scientik’s ad hoc creation in the moment of the narrative resolution and, as such, it carries transcultural meaning, independent of what it means exactly on a denotational level.

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Index

136-8, 165, 167, 169, 183-4, 187-9, 193-4, 222, 233, 235, 237, 255-6, 259, 261-2, 270, 273

affect 9, 28-9, 33, 230-3, 247-50, 263-4, 277 see also stance, affective affectology 9, 228-9, 247-50, 258 African American English xiv, 33, 259, 277 Afrika Bambaataa 182, 183, 233, 243 age xv, xvii, 7, 22-5, 52, 63-4, 73-5, passim, 156, 165-7, 172, 179, 181, 185, 189-90, 192-3, 195, 202, 221-2, 225, 234-9, 249, 256, 260, 265, 268-269, 276 A-List 60, 73, 98 ambiguity/ambivalence 7, 19, 28, 80-84, 86, 135, 150, 207, 217, 225, 231-3, 242-3, 247-9, 257, 259, 263-4 American rap music xiii, 9-10, 14-15, 28, 56-7, 82-3, 137, 171, 193, 225, 260, 269 anonymity 76-8, 81, 89, 263 appropriation 2-3, 12-5, 19, 24-5, 41-2, 56-9, 70, 83, 86, 162, 165-6, 174, 186, 222, 235, 242, 246, 257, 259-60, 263, 273 appropriateness 25, 37-8, 41, 50, 52, 57, 68, 83, 257, 266 aura 179, 202, 256 see also flow; vibe authenticity (keepin it real) xii, 6, 10, 14, 20, 82-4, 90-8, 103-6, 107-8, 113, 117-8, 120-4, 127, 134,

Baba Abna 64, 98-9, 105, 255, 267 B-boy Rishi 192 B-boy Gunjan 192 B-boy Rawdr 18-21, 23, 58, 85, 104, 143, 170-2, 229, 253-254, 258 b-boy stance 21, 24, 52, 104, 187, 189, 193-4, 203-5, 222-4, 232-3, 244, 256, 276 see also freeze B-girl Am-B xvii, 156 beatboxin xii, 82, 175-80, 256, 258 breakin (b-boyin and b-girlin) xii, xiv, 5, 47, 60, 71-2, 82-3, 91, 106, passim, 124, 134, 154, 156, 171-2, 186-227, 232, 235, 272, 274-6 basti (see informal settlement) battle 107, 187, 190, 197-227, 244, 256, 269-70, 275 beats 22, 72, 98, 104, 139-40, 178, 182, 184, 191, 197-8, 223, 267, 269 beef 18, 20, 259 Berlin 57, 60, 91, 98, 152, 165-6, 195, 266-7 Bombay (see Mumbai) British colonialism/imperialism 1, 144, 177 304

Index 

Bronx xii, 20, 159-185, 190, 256, 276 see also New York City Bunty 64, 91, 93, 95-6, 106-29, 150, 188, 194-5, 237, 255, 257, 274 caste 20, 23, 155-6, 181, 256, 261 Cape Town 137, 226 Cardiff 16, 45, 60, 65, 76, 201 Chandigarh 91, 98, 256, 266, 270 Chennai 91, 266 chronotope 7, 68, 72, 137, 159-164, passim, 170, passim, 184, 194, 256, 258-9, 274 see also historicity cipha (see cypher) class xiv, xv, 2, 14-5, 20-3, 45, 85-6, 134, 175, 184, 256, 261, 274 codeswitching 85, 94, 103, 127-9, 175-8 coloniality 12-3, 138, 144, 177, 233-4, 248-9, 255-7, 261 see also postcolonial complexity 3-4, passim, 22-4, 27-31, 35, passim, 40-2, 46-8, passim, 70, passim, 88, passim, 130, 132, passim, 138-9, 159-64, 170, 178, passim, 247-8, 256, passim, 270 connective marginality 92, 105, 143, 185, 256-7, 275 crew 134, 139, 156, 172-5, 180, 186, 191, 198, 203-4, 207, 209-10, passim, 256, 258 cypher 67, 72, 175, 185-90, 191-227, 235, 255-6, 259, 267, 269-70, 275-6 Daku 139, 146-51, 153, 157-8, 167, 169, 256, 258 Dattatreyan, Ethiraj Gabriel 24, 62, 667, 71, 73, 83, 86-9, 223-4 deep structure 39-40, 50, 53, 55, 57, 112, 117, 122-3, 149, 193, 196, 264, 271 deejayin xiv, 34, 57-8, 62, 82-3, 104, 137, 164, 182-3, 188, 191, 194,

