Remix Multilingualism: Hip Hop, Ethnography and Performing Marginalized Voices

Description

"Remixing multilingualism" is conceptualised in this book as engaging in the linguistic act of using, combining and manipulating multilingual forms. It is about creating new ways of 'doing' multilingualism through cultural acts and identities and involving a process that invokes bricolage. This book is an ethnographic study of multilingual remixing achieved by highly multilingual participants in the local hip hop culture of Cape Town. In globalised societies today previously marginalized speakers are carving out new and innovating spaces to put on display their voices and identities through the creative use of multilingualism. This book contributes to the development of new conceptual insights and theoretical developments on multilingualism in the global South by applying the notions of stylization, performance, performativity, entextualisation and enregisterment. This takes place through interviews, performance analysis and interactional analysis, showing how young multilingual speakers stage different personae, styles, registers and language varieties.

Quentin Williams is a Senior Lecturer in the Linguistics Department at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and also a Research Fellow in the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) at the same university.

Williams' book is a state-of-the-art document of the current scholarly interest in the sociolinguistics of global hip hop ... An important case study for students of language, culture and society. * Journal of Sociolinguistics * Quentin Williams both broadens and connects two major areas of research: the sociolinguistics of multilingualism and hip hop studies ... Remix Multilingualism provides deep insights into the local Cape hip hop scene while demonstrating its important relationship with global hip hop. * Language in Society * Highly recommended. * Sociolinguistics Studies * Hip Hop messes up with language, it takes it to a whole nother level, where the poetic is mixed with the political, where the global and the local meet in a space of metissage, and where the familiar is so worked-on that it becomes unfamiliar. Grounded in the multilingual, the ethnographic and the marginalized, Remix Multilingualism shows us the power of (Global) Hip Hop (Language) and why we need to have our ears to the ground and hear it. WORD! * Awad Ibrahim, Full Professor of Education, University of Ottawa, Canada * Remix Multilingualism is the book we've been waiting for ever since 1994 when the 'new' South Africa enshrined its eleven official languages policy in the Constitution. Williams' clear, scholarly vision and rigorous, ethnographic labor in the Hip Hop vineyards of Kuilsriver have yielded a master text which demonstrates the rich multilingualism of marginalized voices in South Africa (and by extension, elsewhere in the Global South). It is a major contribution to the fields of Hip Hop studies and Multilingualism and a must-read for scholars and teachers alike. * Geneva Smitherman, University Distinguished Professor Emerita, Michigan State University, USA * An exciting and rich multi-sited linguistic ethnography of marginality in the South and its multilingual (re)mediation. Quentin Williams has (re)mixed a tantalizing recipe for understanding how lives and selves may be materialized in and through Linguistic Citizenship. * Christopher Stroud, Senior Professor of Linguistics and Director for the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research, University of the Western Cape, South Africa * This is a dope book. Quentin Williams - this Kaalvoet Laaitie vannie Lavis - nails the ways Hip Hop is a driving force in remixing multilingualism, doen your ding, shifting the raciolinguistic politics of multilingualism. This vital book is not only about remixing linguistic resources in South Africa but about remixing how we think about multilingualism. Read it and remix. -- Alastair Pennycook, Distinguished Professor of Language, Society and Education, University of Technology Sydney, Australia Remix Multilingualism takes readers into the heart of Cape Hip Hop's rich multilingual politics in a detailed ethnographic study that lays the groundwork for rethinking hegemonic understandings of' 'race', 'gender' and identity politics. The strength of Williams' work is that it pushes debates about 'coloured' and 'black' identities, as well as linguistic performances of these identities beyond the confines of what the academe has considered worthy of academic study in the South African context and beyond apartheid-era thinking about 'race', which endears in a country that remains racially divided. * Adam Haupt, Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa *