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A close look at how Taiwanese musicians are using rap music as a creative way to explore and reconcile Taiwanese identity and history.

Like many states emerging from oppressive political rule, Taiwan saw a cultural explosion in the late 1980s, when nearly four decades of martial law under the Chinese Nationalist Party ended. As members of a multicultural, multilingual society with a complex history of migration and colonization, Taiwanese people entered this moment of political transformation eager to tell their stories and grapple with their identities. In Renegade Rhymes, ethnomusicologist Meredith Schweig shows how rap music has become a powerful tool in the post-authoritarian period for both exploring and producing new knowledge about the ethnic, cultural, and political history of Taiwan.
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Schweig draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, taking readers to concert venues, music video sets, scenes of protest, and more to show how early MCs from marginalized ethnic groups infused rap with important aspects of their own local languages, music, and narrative traditions. Aiming their critiques at the educational system and a neoliberal economy, new generations of rappers have used the art form to nurture associational bonds and rehearse rituals of democratic citizenship, making a new kind of sense out of their complicated present.

Abbreviations …IX
Notes on romanization and translation …XI
Listo f figures and muiscal examples …XIII
Prologue: first, th erain …XV
Introduction: tales of Taiwan …1
PART ONE
Polyphonic histories
CHAPTER ONE
It depends on how you define “rap” …19
CHAPTER TWO
…because others might define it differently …40
PART TWO
Narratives and knowledge
CHAPTER THREE
Masculinity politics and rap’s fraternal order …65
CHAPTER FOUR
Performing musical knowledge work …98
CHAPTER FIVE
“We are so strong, we are writing history” …137
Epilogue: then, the sunflowers …173
Acknowledgments …173
Notes …187
References …209
Index …229