This article aims to discuss how diasporic Hmong youth express nostalgia and resistance through rap music, transmit collective memory, encourage young people to question social and political structures, and engage in public life. Based on fieldwork in France, this article explores how French Hmong rap artists convert their nostalgia, experience and in-betweenness into the sound space. This article also demonstrates how French Hmong rap artists construct an alternative discourse in which young people are able to show solidarity. As a result, this article provides some insights into navigating the popular culture of an underrepresented community and its belonging, nostalgia and resistance.
Dress has been used as a visual avowal of social status, personality, personal taste, identity, and philosophy throughout history. This article aims to assess the changing dress practices and understand the meaning of ethnic dress in the diasporic community in a super-connected era. This article examines the cultural–historical contexts that contribute to dress practices at the macro level and individuals’ perceptions at the micro level. This article demonstrates how the Hmong experience can contribute to the knowledge of dress as a vehicle of agency, identity, and aspiration in fashion and material culture studies. In doing so, this article provides new insights into a growing area of research by exploring the emotionality of materials in terms of how imagination and aspiration of ethnicity are inscribed in and ascribed to dress and clothing in diasporic groups.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.