‘Born in villages, roaming the world’: Diasporicity in Fateh’s Sikh Canadian hip hop
Author
Faculty Advisor
Date
2023
Keywords
rap, hip hop, racialization, Sikh diaspora, Canadian multiculturalism
Abstract (summary)
This paper shows that various songs by Sikh Canadian rap artist Fateh represent engagements with essentialist discourses that neatly mirror Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s notion of “diasporicity”: the continual re-inscription of the origin in acts of embodied agency that retain their connection to tradition while also negotiating the body’s social meanings that exist outside of the subject’s selfpositioning. I argue through a reading of Fateh’s songs that the notion of diasporicity reveals how race, ethnicity, and religion overlap for Sikh Canadians—especially the ways in which bodily expressions of Sikh “religion” are simultaneously interpellated through the discourse of culture/ethnicity and religio-racialization.
Publication Information
Grewal, S. (2023). ‘Born in villages, roaming the world’: Diasporicity in Fateh’s Sikh Canadian hip hop. Sikh Formations, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17448727.2023.2237241
Notes
Item Type
Article
Language
Rights
All Rights Reserved