305

197-203, 207, 220-3, 242-3, 245, 253 Delhi (and National Capital Territory) 17, 22-3, passim Bahadurghar 172-4 Delhi Metro 63-4, 69 Green Park 269 Gurgaon (now renamed Gururgram) 63-4, 223 Hauz Khas Village 223 Janakpuri District Park 194 Khan Market 147, 267 Khirki Village 74-5, 134, 181, 192, 267 Malviya Nagar 72, 134 Muhammadpur 267 New Delhi 194, 267, 276 R.K. Puram 197 Satpula Dam 267 Shivalik 134 Shadipur 181 South Delhi 13, 74, 181, 191, 197, 223, 267, 269 Tilak Nagar 1, 134, 144 West Delhi 1, 194 Devanagari 2, 139, 146-51, 158, 256 dialogism 7, 37-40, 47, 49-51, passim, 70, 94-5, 116-9, passim, 14950, 224-5, 237, 254, 268 dialogic responsiveness 37-40, 42, 46, 93, 150, 225, 238 digital 24, 32, 65, 72, 74, 83, 133, 136, 162, 194, 198, 223, 255 discourse 10, 12, 28, 31, 33, 46, 53-4, 70, 80, 83, 88-9, 121, 132, 135-6, 157, 160-1, 196, 233, 244, 273 Dizy xvii, 23, 139, 152-9, 198, 256-7, 274 DJ BC 267 DJ Kool Herc 164, 182-3, 243 DJ Uri 57-9, 166, 195, 257 dopeness 26-7, 34, 100, 103-5, 131, 1436, 152, 253-4, 255, 259-60, 269-70

306 Index

each one teach one (informal pedagogy) xii-xiv, 17, 99, 121, 152, 154, 174, 185, 198 education 17-8, 30, 45, 86, 136, 138, 172, 185, 251, 260-1, 274, 277 effortlessness 19, 59, 195-6, 221-2, 236, 242, 245-6, 248 elements of hip hop xiii-xiv, 1, 34, 62, 182-3, 187-90, 222, 235, 241-6, 252, 256 embodiment (see voice, embodied) emceein xiv, 1, 22, 67, 72, 74, 82, 99101, 104-5, 139-45, 182-4, 1878, 190, 198-204, 219, 223, 2423, 245-6, 267, 269-70, 273 English 1-2, 10-11, 33, 45, 58, 73, 75, 856, 89-91, 96-8, 103, 106-7, 109, 112-9, 125-8, 139-42, 148-50, 153-4, 166, 168, 177, 188, 206, 230, 233, 244, 249, 251, 255, 259-61, 269, 273-4, 277-8 Enkore 73, 98, 168-9 epistemicity 230, 248, 262, 277 see also stance, epistemic ethnography xviii, 15-6, passim, 27-29, 31, 60-89, 197, 226, 249 see also linguistic ethnography; hiphopography essentialism (see reification) see also strategic essentialism evaluation 21, 39, 47, 48, 50-1, 52-4, 84, 103-4, 107, 112-5, 120, 124, 132, 142-3, 209, 212, 223-4, 225, 238, 242, 246, 277 see also narrative resolution; stance females in hip hop xvi-xvii, 23, 92, 105, 156, 269-70 femininity 92, 217, 252, 268, 270 fifth element xiv, 6, 182-3, 228, 241 see also knowledge and overstandin flow 2, 14, 104, 139, 141-2, 145, 197-202, 221, 255, 276 see also aura; vibe

