In this article I propose the exploration of racial discourse in recent Black Caribbean rap and hip-hop productions. Rap and hip-hop are often used as a sociopolitical tool that—through writing and language—achieve to create activist movements. Specifically, I study the work of the Cuban hip-hop group Obsesión [Obsession] and of Cuban rapper Robe L Ninho and the work of Dominican rappers Circuito Negro and JNoa. I particularly focus on some of their songs that make of the genre an opportunity to approach the racial topic in their communities and a way to celebrate Blackness. This way, these hip-hop and rap songs break the most commercial, common, and expected pattern of lyrics that focus on topics that oversexualize the female (Black) body, that often objectify women, and that reproduce a patriarchal and heteronormative discourse. Instead, these songs, through the topics that they explore, aim to create community and craft a space for social activism. They do so, for example, by singing about hair (Obsesión and Robe L Ninho) and by singing about their Afro-Caribbean communities and their existence as Black people in their neighborhoods (Circuito Negro, JNoa). Among a variety of tracks, I mainly focus on songs that are connected in topic and that represent a continuumin the production of approximately the last decade. So, for example I analyze the songs “Los pelos [Hair]” by Obsesión (2014) and “N.E.G.R.O. [N.E.G.R.O.]” by Robe L Ninho (2022) that focus on Afro hair, celebrate the beauty of it, and denounce the prejudices against it almost a decade apart from each other. Then, I focus on the song “Revolufunk” by Circuito Negro (2011) and the song “Qué fue[What Happened?]” (2022) by JNoa. In this case also there is a generational gap between the artists that symbolize both the evolution of the genre and the consistency of the topics that they cover and that are connected to Blackness. In addition to the racial discourse and the connection of topics across the last decade, these songs also create an inter-Caribbean discourse that transcends the concept of nation and nationality and instead identifies with and shapes a message for Black Spanish-speaking Caribbean people. These songs reveal a poetic that adds urban sounds to a spoken word tradition and that mixes writing, oral tradition, and language in lieu to create a sociopolitical activist movement for Afro-Caribbean people. Also, by focusing on race in countries where the Black communities are often made invisible, they shed light on minorities that usually are relegated to the lowest layers of society. Thus, through their music, these artists raise awareness on their Blackness and on their communities, but they also create a transversal Afro-Caribbean narrative that connects and creates a sense of community among Blacks in the Caribbean in their native Spanish language. This study, so, represents an opportunity to shift a US-centered discourse on Blackness and race and opens new ways of living
在本文中，我建议探讨加勒比黑人近期说唱和嘻哈作品中的种族话语。说唱和嘻哈经常被用作一种社会政治工具，通过文字和语言来创造积极的运动。具体而言，我将研究古巴嘻哈团体 Obsesión [Obsession] 和古巴说唱歌手 Robe L Ninho 的作品，以及多米尼加说唱歌手 Circuito Negro 和 JNoa 的作品。我特别关注他们的一些歌曲，这些歌曲将这一流派作为切入其社区种族问题的契机和颂扬黑人的一种方式。通过这种方式，这些嘻哈和说唱歌曲打破了最商业、最常见、最令人期待的歌词模式，这些歌词关注的主题将女性（黑人）的身体过度性化，经常物化女性，并复制父权制和异性恋话语。相反，这些歌曲通过所探讨的主题，旨在创建社区，为社会活动创造空间。例如，她们通过歌唱头发（《Obsesión》和《Robe L Ninho》）、歌唱她们的非洲-加勒比社区以及她们作为黑人在社区中的存在（《Circuito Negro》和《JNoa》）来实现这一目标。在各种曲目中，我主要关注那些主题相关的歌曲，这些歌曲代表了近十年来创作的连续性。例如，我分析了《Obsesión》（2014 年）的歌曲 "Los pelos [Hair]"和《Robe L Ninho》（2022 年）的歌曲 "N.E.G.R.O.[N.E.G.R.O.]"，这两首歌的主题都是非洲人的头发，歌颂非洲人头发的美丽，并谴责对非洲人头发的偏见。然后，我重点关注 Circuito Negro（2011 年）的歌曲 "Revolufunk "和 JNoa（2022 年）的歌曲 "Qué fue[发生了什么]"。在这种情况下，艺术家之间也存在着代沟，这既象征着流派的演变，也象征着他们所涉及的与黑人有关的话题的一致性。除了种族论述和过去十年间主题的联系之外，这些歌曲还创造了一种超越国家和民族概念的跨加勒比论述，转而认同和塑造了讲西班牙语的加勒比黑人的信息。这些歌曲揭示了一种在口语传统中加入城市声音的诗意，这种诗意将写作、口语传统和语言混合在一起，为非洲裔加勒比人创造了一种社会政治活动。此外，在黑人社区经常被忽视的国家，通过关注种族问题，他们揭示了通常被置于社会最底层的少数群体。因此，通过他们的音乐，这些艺术家提高了人们对其黑人身份及其社区的认识，同时也用他们的母语西班牙语创造了一种横向的非洲-加勒比叙事，将加勒比地区的黑人联系在一起，并创造了一种社区感。因此，这项研究为改变以美国为中心的关于黑人和种族的讨论提供了一个机会，并为在其他地域生活和理解非洲移民社群开辟了新的途径。
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Following the transnational turn in modernist studies, and building on Stuart Hall’s and Nadia Ellis’s concepts of diaspora as key to understanding Caribbean modernism, this essay examines Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960) as the first wave of West Indian fiction that traces a black, male consciousness shaped by modernity and migration, one whose lived experiences and feelings of belonging in post-WWII London resist binarized understandings of colonizer and colonized. Selvon’s and Salkey’s fiction represents complex and conflicting senses of black masculinity as mediated by colonialism, bourgeois respectability, and whiteness. Migrant or middle-class, normative or queer, the various modes of black masculinity captured in the novels counter reductive attempts to ascribe one fixed identity, ideological position, or reality to Windrush flaneurs who might prefer walking the streets of London incognito.
