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Article published In:
Meaning Making in the Periphery
Edited by Luiz Paulo Moita-Lopes and Mike Baynham
[AILA Review 30] 2017
► pp. 1–26

Migrant rap in the periphery

Performing politics of belonging

| University of Jyväskylä, Finland
| University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Focusing on a YouTube performance by an emergent Finnish Somali rapper and the audience responses it has generated, this paper looks at ways in which rap music engages with the issue of belonging. Drawing on recent theorizations of belonging as a multi-dimensional, contingent and fluid process, along with sociolinguistic work on globalization and superdiversity, Finnish hip hop culture and popular cultural practices in social media, the paper investigates how belonging is performatively and multi-semiotically interrogated in its online context. It shows how rap can serve as a significant site and channel for new voices in turbulent social settings characterized by rapid social change and complex diversity, as well as provide affordances for critical responses to and interventions into xenophobic and nationalist debates and discourses of belonging.

Keywords: Finland, hip hop culture, rap music, YouTube, migrants, blackness, belonging, multisemioticity, sociolinguistics
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Belonging as a multifaceted process
  • Peripherality, centrality and Finnish hip hop
  • Finnish hip hop and rap: A brief introduction
  • The emergence of migrant rap
  • Performing a politics of belonging: The case of Bizzyiam
  • Rap performance as politics of belonging on the stage of social media
  • Belonging as emplacement and emotional attachment
  • The (im)possibility of social belonging
  • Engagement with discourses of belonging
  • The ultimate denial of belonging
  • Audience reactions – demarcating the right to belonging
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 15 January 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.00001.lep
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