UCC Professor Griffith Rollefson says African-Americans are key figures in shaping American cultural identity in his new book
The former Cambridge lecturer has just released his book titled Flip The Script: European Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality
GRIFFITH Rollefson recalls a scene he witnessed in Germany during his fieldwork that has stuck with him in the years since.
At a festival in Berlin, the Afro-German rapper B-Tight (Robert Edward Davis) performs his hit single, Der Neger, to a festival crowd.
The audience is mainly made up of white people and Germans of Turkish decent and, with their hands cocked in what resembles a straight-armed salute, it’s easy to jump to conclusions.
Add to the mix that the crowd of majority non-black people were pointing to the artist and chanting a chorus designed to resemble a racial slur, and it’s not a good look.
Looks can be deceiving, though. The crowd were chanting with, not at, the artist and those straight-armed salutes? A standard ‘bounce’ gesture seen at countless hip hop gigs.
Nevertheless, it’s a scene that exemplifies the central theme of the UCC professor’s doctoral thesis and one that perhaps has more relevance for Ireland than might be immediately obvious.
That image formed a key part of his thesis, which studied the politics of postcoloniality in European hip hop, and which he later expanded and released as a book: Flip the Script.
Rollefson tells Something for the Weekend: “There’s a picture on the website of all these white people with their right arms raised like a nazi salute.
"If you’ve ever been to a hip-hop show you’ll often see these arms in the air doing this bounce gesture.
“Seeing all these white and Turkish German fans saluting a black artist and then doing this pointing thing where they say ‘der neger’.
"I talk about it as an ‘exorcism’. It’s like exorcising the ghosts of racism. It was like ‘we’re going to do this weird thing’, and I totally felt weird.
“That was definitely striking to me, but that’s when I thought that’s what it’s going to take to put those ghosts to rest.
“It’s like ‘we’re Germany, this happened here, and we’ve got to deal with this every day until it doesn’t matter anymore’.
“And when it doesn’t matter anymore, we’ll know. But I think that’s 50 years off now, or maybe 100.”
After spending time in Germany while in high school, Milwaukee native Rollefson returned when he received funding from the German exchange service.
He was given enough money to conduct field work in Berlin, Paris and the UK and explore the differing effects that colonialism had on the emergence of each city’s rap scene.
His subjects ranged from B-Tight, who is the son of an African-American father and German mother, to the Anglo-Sri Lankan rapper MIA and Sefyu, a French rapper of Senegalese background.
He would speak extensively with B-Tight and others, but wouldn’t be able to make contact with either MIA or Sefyu and his analysis was, in some ways, richer for it.
The fascinating Parisian Sefyu is an elusive figure whose true identity is little known and who obscures his face when performing.
MIA, as her name implies, is also notoriously hard to pin down and much of what she’s allowed to be known about herself is gleaned from interviews.
What Rollefson found was that, while colonialism had taken different forms in France, Germany and the UK from the United States, similar themes did emerge.
“I thought I’d like to go and look at Berlin, which was ground zero for Turkish-German hip hop, and look at what had changed in between 1992 and 2002.
“At first it was politically-conscious minority hip hop in Berlin, and then it was a gangsta minority thing.
“Then it was all these really interesting, sometimes in line with what happened in the US, but later, and sometimes in really interesting ways.
"Turkish-Germans who were brought in to rebuild the country after WWII and then told ‘go back home’ after they’d rebuilt German society.
“There were the grandsons and granddaughters of the guest workers that are in this weird position where they heard something in African-American hip hop that resonated with them.
“That was a story I wanted to tell.”
The story of hip hop’s spread around the world is in many ways a unique case study.
It couldn’t be any other way given the history of African-Americans, who have simultaneously been marginalised in American society while their culture is exploited and promoted.
Afro-Germans and Turkish-Germans, Algerians and Senegalese in France, English people from Asian and Caribbean backgrounds – all have found hip hop resonates with their own lived experience.
“My thesis, I hope I make it clear enough in the book, is that African-Americans are very much central to American cultural identity.
“Whether you’re talking about music, from Michael Jackson to Louis Armstrong, or sports from Wilt Chamberlain to Michael Jordan, African-American is central to American culture.
“And yet African-Americans are constantly marginalised.
"They’re kept out of jobs, kept out of positions of prestige."
So how would the music not be contradictory? The reality of African-American life is contradictory.
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It’s what WB Dubois calls ‘double consciousness’.
“That’s why hip hop has these contradictions, and that we can hear these contradictions the way the music works politically and aesthetically.”
- FLIP the Script: European Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality is out through University of Chicago Press.