Frankfurt 81, 83, 88, 191 freeze 187, 192, 203-9, 212, 217, 220, 222-3 see also b-boy stance; transition relevance place German language 62, 82, 98, 117, 126, 134, 153, 166-7, 269, 276 Germany 82-5, 152-3, 157, 165, 198, 267, 276 global hip hop linguistics 8-12, 15-6, 26, 89, 139, 187-90, 203, 225-6, 248, 253, 259 Global Hip Hop Nation 12, 17, 24, 85, 92, 134, 138, 145, 159, 163, 168, 174, 183-4, 194, 243, 2567, 260, 275-6 Goa 91, 177, 266 graffiti writin xiv, xvii, 1, 17, 22, 82, 93, 98, 131, 139, 146-52, 156, 158, 167, 183, 190, 194, 235, 242-3, 256, 258 Grizzly Adams 57-8, 257 Haryana 63 hegemony 7, 13, 24, 33, 71, 86, 167, 2334, 277 hegemonic masculinity 24, 186-7, 18990, 201, 217, 220, 225-7, 258, 266, 268-70 heteroglossia 4, 7, 25, 39-40, 50, 53, 55, 57, 113, 117, 122, 126, 149, 264, 271 see also deep structure heterosexuality xvi-xviii, 23-4, 156, 1867, 189-90, 192-4, 226, 256, 261, 265, 268-9 Hindi 2, 62, 74, 84-6, 89, 90, 96-7, 106-8, 113, 115, 117, 127-8, 139, 1402, 146, 148-51, 163, 154, 175-9, 260-1, 271, 274, 276 Hinduism 1-2, 145, 197, 274 Hindutva 274 hip hop, definitions of xii-xiii, 165, 181-4

Index 

hiphopography 15-6, 26, 29, 34, 56, 84, 88-9, 228, 253-4, 270 historicity 38, 159-64, 178, 180, 183-4, 194-5, 253, 273, 275 see also chronotope homies 104, 134, 259 homosexuality 36, 98, 217, 227, 261, 276 homosociality 52, 192, 256, 261 Hong Kong 60, 251 hood 5, 92, 133-4, 144 see also informal settlement ideology xiv, 9, 19, 26, passim, 38-9, 41, 43-4, 50-1, 55, 66, 83, passim, 94, 105, 121, 135, 170, 185, 188, 196, 202, 205, 217, 225-7, 260-2, 274-5 see also language ideology indexicality xiv, 36, 19-20, 34-5, 37-40, 54, 59, 85-6, 90-1, 94, 96, 1012, 104-5, 106-7, 119, 122, 126, 128-9, 144, 161, 222-3, 239, 247, 254, 261-3, 271 direct 37, 54 iconic 2, 39, 44, 114, 122, 125, 136, 178, 187, 189, 194, 199, 208, 211-23, 226, 256 indirect 37, 49, 52, 54 symbolic 72, 199-201, 206, 210-5, 219, 221 Indo-German Hip Hop and Urban Arts Project (2011-2012) 152-3, 156, 165-6 informal settlement 23, 74, 92, 107 Islam xii, 2, 144, 185, 274-5 Islamophobia 144-5 jhodpadpatti (see informal settlement) Kashmir 91, 185 Ken Swift 242-3, 251 kinaesthetic knowledge 191, 195-7, 199-200, 209-14, 221, 225-6, 256, 258

