Battling the Race: Stylizing Language and Coproducing Whiteness and Colouredness in a Freestyle Rap Performance

Abstract

In the last 19 years of post-apartheid South African democracy, race remains an enduring and familiar trope, a point of certainty amid the messy ambiguities of transformation. In the present article, we explore the malleable, permeable, and unstable racializations of contemporary South Arica, specifically the way in which coloured and white racializations are negotiated and interactionally accomplished in the context of Capetonian hip-hop. The analysis reveals the complex ways in which racialized bodies are figured semiotically through reference to historical time and contemporary (translocal) social space. But also the way iconic features of blackness are reindexicalized to stand for a transnational whiteness.

Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective

“…These historical and contemporary linkages underscore the importance of interrogating the role of language and race in the reconfiguration of colonial distinctions in purportedly postcolonial, postracial, and postapartheid settings (Alim & Reyes 2011; Williams & Stroud 2015). Rafael (2000) analyzes historical and contemporary conceptions of racial and linguistic mixing in the Philippines, a site of Spanish and US colonialism, and the contested perspectives from which this mixing is framed as a sign of superiority or inferiority.…”

Parodies of whiteness: Die Antwoord and the politics of race, gender, and class in South Africa

“…NOTES 1 'Coloured' is a racial category in South Africa, used by the apartheid government to refer to individuals who were not easily classifiable into either of the dominant racial groupings (i.e., 'white' or 'black'). Today, the term 'coloured' is still in widespread use, though its meaning has fragmented to include both a racial classification and a more particular cultural affiliation (Adhikari 2005;Williams & Stroud 2014).…”

“…‘white’ or ‘black’). Today, the term coloured is still in widespread use, though its meaning has fragmented to include both a racial classification and a more particular cultural affiliation (Adhikari 2005; Williams & Stroud 2014).…”

Critical Perspectives on Linguistic Fixity and Fluidity

“…Their defense of the purity of standard languages probably originates in the class habitus of the educated, but that is not the end of the matter. The discourse of 'slang' and 'mixture' belongs to long-standing historical ideologies of language that still circulate through South African society, racializing speakers of nonstandard registers of Afrikaans ( Anthonissen 2013 ), especially speakers of urban Cape Afrikaans ( Stone 2002 ;McCormick 2006 ;Williams & Stroud 2014 ). Here we see another example of intersecting micro-and macro-scale processes, not just of classrooms practices and school policy, but also of school staff perceptions of students and families and enduring colonial-and apartheid-era language prejudices.…”