继现代主义研究的跨国转向之后，在斯图尔特-霍尔（Stuart Hall）和纳迪娅-埃利斯（Nadia Ellis）将散居地概念作为理解加勒比现代主义的关键的基础上，本文研究了萨姆-塞尔冯（Sam Selvon）的《孤独的伦敦人》（The Lonely Londoners，1956 年）和安德鲁-萨尔基（Andrew Salkey）的《逃离秋天的人行道》（Escape to an Autumn Pavement，1960 年），作为西印度小说的第一波浪潮，这两部小说追溯了现代性和移民塑造的黑人男性意识，他们在二战后伦敦的生活经历和归属感抵制了殖民者和被殖民者的二元化理解。塞尔冯和萨尔基的小说表现了以殖民主义、资产阶级体面和白人为媒介的复杂而矛盾的黑人男性意识。无论是移民还是中产阶级，无论是规范还是同性恋，小说中捕捉到的黑人男性气质的各种模式都反驳了将一种固定的身份、意识形态立场或现实归结为 "风流 "流氓的企图，这些流氓可能更喜欢隐姓埋名地行走在伦敦街头。
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Egyptian writer Mona Prince’s self-published 2012 memoir Revolution is My Name abounds with descriptions of transferring Tahrir Square into a domestic space during the 2011 Revolution: people nurturing fellow visitors and protestors; sharing of blankets, warm clothing and mattresses; cooking and eating; distributing Coca-Cola, endless cups of tea, cigarettes; and nursing the injured who clashed with the police. In one point in her chronicling of her political participation, she describes moving one of her friend’s mattresses out into the square and accepting food from whoever is offering it to her. She also details the square being cleaned by women of the elite class, heralding, in Prince’s imaginings, “a new people.” Focusing on descriptions of the cleaning of the square, this article argues that Prince expands domesticity’s political function while overlooking class and religious biases and blindness that undergird her theorizations of it. This blindness, I argue ultimately undermines the revolution’s attempt at total rupture from the unjust state regime of the past and extends insights into the entanglement of power, oppression and political resistance. Given that theorizations of cleanliness have been mobilized by the colonial project as an alibi for the gendered and racialized inequality of colonialism (and neocolonialism), cleaning here raises the specter of colonialism and highlights its mobility to function as a tool to measure complex class ambivalences.
埃及作家莫娜-普林斯（Mona Prince）在 2012 年自费出版的回忆录《革命是我的名字》（Revolution is My Name）中大量描述了 2011 年革命期间解放广场变成家庭空间的情景：人们照顾来访者和抗议者；分享毯子、御寒衣物和床垫；做饭、吃饭；分发可口可乐、喝不完的茶和香烟；护理与警察发生冲突的伤员。在她记录自己参与政治活动的过程中，她描述了自己把朋友的一个床垫搬到广场上，接受别人给她的食物。她还详细描述了精英阶层的妇女打扫广场的情景，在普林斯的想象中，这预示着 "一个新的民族"。本文将重点放在对广场清洁工作的描述上，认为普林斯在扩展家政的政治功能的同时，忽略了阶级和宗教偏见，以及支撑她对家政理论的盲目性。我认为，这种盲目性最终破坏了革命试图与过去不公正的国家政权彻底决裂的努力，并扩展了对权力、压迫和政治反抗之间纠葛的洞察。鉴于清洁的理论被殖民项目所利用，作为殖民主义（和新殖民主义）性别化和种族化不平等的托辞，这里的清洁提出了殖民主义的幽灵，并强调了其作为衡量复杂的阶级矛盾的工具的流动性。
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