307

knowledge and overstandin (fifth element) xiii-xiv, 6, 9, 34, 42, 182-183, 196, 228-9, 233-4, 241-4, 246-50, 257-9, 263, 277-8 Korea 36, 83, 198, 207, 276 KRS-One xii-xiii, 183, 242-3, 278 language ideology xiv, 8, 40, 54, 56, 96, 130-58, 188, 253, 258, 263, 274 see also ideology linguistic ethnography 29-32, passim, 60-89, 186, 188, passim, 264, 272 logocentrism 8-9, 32, 186-7, 225, 229-33, 238-9, 247, 264 London 45, 57, 60, 266 Los Angeles 274 love 23, 76, 87, 133-6, 139, 141-7, 149, 153, 155-8, 255 Manmeet Kaur xvi-xviii, 23, 60, 64, 73-4, 91-4, 98-106, 113-6, 118-9, 126-9, 156, 245, 255, 266-70, 274 Marxism 134, 163, 181, 184 masculinity (cis heterosexual) xviii, 52, 105, 185, 189, 193, 208, 212, passim, 217-22, 225-7, 256, 261, 269-70 see also hegemonic masculinity MC Akshay Tashan 74-5, 267 MC Eucalips 71, 175-81, 184, 256, 258 MC Freezak 74-5, 267 MC Sarkar 267, 269 MicMaster Aeke 17-8, 78, 172-5, 194, 198, 201-2, 221, 226, 256, 258 migration xv, 22-3, 62, 93, 134, 139, 144, 177, 260-1 mobile phones xvii, 1, 63-4, 66, 71, 83, 191, 250, 266-9 morals 7, 20, 23, 27, 46, 51, 54, 90-3, 968, 104, 105, 107, 124, 127, 132,

308 Index

144, 155, 160-1, 169, 254, 2567, 259-60, 262, 273 see also stance, deontic Mumbai (Bombay) xvii, 57, 60-1, 64, 73-4, 91, 98-9, 106-8, 151, 156, 158, 167-9, 189, 193, 266, 273 Muslims (see Islam) multimodality 5, 155, 186, 188-9, 191, 197, 203, 225, 231, 275 narrative 4-6, passim, 20-1, passim, 4648, passim, 69-71, passim, 232, passim, 254, 257, 261-3 structure 4-5, 36, 47-48 positioning practices 5, 53-4 resolution 4-5, 7, 14, 21, 24, 48, 135-6, 139, 144, 160, 174-5, 178, 187, 189, 206, 215, 217, 221, 223-4, 229, 243-5, 2478, 262 Nebla 267, 269 New York City xii, 60, 88, 91, 106-7, 116, 127, 164, 168-9, 173, 175, 178, 196, 222, 226 see also Bronx Nigeria 10, 83 Nirbhaya (Jyoti Singh) xv, xviii, 156, 265 normalising xvi, 3-8, 11-2, 19, 21, 25, 33, 39, 42, passim, 90-129, 132, passim, 159, 161-2, passim, 189-90, passim, 245, 254, 257, 259-63, 270

polyphony 7, 25, 32, 34, 46, 53-5, 70-1, 88, 90, 123-4, 149, 196, 221, 225, 239, 254, 257, 259, 263 positionality (see stance; narrative positioning practices) postcolonial 10, 33, 48, 58, 86, 92, 139, 144, 160, 170, 183, 185, 248-9, 257, 261, 278 see also coloniality post-varieties approach 11-2, 41 Puducherry (formerly named Pondicherry) 152-3, 274 Punjab 1, 23, 84-5, 91, 106, 139, 142-6, 180, 208, 217, 266, 273 Punjabi language 2, 45, 85, 106, 126, 131, 139-46, 255, 274 Prabh Deep 1-3, 15, 23, 64, 73, 104, 134, 139-46, 153, 156-8, 188, 194, 223-4, 255

overstandin 233-4, 242-3, 258 ownership 4, 6-7, passim, 21, 25, passim, 42, 48, 54-9, passim, 149, passim, 245-6, passim

Rane 60, 167-9 rape xv, 22, 156, 265, 270 realness (see authenticity) reflexivity xiv, 18, 20-1, 25-7, 29, 31, 42, 46, 60, 63-4, 86-7, 89, 95, 97, 136, 156, 221, 228, 233, 241-2, 254, 262-3 reification 11, 19, 130, 133, 138-9, 144, 150, 156-7, 254, 256-7, 259 see also strategic essentialism remixin 11, 130-158, 188, 255, 258-9, representation (reppin) x, 8, 13, 17-8, 24-5, 28, 37, 39, 48, 55-6, 62, 76-8, 104, 130, 133-6, 138-9, 141-6, 156-8, 160, 163, 170, 174, 178, 198, 230-1, 248, 250, 252-3, 254-5, 263, 265, 269-70, 274 Rio de Janeiro 56

