Items in Figshare are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated."I feel English as fuck": translocality and the performance of alternative "I feel English as fuck": translocality and the performance of alternative identities through rap identities through rap PLEASE CITE THE PUBLISHED VERSION
This paper examines the construction of prisoners' identity through rap in England's high security prisons. While hip hop studies has often addressed rap's connection to the social practices of criminalised youths, prison rap cultures have received scant attention. This paper draws on a series of rap workshops and interviews with prisoners to investigate the experiences of black prisoners in high security prisons and how identities are produced and negotiated through rap. Rap is associated with the production of a range of identities and identifications, enabling prisoners to accommodate themselves to the conditions of their incarceration and to challenge aspects of the criminal justice system that they experience as unfair or illegitimate.
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the course of one year in London and Bristol to examine the performance of rap in English youth centres. Youth centres play a significant role in supporting and shaping rap culture. However, historically dominant narratives within hip-hop studies and hip-hop culture depict rap as a vernacular cultural form that emerges from ‘the street’, and which derives its authenticity through its relation to ‘the street’. We seek to move beyond such discourses and towards a recognition of the institutional processes, structures and networks that shape and sustain rap culture. Our focus on the institutional life of rap leads to an analysis of the various possibilities, limitations and tensions that arise in the coming together of public funding, and social policy priorities, local organisations and black vernacular culture.
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