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

Abstract

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.