Pakistan 1, 139, 143-5, 255 Partition (of India and Pakistan 1947/48) 1, 23, 139, 144 point of view (see stance)

samplin xiv, 27, 56-9, 70, 73-4, 131, 136, 171, 178, 183, 257, 259, 263, 270 Samsam xvii-xviii, 23

Index 

Sanskrit 179, 277 Scientik 175, 195, 228-52, 256, 258 semiotic surface 39, 48, 50, 52, 54-7, 61, 71, 90, 102, 122, 126, 196-7, 229-30, 249, 271 Seti X 179-84, 246 sexuality xv, xviii, 9, 23, 156, 190, 261, 265-6, 268-10 Sikhism 134, 139, 144-5, 180-1, 266 Slovakia 83 slum (see informal settlement) Snoop Lion/Dogg 63-4, 82, 98, 223 social media 63, 83, 91 Somalia 75, 83, 162, 259 South Africa 137-8, 190, 226 stance 33, 35-7, 42, 46, 51-3, passim, 84, 117, 125, 194, 272 affective 9, 19, 34, 36, 52, 84, 168, 202-3, 228-31, 234, 236, 238-9, 243-6, 253, 258, 277 epistemic 52, 93, 80, 84, 90, 93, 103, 115-20, 122, 125, 128, 229-30, 233-4, 237-9, 242-3, 245, 24750, 253, 263, 277 deontic 7, 55, 84, 90, 93, 103, 1178, 120, 122, 128, 253, 270, 271, 277 see also b-boy stance strategic essentialism 133, 135-6, 139, 144, 156-7, 234, 256, 259 street art xiv, 139, 146-7, 149-51, 167, 182-3 style-shifting 36, 42-6, 49, 71, 51-3, 56, 90, 94-8, 101, 105, 108, 114-6, 127, 137-8, 181, 193, 195-6, 231, 272 styling 94-8, 103, 113-6, 119, 128 stylising 7, 45, 49, 57, 94-8, 101-6, 113, 116, 127-8, 177, 189 Sun-J 140, 142, 223-4, 267, 269 Sunz 198 synchronisation 6, 159-186, 257-9, 263, 273 taboo language 115, 126, 259

309

third space 2, 13-4, 88, 125, 138, 248, 257 transcultural voices, definitions of xviii, 4, 6-8, 24-5, 42, 47-8, 54, 58-9, 187, 257-9, 262-3 transculturation 3, 12-5, 19, 25, passim, 46-7, 58, 72, 83, passim, 253, 257, 259, 262-3 transition relevance place (TRP) 120, 206-7, 212, 217, 222 translanguaging 41-2, 126, 130-158, 177, 254-5, 260 translation 14, 85 turn-taking 47, 52, 120, 187, 189, 197, 203-7, 209, 211, 219, 230, 249, 269 United Kingdom 9, 29-30, 84, 93, 142, 149, 180, 266, 273 United States of America 9-10, 177, 181, 195, 233, 274, 277 see also American rap music Urdu 139, 143-5, 158, 255, 274 Uttar Pradesh 23 vibe 169, 201-2, 221, 225, 256, 261 see also aura; flow voice creaky 114-5, 126 embodied 5-6, 9, 29, 34, 47, 52, 133, 155, 186-9, 196, 199-226, 228, 231-4, 236, 247, 255-6, 258, 275 intonation 3, 6, 52, 90-129, 101-8, 112-29, 206, 230, 274 cantante (singsong) 90-129 fusion 126-9 loudness 90, 95 diminuendo (decreasing) 114-5, 126 phonosonic 36, 39, 48, 199-200, 204, 211 physical 35-7, 39-40 rhythm 90, 95, 97, 117

310 Index

allegro (fast) 101, 115, 126, 169 lento (slow) 3, 100 staccato (detached) 102, 113, 126 social 34, 35-7, 94, 133 somatic (see embodied voice) ‘own’ (see ownership) quality 3, 6, 36, 49, 116

Wazulu 111, 274 yoga 251 Zan 73, 111, 274 Zebster 17-8, 60, 76, 78, 165-6, 168-9, 195 Zine 17-8, 76, 78