“Honor”: Rapping and Representing Asian America

Abstract

Since its foundation as a Black cultural form in the 1970s South Bronx, the hip hop nation has become an imagined world – constituted by constellations of local, national, international, and digital exchanges. Through glocalization, the hip hop nation is multiracial, multiethnic, international, and transnational. However, in America, spaces of hip hop are largely considered more homogenous. Drawing from twelve weeks of virtual ethnographic research conducted with ten Asian American rappers, this ethnography illuminates how Asian American rappers negotiate hegemonic identifications and mobilities embedded in spaces of hip hop within the U.S. This thesis elucidates how Asian diasporic rappers reclaim the power of self-identification: constructing, performing, and repeating perceived realities of the self. Probing the growing heterogeneity and hybridization of hip hop beyond the United States, this thesis also explores the poetic and sonic palettes of Asian American hip hop, mapping the deconstruction of borders between Asianness/Asian music and Americanness/American music.