In Remix multilingualism, Quentin Williams both broadens and connects two major areas of research: the sociolinguistics of multilingualism and hip hop studies. Based on a one-year, multi-sited ethnography of hip hop spaces in Cape Town, the book builds on the work of other hip hop scholars by bringing new insights into the multilingual Cape hip hop scene and its raciolinguistic politics. Williams demonstrates the ways in which young speakers’ creative, locally styled multilingualism can stage marginalized voices and create new types of linguistic citizenship.
Williams introduces the reader to members of the rap group Suburban Menace, who perform regularly at Club Stones, a venue in the Cape Flats suburb Kuilsriver. Remix multilingualism centres around the emcees’ practices of selecting, entextualising, enregistering, and performing the many languages of the region (including Afrikaans, Afrikaaps, isiXhosa, Black South African English, the local register Sabela, and the stylect Tsotsitaal)—both in staged rap battles at the club, and at their home ‘base’, the Suburban Menace Mansion.
Through exploring in depth these two hip hop spaces (chapter 4), Williams presents the construction of ‘extreme locality’ of the Cape hip hop scene, while at the same time demonstrating its intertextual relationship with global hip hop—for example, through the combination of English signage and Afrikaans-speaking staff from Kuilsriver at Club Stones.
After a detailed introduction to the emcees and their hip hop spaces, Williams presents data from rap battles to explore multilingualism in the rap genre of ‘braggadocio’ (chapter 5) and in freestyle rap (chapter 6). Here, too, Williams finds strategic contrasts between global and local; emcees use African American English and generic tropes to display their ‘global Hip Hop authenticity’ (111), but also Kaaps, Afrikaans, and Sabela (among other languages) to include locally meaningful wordplay, and to involve the club's diverse audience. For Williams, emcees manipulate the ‘intertextual gap’ between local and global hip hop by using—and then breaking away from—the ‘mainstream’ linguistic elements of hip hop. In doing so, they ‘relocalize’ the genre of braggadocio, with the aim of representing the Kuilsriver community and including marginalized voices that are not only absent from mainstream hip hop, but also disempowered in South African society.
The sociolinguistic fallout of apartheid is clear throughout the book. As noted by Alim in his foreword, Williams exposes raciolinguistic ideologies in his analysis of Suburban Menace's Facebook page (chapter 6). Online discussions illustrate the attitudes of the emcees and their fans towards different languages and their use in hip hop.
Chapters 7 and 8 are devoted to constructions of gender in Cape hip hop. Here Williams explores the ‘toxic masculinity’ of the identities performed by multilingual emcees, the sexualisation of female bodies in dance battles at Club Stones, and the precarious position of ‘femcees’ engaged in hip hop practices.
Remix multilingualism provides deep insights into the local Cape hip hop scene while demonstrating its important relationship with global hip hop. Just like the emcees, Williams emphasizes both the global and the local in his research, mixing and remixing theoretical approaches to multilingualism.
