Intermediality, Rewriting Histories, And Identities in French Rap‪.‬

Cultures often recur to historical discourses and narratives in order to legitimize their existence. This is particularly true in hip hop culture, which constitutes a new space of representation for communities in search of a new identity which will be partly founded in the articulation of historical narratives different from official and hegemonic ones. Like in other forms of resistant and subversive music, rap music gives individuals who feel socially and culturally dispossessed an aesthetic experience which helps them building their identity in relation to their immediate world, their physical appearance, their common denial of superstructures, and also in relation to their memories, their traditions, or their real or symbolic origins. In this context, reclaiming the past and questioning dominant historiography, while rejecting mainstream views and values, become discursive strategies aimed to (re-)build their de-localized identities, situating them in new socio-cultural vernacular spaces. In hip hop--a genre that is a prime example of intermedial cultural production--the construction and expression of identity against mainstream society represents social relevance in several cultural spaces including France. I begin with the question of how is music able to contribute shaping identities? As an aesthetic manifestation, music plays a prominent role in the semiotic community that forms a culture. "Serious" music but also folk and popular music constitute core elements in shaping cultural heritage and cultural identity. In its relation to society, music is an aesthetic experience which is created, produced and received in a specific social group to which it is complexly related. As Brian Longhurst points out, understanding music requires taking into account its production system, its own form and objectives and the readings of its audience (249). Music, especially contemporary popular music because of its ubiquity and accessibility, is a cultural product and practice with symbolic and ideological content. Moreover, on the individual level, music is a core element in the process of forging symbolic identity, both individual and social. Music plays an important role in the way people situate themselves in society, that is, in the way they create their identity, defined as the process by which a subject symbolically positions himself or herself in a specific community (see, e.g., Frith, Popular Music: Music and Identity). In fact, "music, like identity, is both performance and story, describes the social in the individual and the individual in the social, the mind in the body and the body in the mind; identity, like music, is a matter of both ethics and aesthetics" (Frith, "Music and Identity" 294). Therefore, musical experience (as performance and as listening) helps the subject locating himself/herself in relation to a socio-economic group and to an aesthetic, ideological, and symbolic community. Music does not express a social group's beliefs or values; on the contrary, as Simon Frith affirms, "social groups only get to know themselves as groups (as a particular organization of individual and social interests, of sameness and difference) through cultural activity, through aesthetic judgement" (Frith, "Music and Identity" 296). In everyday life, as Tia DeNora points out, "music has power. It is implicated in every dimensions of social agency ... Music may influence how people compose their bodies, how they conduct themselves, how they experience the passage of time, how they feel--in terms of energy and emotion--about themselves, about others, and about situations" (DeNora 17). In this complex process of building identity, music contributes to the narrativization of place, that is, to the representation that links the subject to his or her location, to his or her "territory" (real and imaginary). The same is true when it comes to the ways in which the subject relates to time, traditions, and cultural heritage: music narratives