Indigeneity and the city: Australian Indigenous youth and their strategies of cultural survival through Hip Hop

This essay explores issues of Indigenous resilience in the city. Primarily I am looking at the ways in which young Indigenous people’s discourses—understood in a Foucauldian perspective—can be inscribed into wider discussions on cultural continuity across the generations. In particular, I will examine how Indigenous youth in south-eastern and eastern Australia make sense of their surrounding reality through rap music. In what way are young Indigenous rap artists who live in urban areas reshaping the socio-cultural geography of Australian society and its sustainability? The Brundtland Commission (WCED 1987) has defined sustainability as that ‘practice’ that envisages and encompasses the participation of various social actors, principally within urban environments. According to this view, together with demographic shifts showing significant growth in the Indigenous section of the population, notions of urban and cultural sustainability have become extremely relevant. In this regard, some considerations need to be mad