Black Power Is Black Language. Le lingue del ghetto come pratiche di ®esistenza

Abstract

Drawing on the debate on African American English, this paper will explore two pivotal aspects of the issue: the necessary tracing back of the origins and the context that gave birth to Black language as a fundamental issue for a specific social reality, and the identification of those peculiarities (phonetic, morpho-syntactic and lexical) not only proving the complexity of its linguistic status and its diversity from standard English, but also representing all its strength. In particular, by connecting African American Diaspora to more recent trans-Mediterranean routes, the theoretical framework will focus on the creation of new geo-localities and linguistic identities emerged from the multilayered contaminations brought about by global cultural flows. From a linguistic point of view a meaningful example of this process of contact and contamination is the form of Black English used in Italy by some second-generation immigrants as a pidgin adapted to specific communicative purposes that exceed linguistic, national and geographical borders. More specifically, the research will analyze Karima 2G’s aesthetics that might help re-construct the linguistic and cultural history of the color line in Italy through her history of second-generation Liberian-Italian using rap and Black English to open a transatlantic vision of the traces left by the African Diaspora.