Aesthetics and Intertexts of Resistance and Liberation in the African Diaspora: Hip-hop and Creolite.

In this paper, we examine aesthetic modalities and intertexts of poetry from the francophone and anglophone African diasporas through a concerted analysis of the structural and stylistic elements of the poetic discourses of creolite in the Caribbean and Hip-hop in North America. Here we contend that Afro-Caribbean and African-American identity construction and performance find their principal forms of expression in disrupting literary and cultural norms through intertextual relationality and revolutionary aesthetic appropriation. (1) One may even argue, as Fanon seems to suggest in Black Skin, White Masks, that any discourse of liberation is automatically one of appropriation. (2) The characteristic of taking, redefining, and remaking a discourse to mean something other than its original significance is at the heart of what an Africana literary tradition has become, a discourse which continually and collectively resists defining concepts of race, class, gender, and nationality through reiterative performance of relational identification. (3) In diverse manifestations, the artistic productions of populations comprising the global African diaspora finds a fundamental mode expression through a poetics of resistance within the domain of the metropolitan setting.

The very concept of Africa in its modern form must be defined as an inherently diaspora concept, with multiple vectors of influence, a notion which is outlined by Achille Mbembe in Critique de la raison negre. (4) In the context of the British African diaspora, he Paul Gilroy writes in The Black Atlantic, "I have argued elsewhere that the cultures of this group have been produced in a syncretic pattern in which the styles and forms of the Caribbean, the United States, and Africa have been reworked and reinscribed in the novel context of modern Britain's own untidy ensemble of regional and class-oriented conflicts." (5) Gilroy's example of the British cohort of Africana peoples scattered over the globe from Europe to the Americas who derive their heritage from the continent of Africa is in fact one specific example of a global transnational multilingual and poly-cultural phenomenon. Despite a shared collective memory of colonialism and enslavement, the diverse people groups that comprise the global African diaspora cannot be considered as singular unified community since they exist within the paradigm of western imperial hegemonic power, which divides people in terms of multiple intersecting demographic categories of class, gender, sexuality, and race. (6) Although the twenty-first century has thus far been one of exacerbating irreconcilable differences (such that it is difficult to maintain the position that any single "black community" exists), it cannot be denied that there are certain shared quasi-cultural characteristics of art, poetry, music, and literature that help to sketch out skeletal structure of the sort of pan-African identity advocated by DuBois and Marcus Garvey at the beginning of the twentieth century. (7)

This shared Africana culture is thus very dependent on language as a tool for defining its common heritage of resistance, not in terms of which language is spoken, since it can range from a multitude of indigenous African languages to French, English, and an infinite blend of Creoles. The...