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Original Articles

Spanish in a global key

 

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the possibilities and potential pitfalls of the Global Hispanophone by placing this emergent category in dialogue with recent developments in Hispanic studies and with ongoing debates in comparative literature about the status of the globe (or the world) as an analytic framework. Drawing on these debates, the essay examines the politics, hermeneutics and aesthetics of multilingual hip-hop, focusing on Khaled, a Spanish rapper of Moroccan descent, whose work weaves between languages (most notably, Spanish and Moroccan Arabic) and musical idioms. Khaled's multilingual performances challenge hegemonic positions of race, class, religion and place of origin. They also highlight transnational networks of solidarity between marginalized groups in Europe and the United States. Using Khaled's music as an illustrative example, this essay outlines a tentative vision of the Global Hispanophone, one that focuses on language practices rather than on geography. In what follows, the Global Hispanophone describes the tension between Spanish as a language of imperial power and Spanish as a language that spawns creative responses to power, often through nonstandard uses that throw into question the borders (geographic, cultural and even linguistic) of the language.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following colleagues for their valuable input and suggestions: Hisham Aidi, Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo, Patricia Estevan, Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla, Matthew Machin-Autenrieth, John Meyers, Karim Ouaras, Benita Sampedro Vizcaya, Paul Silverstein and David Sucunza.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Eric Calderwood is an Associate Professor in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture (Harvard University Press, 2018). His articles have appeared in PMLA, The Journal of North African Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies and Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. In addition to his academic publications, he has contributed essays and commentary to such venues as NPR, the BBC, Foreign Policy and McSweeney's Quarterly. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 One of the catalysts for the emergence of the transatlantic paradigm in Hispanic studies was a series of colloquia held at Brown University and detailed in “Transatlantic Project” (Citation2017). Although Africa was relatively absent from the early formulations of transatlantic Hispanism, recent work in the field has placed renewed emphasis on the multiple intersections between Africa, Europe and the Americas (Epps Citation2010; Sampedro Vizcaya Citation2012).

2 To this point, Resina writes: “In recent years a ‘transatlantic’ variation on Hispanism has transplanted to United States academia the politics of hispanidad fostered by the Franco government and reemphasized by the post-Franco Spanish state through the policies of the Instituto Cervantes” (Citation2013a, 16).

3 Speaking to these concerns, Resina states: “The innovative idea behind Iberian studies as a discipline is its intrinsic relationality and its reorganization of monolingual fields based on nation-states and their postcolonial extensions into a peninsular plurality of cultures and languages pre-existing and coexisting with the official cultures of the state” (Citation2013b, vii).

4 Developing this idea, Jay observes: “The locations we study do not exist apart from the human act of measuring, delimiting, identifying, categorizing, and making boundaries and distinctions” (Citation2010, 74).

5 I build here on an argument that I laid out in Calderwood (Citation2014).

6 I have pieced together a biographical sketch of Khaled based on his Internet presence, including the Wikipedia entry for Los Santos (formerly known as Pxxr Gvng), as well as the coverage of Khaled in the Spanish press, such as Riaño (Citation2017).

7 Other prominent voices in this emerging generation of artists include Paisano, a Tangier-based hip-hop artist who raps in Spanish and Moroccan Colloquial Arabic, and Chekara, the scion of one of Morocco's most famous musical families and the leader of a Granada-based ensemble that fuses flamenco and Moroccan Andalusi music, with lyrics in Spanish and Arabic.

8 For further examples, taken from French hip-hop, see Silverstein (Citation2018, 132–137).

9 My description is based on the video available on YouTube (Los Santos Citation2015). There is no widely accepted system for transliterating colloquial Moroccan Arabic into English. My approach has been to draw on the transliteration system of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, while keeping in mind the phonetic particularities of Moroccan Arabic.

10 I have transcribed the lyrics from Los Santos (Citation2015). Pxxr Gvng's lyrics are notoriously difficult to decipher, in no small part because they often deploy slang terms that are derived from several different languages and cultural contexts. In my efforts to transcribe and interpret Khaled's lyrics, I have listened to his songs several times, but I have also consulted the online fan forums that have been created to debate Pxxr Gvng's lyrics – most notably, https://pxxrgvngfanpage.wordpress.com/. Finally, I consulted with Hisham Aidi, Patricia Estevan and David Sucunza, whom I thank in the Acknowledgments.

11 I am playing with Doris Sommer's work on bilingual aesthetics and, in particular, on her observations about the connection between bilingual code switching and jokes. Sommer writes: “One way to get a joke is to notice that you missed something, or that someone else gets it differently” (Citation2004, 64; emphasis in original).

12 Both gitano (“Gypsy”) and moro (“Moor”) are vexed terms and have often been used pejoratively. I will, nonetheless, retain these terms here, in large part because Khaled himself uses them. Both terms have recently been the object of a process of “taking back”, in which some Spaniards of Roma or North African descent have appropriated them and used them to their own ends. Such is the case, I think, with Khaled's use of the terms.

13 In the current Spanish hip-hop scene, several artists have adopted Gypsy personae as a position from which to talk about experiences of social struggle and marginalization. I am reminded, for example, of Somadamantina's trap anthem from the summer of Citation2015, “Femme Fatale”, whose refrain is: “Las gitanas dando palmas a yeli”.

14 For a compelling analysis of the song, see Swedenburg (Citation2015, 111–115).

15 For 113's association with the “gangsta” rap scene in France, see Swedenburg (Citation2015, 112–113); Silverstein (Citation2018, 132–134).

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