‘How many of us remember 1984?’: Narrating masculinity and militancy in the Khalistani rap bricolage.

Singh, Jaspal (2013). ‘How many of us remember 1984?’: Narrating masculinity and militancy in the Khalistani rap bricolage. Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 9(3) pp. 339–360.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17448727.2013.863061

Abstract

For some Sikh rappers and their audiences, the utopian concept of Khalistan serves as an ideological grid, in which specific masculine and militant logics become meaningful and acceptable. In diasporic settings, such as in the UK, memories of ancestral cultures serve as mythical resources for constructing coherent narratives vis-à-vis metaphorical discourses of contemporary youth cultures. This article investigates the ways in which such narratives are constructed, and how historical remembering is explicitly and tacitly made relevant. An analysis of the lyrics of one song by a London-based hip-hop group will help to inform such perspectives on the negotiation of culture in diasporic settings, and will further deconstruct essentialist notions of ‘culture’ and ‘identity’.