From Trickster to Badman to “gangsta”: Globalizing the Badman Mythoform through Hip-hop Music
Open Access
- Author:
- Nyawalo, Mich Yonah
- Graduate Program:
- Comparative Literature
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 16, 2011
- Committee Members:
- Thomas Albert Hale, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Thomas Albert Hale, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Jonathan Paul Eburne, Committee Member
Jennifer Boittin, Committee Member
Gabeba Baderoon, Committee Member
Sophia A Mcclennen, Committee Member
Dr Aaron L Rosenberg, Special Member - Keywords:
- Badman
Trickster
Hip-Hop
France
Kenya
United States
Gobalization
Music
Social Activism
Rap - Abstract:
- While a vast amount of hip-hop scholarship has focused on the proliferation of rap music within contemporary national contexts, little research has been conducted on the ways in which rappers have capitalized transnationally on each other’s national histories and folklore in their music. As a counterpoint to this dominating presentism in current hip-hop scholarship, my project analyzes how the mythological figures of the trickster and the badman, key characters in numerous African-American traditional narratives, have dramatically influenced the modes through which authenticity and notions of communal agency have shaped hip-hop in the United States, France, and Kenya. I show how and why these figures that first emerged in U.S. hip-hop have been extensively reproduced in Kenyan and French rap music. In this fashion, my dissertation tracks the formation and articulation of these tropes in hip-hop music and reveals the extent to which they are symptomatic of key moments in the history of the United States, France, and Kenya. The figure of the trickster has survived for centuries in African-American music, mainly because of each subsequent generation’s ability to reinvent it in their own image as well as accommodate it to their own social predicaments. During slavery, trickster tales emerged as ontological modes of cultural resistance through which Africans could cope with the physical and ideological realities that had been imposed on them. In the 1890s, the trickster tales that had been popularized during slavery evolved into what was to be known as badman heroic figures. The figure of the badman as an outlaw was the antecedent of the “gangsta” persona that later appeared in hip-hop culture. It is only through an exploration of this genealogy that the global cultural translations in contemporary hip-hop become historically intelligible. My project thus seeks to analyze how the badman trope, through its multiple manifestations in both “conscious” and “gangsta” rap, has been appropriated by French and Kenyan hip-hop artists.