Revolutionary but gangsta: hip-hop in Khayelitsha, South Africa

The global spread of hip-hop has taken shape through the localisation of hip-hop practices. Youth all over the world have taken up a hip-hop corporeal schema. A key question of this research project is: How does hip-hop enable youth to empower local culture, language and social practice through emceeing? This thesis presents the original findings of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cape Town from 2008 to 2013 on hip-hop in Khayelitsha, a predominantly isiXhosa-speaking township on the outskirts of the city. The main element of hip-hop practiced in Khayelitsha is emceeing. The literature on hip-hop is dominated by semiotic lyrical analyses. This thesis departs from this approach and develops a phenomenological model of hip-hop to account for the intercorporeality of hip-hop s collective capacities. Emceeing is a specific embodied mode of vocality of doing words with the body. My research utilised a phenomenological and decolonising methodology in order to document this vital embodied capacity of emceeing and privilege the voices of participants. My thesis describes and analyses what youth in Khayelitsha are doing with hip-hop by considering the collectivity-making capacities of live events such as cyphers, open mics, and studio jams. Such live activities develop a new way of inhabiting the space of the township, thus transforming identity, belonging and locality. Rap in Khayelitsha is either in English or in a mix of urban Xhosa, tsotsitaal and deep Xhosa (known as spaza hip-hop). The legacies of colonising missionaries, and oppression under apartheid, continue to play out in local language ideologies, in the education system and in tensions manifest in the local hip-hop scene. Younger members of the township of Khayelitsha understand what they are doing with hip-hop as an extension of Xhosa oral traditions, particularly the art of the imbongi (praise poet). They see hip-hop as a continuation of aspects of imbongi such as improvisation, the role of the poet, the experience of flow and praising ancestors. This ...