H. Samy Alim

Introduction: Complicating race: Articulating race across multiple social dimensions

This introduction to the special issue, ‘Complicating Race: Articulating Race Across Multiple Social Dimensions’, situates the collection of articles with respect to the wider body of sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological work on race in US contexts. The articles not only explode the myth of the ‘postracial’, but also seek to recast the relationship between language and race by demonstrating how race is inextricably bound with multiple, intersecting social dimensions and power relations.

On Some Serious Next Millennium Rap Ishhh Pharoahe Monch, Hip Hop Poetics, and the Internal Rhymes of Internal Affairs

By examining the Hip Hop poetics on Pharoahe Monchs album, Internal Affairs (1999), this article demonstrates the linguistic inventiveness and innovativeness of contemporary African American lyricists. As poets, Hip Hop MCs (rhymers) have both built on and expanded far beyond the American poetic tradition, using a form that is highly intertextual and that demonstrates multilayered poetic complexity. While Hip Hop MCs draw upon alliteration and assonance and other traditional rhyme forms, they also employ new rhyme strategies that require new categories of knowledge, such as compound internal rhymes, primary and secondary internal rhymes, chain rhymes, back-to-back chain rhymes, and bridge rhymes. Hip Hop MCs also employ various literary techniques, such as wordplay, simile, metaphor, narrativity, flashback, role-play, suspense, irony, and imagery in their lyrical compositions. Often constructing these rhymes in a multirhyme matrix, Hip Hop MCs offer a vast corpus of literary and linguistic texts to be analyzed.

Moving the crowd, ‘crowding’ the emcee: The coproduction and contestation of black normativity in freestyle rap battles

This article shows how participants in freestyle rap battles coproduce and contest hip hop as a black space. Through discourse analysis of long-term ethnographic fieldwork at an open mic venue in Los Angeles, we show how black normativity is co-constructed and sometimes challenged by non-black emcees and audience members. Specifically, we examine videotaped data of verbal artistic duels between a black and a Latino emcee, analyzing instances in which the black emcee draws on stereotypes of Mexicans to racialize the Latino emcee. We show how the Latino emcee sometimes participates in his own racialization, while, in other instances, he opposes this process with the support of the audience. This multiparty coproduction and contestation of black normativity highlights the fact that the normative status of particular social identities across sociocultural contexts cannot be seen as given, but rather, as constantly challenged and maintained by invested actors.

Interview with Geneva Smitherman

The following interview was conducted over email by H. Samy Alim in July 2012. The text reflects our style-shifting between multiple ways of speaking and writing. Some editing of the original exchanges was done in preparing the interview for publication. The quotations from Barack Obama’s speeches represent our own transcription of the original speeches. Geneva Smitherman dedicates this interview to revolutionary linguist, the late Dr. Neville Alexander, her long-time friend and comrade in the struggle for language rights.

African American English: Linguistic Introduction

African American English: Linguistic Introduction By Lisa Green. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 2002.