Francophone Hip-hop Studies and Its Discontents

This review article discusses how Alain-Philippe Durand’s recent edited book about Francophone hip-hop gathers a plurality of voices and disciplinary approaches on hip-hop worlds, and offers thoughtful insights with regards to a number of issues often raised about hip-hop—related to race, migration or institutionalization of countercultural forms over different spaces of the French-speaking Atlantic—but also regarding the field of hip-hop studies itself. I address two main lines of discussion opened by the book and that could deserve further discussion in light of the current literature on hip-hop in the Francophone area. The first one is related to the contrasts and oppositions perceptible at the reading of this collection of papers, about the meaning of making hip-hop studies in a context of imagination of hip-hop as a “resistant” and countercultural form. The second is the issue of racial politics, imaginaries and identifications exchanged over the Atlantic space, and the role of Africa as an imagined or real land of reference in the construction of identities, art forms, ideologies and discourses in Francophone hip-hop worlds. I finally defend how the book’s rich reflections raise many questions and future possibilities, both for the field of hip-hop studies and beyond.