In Pursuit of Recognition

As a spatial phenomenon connected to migration, Swedish Hip-hop has often been described as a glocal culture that has created a form of spatial solidarity amongst immigrant youth (mainly) in the “förorten”, the suburbs of the three largest Swedish cities, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. It has therefore primarily been viewed as a collective culture that has united youth in the “förorten” with a wide variety of immigration backgrounds behind a common goal – to pursue recognition by combating structural forms of social misrecognition and economic maldistribution. One of the consequences of such a collective pursuit of recognition is thus that it renders familial pasts and ties to places outside of the “förorten” obsolete. This presentation is based on an oral history interview with an individual Hip-hop artist – Rodrigo Rodde Bernal – who explicitly addresses such ties through his music. As member of the Sweden-based group Hermanos Bernal, he performs his raps solely in Spanish and directs his music at Chile, the former home country of his parents. I argue that Rodde pursues recognition through Hip-hop in both Sweden and Chile by constructing or translating four different versions of “Chile” in what I will call the Hip-hop zone in-between Chile and Sweden. These translations include the construction of “Chile” through his own memory and the postmemory of his parents, that is, “the memories rooted (in his family´s) oral tradition rather than (his) lived experiences” (Hirsch). My presentation thus sets out to trace the connection between place and recognition in his personal pursuit of recognition within the Hip-hop zone in-between Chile and Sweden by analyzing these four translations of “Chile”