UC Berkeley

“Asian Americans in the Cipher” aims to challenge prevailing notions of Asian American rappers by presenting a polycultural portrait of their lives and cultural practices. Among cultural critics and race scholars, Asian American participation in Hip Hop has increasingly become a popular subject of socio-political inquiry. On one hand, critical Asian and African American voices have asserted the need to boldly confront instances when Asian American youth appropriate Black cultural styles for their subversiveness and profitability. Concurrently, a number of Asian American Studies scholars have exhumed case studies of Asian American rappers who engage Hip Hop expression to articulate racial identities that reject assimilation into whiteness. These accounts thus importantly distinguish forms of cultural interface that challenge relations of power from those that reinforce them. To varying ends, however, they also narrowly determine Asian Americans in Hip Hop as a particular racialized group that draws on the culture of others for “their own” agendas. More broadly speaking, they treat cultures as fixed and discrete, rather than as living entities that coincide and assume lives of their own. A fundamental reason for these limited perspectives, I argue, is that they have yet to adequately consider Asian Americans who are in community with Black and other Hip Hop heads of color.

In this dissertation, I provide an alternative window onto Asian American rappers by emphasizing those whose cultural practices are informed by and produce further opportunities for interracial collaborations. Specifically, I center young men who grew up in majority non-white neighborhoods or otherwise locales that allow for routine Afro Asian encounters, in order to explore how their everyday racialized landscapes shape and are shaped by their relationships to Hip Hop, African Americans, and other people of color. Thus, utilizing an interdisciplinary methodology that incorporates in-depth interviews, multi-sited ethnography, and music/performance analysis, I elaborate upon the polycultural relations indexed in their life histories, music-making practices, and scenes of performance. First, I trace how their identification with Hip Hop reflects the deeply-entrenched interraciality of their daily paths and the mundane cultural exchanges and social intimacies that constitute them. In turn, they understand Hip Hop as both a Black popular form and a vernacular culture. Furthermore, I analyze how their significations of race and Hip Hop cultural identity cohere in their musical compositions. While drawing attention to the ways the rappers critically mediate ideas of Asian Americanness, I also underscore how they invoke a distinct, Hip Hop lexicon of aesthetics and epistemic positions that conjoin them to other people of color as fellow Hip Hop heads. Based on my examination of these processes and ethnographic research, I further exhibit how they forge artistic networks and scenes of performance that more fully realize the Afro Asian notions of community they signify.

By triangulating race, place, and Hip Hop in my study of Asian American rappers, my dissertation questions the racial scripts often used to interpret cultural exchanges between young people of color, and in particular, those that hinge on assumptions of Asian-Black distance. The Asian Americans rappers featured here do not necessarily move outside of themselves and their situated experiences, but rather, build upon their deep-seated polycultural lives. By the same token, they do not simply coincide with African Americans as racialized peoples, but also as a people based on resonant life histories, community ties, common Hip Hop subjectivity, and shared cultural politics. In their worlds, Asians, Blacks, and other people of color more than coexist. They also build, party, and even come to recognize each other as a group. My research thus presents emergent, yet definitely formed, polycultural solidarities that challenge the conflation of race, culture, and peoplehood