The Co-Construction of Whiteness in an MC Battle  

Oleh:

Cutler, Cecelia

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Pragmatics: Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association vol. 17 no. 1 (2007), page 9-22.
Topik: Ritual insults; MC battles; Whiteness; Interculturality.
Fulltext: 544-877-1-PB.pdf (91.26KB)

Isi artikel

Within hip-hop, MC (Master of Cermonies) battles are one of the most visible and potentially humiliating venues for demonstrating ones verbal skill. Competitors face each other in front of an audience. Each has a minute to diss his or her opponent against a backdrop of rhythms produced by a DJ. Each participants performance generally consists of freestyle or spontaneously generated rhymes designed to belittle some aspect of the opponents appearance, rhyming style or place of origin, and ritual insults directed at his or her mother, sister, or crew. Opponents show good will by embracing afterwards. Ultimately the audience decides who wins by applauding louder for one opponent than the other at the end of the battle. Using the framework of interactional sociolinguistics (Goffman 1974, 1981), I will analyze clips from a televised MC battle in which the winning contestant was a White teenager from the Midwest called Eyedea. I will show how Eyedea and his successive African American opponents, R.K. and Shells, participate in the co-construction of his Whiteness. Eyedea marks himself linguistically as White by overemphasizing his pronunciation of /r/ and by carefully avoiding Black ingroup forms of address like nigga (c.f. Smitherman 1994). R.K. and Shells construct Eyedeas Whiteness largely in discursive ways by pointing out his resemblance to White actors, and alluding to television shows with White cultural references. Socially constructed racial boundaries must be acknowledged in these types of performances because Whiteness (despite the visibility of White rappers like Eminem) is still marked against the backdrop of normative Blackness in hip-hop (Boyd 2002). In a counter-hegemonic reversal of Du Boisian double-consciousness hip-hop obliges White participants to see themselves through the eyes of Black people. Hip-hop effectively subverts dominant discourses of race and language requiring MC battle participants to acknowledge and ratify this covert hierarchy.

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