Nothin' but a "G" Thing: Gender, Race, and German Hip Hop :The Politics of Performance and Authenticity

Abstract

My dissertation is concerned with looking at the ways hip hop reimagines German identity. Artists use performance to expose the experience of being racialized in a “multicultural” Germany. Through performance, artists use embodiment to challenge the everyday performativity required of minorities with regard to “Germanness.” The tension between performance and performativity is developed throughout the chapters as artists address Leitkultur, Heimat, and cultural aspects favored by far-right monoculturalists. German identity is questioned and renegotiated by hip hop artists as they use hip hop performance to open conversations about race, gender, class, and sexuality. In the chapters that follow, minorities use performance to resist how these intersections are imposed onto their bodies and what that means for minority’s everyday experiences. Black and Brown bodies are constructed as “non-normative” subjects in European spaces. Racialized minorities are hypervisible due to race, yet invisible as Europeans. Hip hop disrupts this as it brings multi-ethnic European identities to the forefront of “multicultural Germany”.