Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Agurto, Andrés Espinoza

Thesis/Dissertation Co-Chair

Esquilín, Mary Ann Gosser

Abstract

My research centers around French West Indian hip hop music (also called rap) and identity, from its emergence in the 1980s to its evolution in the ensuing years against the backdrop of the Caribbean Francophone literary traditions, as another musical expression of oraliture. By oraliture, we understand a set of unwritten and oral creations representing an era or a community. The dissertation aims to study the appropriation of hip hop music by local artists in the French West Indies (F.W.I.), in particular focusing on the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, because of their geographic, social, political, and cultural settings. Given that these islands have a long-standing tradition of story-telling set to rhythmical patterns, this work analyzes the ways in which ipop Kreyol lyrics highlight the dynamics of the area, paying attention to the aesthetics, the semiotics, and the performance. Considering hip hop music as part of an oral literature framework allows us to address the questions of identity prevalent in the F.W.I. given their relationship to metropolitan France, the Caribbean, and the U.S.. Caribbean theorists have proposed notions of transculturation, poetics of relation, creolization, and Tout-Monde, among others, to understand fluid identity concepts. The use of Creole in rhythmical patterns found in rap lyrics is at the crossroads of identity building in the F.W.I.. Hip hop music lyrics, a cultural product entrenched in the islands’ oral literary traditions, become a useful means to study the development of a unique French West Indian cultural voice, both on the islands and in the diaspora.

Extent

192 p.

Comments

Includes bibliography.|Dissertation (PhD)--Florida Atlantic University, 2024.|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Includes bibliography.

Identifier

FA00014537

Format

pdf

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