Blackness and periphery: A retelling of marginality in hip-hop culture of São Paulo, Brazil

In this research project I address two main issues of meaning-making among Brazilian hip-hoppers: (1) the processes and technologies by which practitioners perform and produce hip-hop (design), and (2) the articulations hip-hoppers make between hip-hop and society (mediation). My analysis is based on over four years of fieldwork in São Paulo, Brazil. I argue that Brazilian hip-hop, as developed by shantytown youth, constructs arenas for citizenship debates, educational discussions, economic development, and practices of community through the narratives it performs, the ideologies and meanings it produces, and the networks it mobilizes. I describe these hip-hop developments and demonstrate how persons “work” hip-hop culture and articulate it to a Brazilian national formation that is challenged by global processes. I delineate how Brazilian hip-hop, while influenced by the United States' version of this cultural form, significantly differs from it. It has transformed the values of the U.S. urban variant and this rearrangement has differing social effects.