Intermediality, Rewriting Histories, and Identities in French Rap

In her article "Intermediality, Rewriting Histories and Identities in French Rap" Isabelle Marc Martinez analyzes aspects of French hip hop culture. As an example of resistant cultural manifestations, hip hop scenes all over the world develop strategies to subvert mainstream values and to replace them by new de-localized, contesting identities via intermedial and intertextual processes. In France during the 1990 rap was intended to reassess French national history and national selfperception. Foundational hip hop bands such as Assassin, Ministere AMER, IAM, and NTM aimed at discrediting official narratives concerning the French culture's colonial and social past. hip hop artists, who viewed themselves as poets in a romantic vein, invested themselves with a responsibility that was political, ethical and aesthetic. From this position of poetic superiority, they attempted to alter official narratives by questioning and reviewing the educational system of France. The outcome of these resistant strategies was the forging of new multicultural and multiethnic identities of French culture, which have been in fact partly appropriated by mainstream culture and politics.