Against Linguistic Necropolitics: Indigenous Hip Hop in Nigeria and Canada

Abstract

This research analyses oppressive practices and policies against Indigenous languages and speakers in Nigeria and Canada, and explores the political, linguistic, social, and cultural themes that emerge in Indigenous hip hop music subcultures, particularly in relation to the disappearance of Indigenous languages. I think through how practices of colonialism continue to violently erase and dissuade local-Indigenous linguistic practices and how sonic worlds, in this case hip hop, retains and reworks language as a tool of resistance and liberation. I center the dynamics between colonialism and resistance and draw attention to meaningful acts of language reclamation, identity affirmation, and social consciousness through hip hop cultural politics. To highlight language oppression in the two contexts, this dissertation theorizes the concept of linguistic necropolitics, centering three interrelated themes: the necropolitical configurations of bodies, the necropolitical configuration of languages for extinction, and the necropolitical configuration of language practices including translanguaging. I argue that linguistic necropolitics helps us to understand the inherent relationship between the disposability of Indigenous languages and the disposability of the bodies that speak these languages in colonial sites. I discuss lyrical speech play and poetics of Yoruba hip hop in Nigeria as cultural instrument of “talking back” (that is, challenging oppression). I argue that the language, poetics, and creativity of Yoruba Indigenous hip hop manifest through modes of “opacity” which emerges as freedom making through defamiliarization. I further uncover three complementary layers of decolonization in Indigenous hip hop subcultures in Nigeria and Canada, namely translanguaging (blending colonial and Indigenous/Black languages in music), lyrical metapoetics (interrogating Indigenous hip hop language, poetics, and aesthetics), and “emergent vitalities” (youth’s efforts that resist Black and Indigenous erasure and revive Black and Indigenous cultural life through their sonic-linguistic works). I argue that Black and Indigenous artists are using hip hop as a cultural medium to promote Indigenous languages and cultural resurgence. My dissertation concludes that Indigenous hip hop does not only highlight the innovative methods by which African and Indigenous Canadian artists reclaim, engage with, and encode their languages for decolonial purposes, but also serves as an arena of hope for Black and Indigenous futures.