Translingualism, Kenyan Hip-Hop and Emergent Ethnicities: Implications for Language Theory and Pedagogy

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article reports on preliminary findings of three prominent Kenyan hip-hop artists, Jua Cali, Abbas Kubaff, and Nazizi Hirji, as they theorize and construct emergent ethnicities vis-à-vis their translingual practices. Using in-depth phenomenological interviews, observations of their everyday language use, and analysis of their language choices in music compositions, I demonstrate how the artists engaged in linguistic activism to resist Kenya’s dominant but deficit model of racial and ethnic categorization. The artists theorized their ethnicities as always emergent and as shaped by their everyday language use and local sociopolitical factors. However, the process of constructing the emergent ethnicities was complicated by the artists’ desire to also maintain a “true” Kenyan cultural identity. As such, reconciling these two seemingly conflicting ethnicities led to contradictions and ambivalence in theorizing their translingual practices. The article concludes by proposing language pedagogies that can lead to more positive linguistic identities and emergent ethnicities not only for Kenyans but also for African youth studying in Africa and in global contexts. It also proposes an emergent theory of translingualism that allows users to move across different types of multilingualism as they construct their linguistic and ethnic identities.