Hip-Hop and Black English: The Ultimate Counterinterpellations

• In Event: Education and Counterinterpellation: A New Look at Louis Althusser

Abstract

My goal in this paper is to flip the script, as Hip-Hoppers love to say, to go from the ground-up and show how counter-interpellation, as conceived through Althusser, is taken up, re-interpreted, bodily performed and made an everyday act. To do so, I conducted two critical ethnographic studies. The first was conducted in 2007 in a large English-language high school in a metropolitan city in southwestern Ontario, Canada. The second was conducted in 2011 in a French-language high school in a metropolitan city in northeastern Ontario. Both studies focused on a group of continental African refugee and immigrant students who came from different parts of Africa: Senegal, South Africa, Somalia, Djibouti, Nigeria, Togo, to name a few.
Once in North America all the adjectives that used to describe them (e.g., tall, Wolof, basketball player, Zulu, or intellectual) are subsumed under the umbrella of Blackness. They enter what I am calling a ‘rhizomatic process of becoming Black.’ That is, I am contending, these young people were not Black in Africa, but they become Black in North America. They fall under the eyes of power, the interpellation of Whiteness where their bodies are read as “Blacks” – with a modernist imperial/colonial outlook (Willinsky, 1998). The outcome of this interpellation, I also intend to show, is that continental African youths join the African diaspora, specifically in North America, by becoming part of it. They do so through language (learning Black English as a Second Language and not the so-called standard English) and Hip-Hop (taking up and reciting Hip-Hop identities and not ‘mainstream’ identities). But before they can join the African diaspora, they have to translate, negotiate and answer the following questions. What does ‘being’ Black really mean in North America and if one is ‘becoming’ Black, what does this call for, entail, and thus produce? In other words, how does the socially constructed person transform him/herself (or being transformed) from a nationality – say, Djiboutian – into a color? And above all, how is language central or fundamental to this transformation? Two more questions also pose themselves. First, why would continental African youths need and want to learn, appropriate, re-produce, and re-perform diasporic African symbolic systems of dress, walk, and talk and second, what does it mean for a Black ESL learner to acquire Black English as a Second Language (BESL)? That is, at a time when North American Blackness is governed by how it is negatively located in a race-conscious society, what symbolic, cultural, pedagogical, and identity investments would learners have in locating themselves politically and racially at the margin of representation?
Yes, continental African youths are learning Black English as a second language, I will show, and yes, they are skewing dominant ‘mainstream’ identities in favor of Hip-Hop and other Black identities; thus making Black English and Hip-Hop the ultimate counter-interpellations.

Willinsky, J. (1998). Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Author

• Awad Ibrahim, University of Ottawa