The Construction of African-American Identity in American Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture

Rap music serves as a potentially powerful tool that enables African American rappers to unfold experiences and hardships of marginalized people and to forge their own identities. Prior research has thoroughly investigated the formation of racial identities in academic settings and cinema. However, previous studies have failed to explore the construction of Black identities in hip hop culture. The current paper aims to investigate how African Americans construct their identities through narrative and which discursive and linguistic means are used by rappers in their lyrics. For this purpose in mind, the critical discourse methodology was applied; in particular, Wodak and Meyer’s Discourse-historical analysis and corpus-assisted analysis were conducted. The research focused on 50 songs of 16 most prominent African American rappers having Grammy nominations and awards. In the discourse-historical analysis, the main themes illuminated by rap artists and the use of discourse strategies of nomination, predication, and argumentation were examined. The results of the paper reveal that African American rappers construct their own identities through the use of racial stereotypes, derogatory images, labels, rhetorical and semantic strategies of African American vernacular English (Ebonics), various linguistic means, and references to the history of slavery and racism. Moreover, the primary ideas of rappers’ lyrics closely intersect with Du Bois’s double consciousness and critical race theories serving as the theoretical framework for the current thesis. The findings of this paper may expand the knowledge about racial identities and contribute to the discourse studies of Whiteness and Blackness as well as African American studies. Key words: African American identity, hip hop, rap, double consciousness, critical race theory, racism, stereotypes