Made in Marseille: Global youth and cosmopolitan identities
Item
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Title
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Made in Marseille: Global youth and cosmopolitan identities
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:ca524392251d:11126
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identifier
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11264
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Creator
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Wojtkowski, Chong J.,
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Contributor
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Francesca C. Sautman
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Romance literature | Music | autobiographical trace | hip-hop | Marseille | urban youth culture
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Abstract
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This dissertation argues for the significance of hip-hop musical culture in the reformulation of French identity by socio-economic, ethnic, and racial minorities. Indeed, these groups, particularly the youth within them, are vigorously reassessing, refiguring and challenging the ways French identity is affirmed through an ensemble of dominant, mainstream discourses. Through the analysis of song lyrics, visual imagery employed in CD inserts/booklets, music videos, and strategies for promotion and production, I argue that Marseille hip hoppers active from the early 1990s to 2010 have used audio-visual modes as discursive tools to articulate hybrid cosmopolitan identities that contest essentialist notions of identity solely or primarily defined on the basis of the nation-state. The cosmopolitan city of Marseille, with its long tradition of emphasizing its difference from the rest of France, is my focus as the urban site that gives its voice to the youth culture at the center of my thesis. I thus investigate how Marseille rappers espouse a regionalist discourse that casts the transnational space of the Mediterranean, including Southern Europe and North Africa, as the locus of their negotiation of identity while affirming difference from a purportedly homogenous national center. Rather than being isolated from their context, rap lyrics must be read in tandem with the music, images, and production, for intertextual readings give a fuller picture of who the artist is, and what messages lie in the text. Thus, I view the entire practice of hip-hop---not just the texts---as a privileged site of identification and self-construction for the rappers, and suggest that they follow a strategy of autobiographical performance writing. The bulk of the dissertation is therefore devoted to autobiographical readings of hip hop texts and images in order to underscore the ways in which identity is articulated through the disengagement from and contesting of existing racial, ethnic, and class constructs in contemporary French society. I propose that a preferable framework for the analysis of youth identities in Marseille is global cosmopolitanism. This aptly describes the choice of rootedness in Marseille simultaneously with the rejection of the binary conception of identity that is so unique to France. This project's goal is to validate the notion of a "French cultural reach," which hybridizes notions of place, space, nation, and ethnicity, without locking Marseille hip hoppers within the dichotomy of French/Other.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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French
