Hip-Hopping Across China: Intercultural Formulations of Local Identities

A Global Cypher: The Role of Hip Hop in Cultural Identity Construction and Navigation for Southeast Asian American Youth

“…Hip hop is a global phenomenon that offers one pathway for Southeast Asian immigrant adolescents in the United States to achieve an integrated cultural identity. The popularity of hip hop culture elevates local acceptance of SEAA youth and facilitates their “glocal” sense of belonging (Barrett, ). SEAA youth navigation between the three cultures of Asian, dominant White, and hip hop has implications for how we think about tricultural identity development.…”

“…Additionally, youth around the world increasingly use hip hop for a sense of identity agency, to expand their identity possibilities and critique/resist the constraints of monolothic identity choices dictated by their societies (Huq, ). Among many examples, hip hop has been used by Latinx youth to “critique their racialized identities in schools and society” (Pulido, ), by Aboriginal Australians to politicize and modernize a transnational Black identity (Morgan & Warren, ), by marginalized Maori and Pacific Islander youth as an identity marker (Kopytko, ), by Mongolian youth seeking to distinguish their generation from older, socialist‐era adults (Marsh, ), and by Chinese youth to showcase their individual, hybridized identities in resistance to a national culture that suppresses individualism (Barrett, ).…”

A Linguo-Cultural Approach to the Integration of Hip-hop Culture with Chinese Culture---Taking Rap Music as an Example

“…Barrett (2012) took Agha's Emblematic Figures of Identity as a framework to explore the processes of identity formation between local and foreign artists mediated by language in the Chinese hip-hop community through various methods, including interviews, lyric analysis and observations (eg. recording-studio and live performance observation) [11]. The final findings were similar to what Omoniyi (2009) identified as the case in Nigerian hip-hop that China is to create hip-hop rooted in local characteristics [12].…”

Brotherhood and Hip-Hop: The Case of Chinese Hip-Hop Club Triple H

“…“As another order of authenticity, the local context is multilayered and polycentric, characterized by marginality in multiple senses of the word, as mentioned earlier” (Wang, 2015, p. 236). In this new historical context, American hip-hop music has been constantly hybridized with Chinese features and lifestyles, and “any understanding of Chineseness should be ascertained by way of local efforts to recruit, inspect, and constantly reformulate the array of available emblematic figures of identity circulating within Chinese hip-hop domains” (Barrett, 2012, p. 259). Chinese rap is often interspersed with English words.…”

“…The combination of languages is not supposed to raise doubt about a rapper’s loyalty to the local culture, and the globalization of this US youth culture can endow the local subculture with new values. “The underlying technical knowledge of American styles is recruited not to disrupt local language practices around hip-hop, but as an asset to advance them” (Barrett, 2012, p. 252). It is rather demanding and innovative for many Chinese hip-hop producers to choose freestyle over well-prepared lyrics when they develop as a set of rhymes for rapping in Chinese, using a sophisticated array of performance skills in many cases as the trigger for the excitement of their audience.…”