Racialization and strategic/normalized otherness: A hiphopography of Danish and Finnish rap scenes

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Global hip hop culture, with its multicultural roots and reach, has afforded marginalized people a voice to discuss questions of otherness and belonging. In the two Nordic countries of Denmark and Finland, the history of (im)migration and multiculturalism is markedly different from, say, urban North America or postcolonial Africa, but also from one another. Nevertheless, racialized otherness is societally topical in both Denmark and Finland, including these countries’ hip hop scenes. Racially othered rappers express multifaceted, and often-times also unprecedented, voices and discourses in these white homogenous settings. In this chapter, our aim is to discuss how rappers and other social actors in the Danish and Finnish hip hop scenes construct racialized otherness and (non-)belonging and, moreover, how they use these as strategic ways for their branding and marketing, while questioning and normalizing these very same categories. Theoretically and methodologically, we draw on global hip hop studies, discourse studies, culture studies and musical anthropology. We discuss a Danish and a Finnish case study: Sorte Får Medier (Black Sheep Media/Black Gets Media) and Tumma toukokuu (Dark May). Our study is hiphopographic in that we draw on our deep and long-term relationships with the scenes and an ethnographic sensibility to understand the insiders’ perspective, which we see as complementing our own researcher perspectives. This chapter sheds light on the challenges and opportunities racially othered rappers experience and the ways in which they are societally, culturally and politically included and excluded. Thus, it offers contemporary evidence on complex means of negotiating, problematizing and representing Danishness and Finnishness, in continually diversifying and polarizing societies—and comparing and contrasting these two scenes.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationGlobal Hiphopography
EditorsQuentin Williams, Jaspal Naveel Singh
Number of pages36
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Publication date2023
Pages299-334
ISBN (Print)9783031219542
ISBN (Electronic)9783031219559
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

ID: 289477468