"Marginal binaire audio / outsider et en stéréo": on the margins of French rap, 2003-2013

Abstract

Rap music has always expressed various degrees of confrontation, appropriation, rejection, and crossing borders. Providing outlets for expressions previously limited to the margins, it offers a large canvas against which many dimensions of identity politics can be projected. France, the world's second-largest market for rap music, is by no means an exception in this regard, as its forms of hip-hop music have grown out of inflections of the dominant African-American practice and evolved into something unique to its own cultural and historical situation. Or, rather, situations: for the central practice of borrowing, riffing, and blending often yields a music rich with confrontation between and metissage among issues of identity as they are related to race, ethnicity, and nation. By examining several recent French rap projects through the notion of the counternation that proposes simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, the present study considers how expressions from the margins can also be expressions of th...