Against Linguistic Necropolitics: Indigenous Hip Hop in Nigeria and Canada
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".