Hip Hop and Diasporic Cultural Production: The Caribbean Diaspora in Toronto

• In Event: 228 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 04. Cultural Production

Abstract

Utilizing rap music and hip hop culture in Toronto, Ontario, Canada as a case study, this paper provides a rationale for a diasporic understanding of cultural fields. Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu and Rinaldo Walcott, this paper examines Michie Mee, Canada’s “first lady of hip hop,” as a case study of diasporic cultural production. This chapter discusses the marginalization of rap music and people of color within the music industry in Toronto; the historical, social, and economic conditions of Caribbean migration in Toronto; and offers an analysis of interviews and a selection of the musical works of Michie Mee. How does she use rap music to showcase her diasporic roots/routes? How does she redefine Canadian identity in ways that emphasize the importance of diasporic identities? How does she use rap music to challenge racist and racialized conceptions of Canadian identity (e.g. as predominantly European)? How can diasporic cultural identity and diasporic cultural production inform Bourdieusian analyses of culture? Based on this analysis, this paper makes the following contributions to Bourdieusian understandings of cultural production. First, cultural identity, like other forms of capital, is a resource which is struggled over within all cultural fields. Second, crucial to the formation and contestation of cultural identities are various practices of representation. Cultural fields not only produce practices, or ways of acting, but they also produce representations, or ways of seeing, which are used in struggles over both identity and the mechanisms of identification. Finally, cultural fields have always been transnational in character.

Author

• Athena Elafros, Keuka College