'Rap français', 'rap en français', 'rap de fils d'immigrés': French hip-hop and postcolonial issues"
Résumé
‘Rap français’, ‘rap en français’, ‘rap de fils d’immigrés’: French hip-hop and postcolonial issues
This paper seeks to situate the socio-political dimensions of hip-hop music through a cultural geography to show how it expresses a poetics of place, race and ethnicity. The local and the global are bonded to one another through contemporary cultural circuits and media flows: rap in particular circulates at a global level within international networks and is produced at the same time in local, hybrid forms. Participants in global rap scenes are dedicated to hip-hop culture by adopting certain ways to make sense of their lives according to specific local and national situations, cultural industries and public policies. The question of authenticity, which is contextually and spatially grounded (and most often articulated within the discourse of ‘keeping it real’), is central in hip-hop culture, and has become even more persistent as some US hip-hop entrepreneurs have become multi-millionaires. In the French context, the ‘rap français’ scene now represents the mainstream for the ‘rap en français’ activists. But more largely, they want to challenge the frames of definition given by identity policies and bring up postcolonial issues to contest the republican model (‘rap de fils d’immigrés’).