Battling the race: Stylizing language and coproducing whiteness and colouredness in a freestyle rap performance
Abstract
In the last 19 years of post-apartheid South African democracy, race remains an enduring and
familiar trope, a point of certainty amid the messy ambiguities of transformation. In the
present article, we explore the malleable, permeable, and unstable racializations of contemporary
South Arica, specifically the way in which coloured and white racializations are negotiated
and interactionally accomplished in the context of Capetonian hip-hop. The analysis
reveals the complex ways in which racialized bodies are figured semiotically through reference
to historical time and contemporary (translocal) social space. But also the way iconic features
of blackness are reindexicalized to stand for a transnational whiteness.