Musical (African) Americanization in the new Europe: Hip hop, race, and the cultural politics of postcoloniality in contemporary Paris, Berlin, and London

This study demonstrates how minority youth across Europe are adopting the musical politics of American hip hop and aligning themselves with African Americans in their struggle for equality. It focuses specifically on the ways in which European hip hop gives voice to the ideal of equality through a non-assimilative expression of minority difference, a creative strategy that also exposes problematic national conflations of race and citizenship. By using racialized discourses hip hop youth are challenging the conventional distinctions between sameness and difference as a way of bringing into form the antinomies of inclusion and exclusion that structure national identities. For while hip hop tends to be read as a "resistance vernacular," it is also a form of assimilation into both national discourses and national economies. The example of hip hop in Europe is thus instructive as a cultural form that is ostensibly about militant opposition and resistance, but which functions in structures of linguistic and cultural inclusion, is widely commercially available, and circulates publicly through the national body politic.;To analyze the seeming paradox of a commercialized resistance music, the study employs the heuristic device "(African) Americanization." In short, this critical apparatus keeps us mindful of the complicated relationship between African American expressive culture and American consumer culture. By drawing out the oft-occluded blackness of American culture we can unpack the racial contradictions inherent in that set of commercially available cultural forms known collectively as "black music," and come to a new understanding of hip hop's global resonance.;Drawing on recorded music and media as well as interviews and observations from fieldwork in Paris, Berlin, and London from 2006 through 2008, the study demonstrates how the children and grandchildren of immigrants from the former colonies and peripheries of Europe are employing the African American musical protest strategies of hip hop both to differentiate themselves from and to relate themselves to their respective majority societies. The study thus situates musical analyses in the postcolonial and globalizing contexts of the three cities, demonstrating how black music structures local concerns creating syncretic expressions that are at once wholly local and definitively global.