Non ‘stranieri’, ma ‘straneri’: hip hop, G2 e sensibilità diasporica in Italia

Abstract

The studies on the ‘recontextualization’ phenomenon of European Hip hop in the 1990s highlight that Italy, if compared to France and Germany, stood out due to the almost total absence of migrant members in rap bands. This datum requires an attentive discussion, since it did not consider the critical factor given by the Italian intern diaspora, which characterized much of the Italian rap production of that period, with rappers of Southern origins immigrated to Northern cities and expressing their feeling of marginalization as ‘strangers in their own country’. In the 2000s, the same words are used to express the feeling of ‘second generation’ (or G2) rappers. My paper aims to give a brief overview of their production from the perspective of the ‘hybridization’ and ‘indigenization’ phenomena – that is, the capacity of Hip hop to encounter local discourse and to integrate into the cultural repertoires of a country, expressing and claiming multiple identities through its discourse modalities.