‘Sikia: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Language and Public Space in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
My research in the field of African studies sits at the nexus of African urban studies, African youth performance studies, linguistic anthropology, global hip-hop studies, and digital media studies. Utilizing a mixed methods approach that innovatively combines ethnographic, archival, and collaborative research methodologies, I posit that youth artists in Dar es Salaam use Swanglish in both live and mediated spaces of performance to construct and mobilize a sociocultural identity that is distinct to postcolonial Tanzanian nationhood and inseparable from an urban, transnational and global imaginary. My project examines this claim by (1) analyzing the interchange of Swahili and English within Dar es Salaam’s rapidly growing community of hip-hop artists, and (2) analyzing how this emerging Swanglish community (re)asserts a claim to the public both in physical performance spaces in Dar es Salaam and digitally via social media. In centering questions of youth performance, language practice, and resistance politics, this project uses Swanglish hip-hop to map the genealogies and practices of migration through historical and sociolinguistic contexts. Through an empirical study of language use, my research examines the ways in which residents of Dar es Salaam deploy language and genre to define both culture and political community, with youth identity construction playing a central role in postcolonial Tanzanian identity formation. While this is a study of how a language variation and genre are shaping youth culture within Tanzanian society, the broader implications of this research speak to concerns about youth self-determination, confronting the limitations of a postcolonial national identity within the Diaspora in the twenty-first century.
Future Research
My current project demonstrates the ways in which Swanglish hip-hop is reshaping how Tanzanians define popular culture within and beyond the borders, existing in a transregional and global sense, connecting Dar es Salaam to other urban epicenters. This project serves as the starting point for my second project on mobility, migration, and East African creatives within the African, Afro-Anglophone, and Afro-Asian Diaspora. An extension of mapping genealogies and practices of (trans)national migration through sociolinguistic and artistic contexts, I plan to further examine the range and depth of this Swanglish aesthetic as it exists within the Diaspora. Specifically, I am interested in exploring the role that technology, digital space, and the internet play in cultivating and (co-)creating spaces of artistic production and digital archiving for East African creatives within the Diaspora in South Africa, the U.K., Canada, and China—countries with some of the largest or most established East African Diasporic communities.