Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

66 Part 1: Language and Ideology
modes of self-fashioning seriously, and if we do, how we think through
their implications’.
It is indisputable that fl ows of popular culture are dominated at one
level by a weight and directionality that are part of the unevenness of
global relations. Thus, Pennay (2001: 128) comments in his discussion of
rap in Germany that ‘the fl ow of new ideas and stylistic innovations in
popular music is nearly always from the English-speaking market, and
not to it’. Similarly, in her discussion of the Basque rap group Negu
Gorriak (featuring the Mugurza brothers), Urla points out that ‘unequal
relations between the United States record industry and Basque radical
music mean that Public Enemy’s message reaches the Mugurza brothers in
Irun, and not vice versa’ (Urla, 2001: 189). Perry (2004: 17) meanwhile critiques
what she calls the ‘romantic Afro-Atlanticism’ of Gilroy’s (1993)
notion of the Black Atlantic, with its view of multiple infl uences across communities
of African origin around the Atlantic. ‘Black Americans as a community’,
she insists, ‘do not consume imported music from other cultures
in large numbers’ and thus ultimately the ‘postcolonial Afro-Atlantic hip
hop community is . . . a fantastic aspiration rather than a reality’ (2004: 19).
While it may be the case that there is little takeup of imported music in
US communities, however, there is also a strong case to be made that the
circles of fl ow of popular culture are far more complex than a process of
undirectional spread. Mitchell (2001) points out that as hip hop has spread,
it has become a vehicle through which local identity is reworked. Indeed,
if we want to fi nd ‘innovation, surprise, and musical substance in hip-hop
culture and rap music’ he argues (2001: 3), it is increasingly necessary ‘to
look outside the USA to countries such as France, England, Germany, Italy,
and Japan, where strong local currents of hip-hop indigenization have
taken place’. Androutsopoulos (2003: 11) suggests that since ‘hip-hop is a
globally dispersed network of everyday cultural practices which are productively
appropriated in very different local contexts, it can be seen as
paradigmatic of the dialectic of cultural globalization and localization’
(my translation). Within these relations of cultural globalization and localization,
furthermore, there are numerous signifi cant sites of cultural production
outside the United States. While the United States may be less
infl uenced by external changes in global hip hop, countries such as France,
with a very different postcolonial history, are far more infl uenced by the
diverse Francophone world, which inhabits its urban environments.
Elsewhere in the world, there are diverse linguistic/cultural circuits of
fl ow. In the relations between Samoan, Hawaiian, Maori and other Pacifi c
Islander communities, we can see a ‘pan-Pacifi c hip-hop network that has
bypassed the borders and restrictions of the popular music distribution
industry’ (Mitchell, 2001: 31). These circles of hip-hop fl ow are at times
overlapping: Hawaii, for example, where Sudden Rush have developed
‘ne mele paleoleo, Hawaiian hip hop, a cut n’ mix of African and Jamaican