Postmigrant rap. Language, metaphor and signifyin(g) practices in British and Italian rap : a comparative study of debut albums by male artists (2017-2022)
(2026)
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- (en) This doctoral dissertation investigates contemporary European postmigrant rap music as a primary narrative and sonic laboratory wherein descendants of migrants systematically restructure contemporary national imaginaries from within the urban periphery. More specifically, this research examines the discursive, semiotic, and stylistic configurations of postmigrant aesthetics through a comparative textual analysis of debut projects by six prominent artists operating in the United Kingdom and Italy between 2017 and 2022: Mahmood, Ghali, Baby Gang, J Hus, Dave, and Central Cee. Moving beyond simplistic thematic or anecdotal readings of the "migrant experience," as well as the academic tendency to reduce the genre to mere biographical clue, the study formalizes a postmigrant analytical framework that operationalizes Naika Foroutan’s sociological processes into definitive categories of textual, metric, and acoustic encoding. This characterization relies first on the conceptualization of an *aesthetics of aphasia*, understood not as a linguistic impairment, but as a deliberate metacommunicative strategy of refusal against the institutional demand for transparent self-narrative. Aphasia functions across a tripartite technical spectrum: noise (materialized through structural repetitions, stuttering, and the oversaturation of derogatory stereotypes), opacity (engineered via encrypted subcultural slang, code-switching, and vocal distortion to protect the text’s hermeneutic sovereignty), and silence (manifesting as a non-masculine withdrawal and structural invisibilization). Second, the dissertation deconstructs the conventional cognitive metaphor of the linear journey toward social exit, demonstrating how the postmigrant subject’s spatial and temporal navigation is recoded into defensive physical circulation, market-driven acceleration, or an inward therapeutic turn. By grinding physical displacement to a halt and interiorizing the journey, artists transform the spatial traps of the periphery into sovereign zones of ideological resistance. Third, through the framework of *postmigrant signifyin(g)*, the research details how these performers engage in formal revisionism, repurposing canonical European tropes, cinematic archetypes, and clinical structures to subvert hegemonic cultural authority from within. By decoupling the postmigrant mode of analysis from an essentialist obsession with the author’s origin, this dissertation ultimately demonstrates that postmigrant rap operates not as peripheral marginalia, but as an active, primary engine of cognitive and semiotic intervention, reconfiguring contemporary European identity, statehood, and textual sovereignty from its very center.
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Sassi, L. (2026). Postmigrant rap. Language, metaphor and signifyin(g) practices in British and Italian rap : a comparative study of debut albums by male artists (2017-2022). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/279929