Black English and the New Cosmopolitanism: Karima 2G’s Linguistic Creativity as a Transethnic Performative Practice

The article focuses on the powers of cultural expression in her chapter “Black English and the New Cosmopolitanism: Karima 2G’s Linguistic Creativity as a Transethnic Performative Practice.” The author takes as her primary text the linguistic per- formance of Anna Maria Gehnyei (“Karima 2G”), a second-generation Liberian immi- grant to Italy, whose “new cosmopolitan” rap performance and narration indexes the “linguistic and cultural history of the color line in Italy.” Karima 2G’s rap refracts a Pidgin English to both represent and complicate the racialized marginalization of black diasporic “geo-localities and linguistic identities” in Italy, and more generally to resist essentialisms of identity that reify categories of “race” and ethnicity. Anti- immigrant sentiment in Italy is as much her subject as her own Liberian background, which becomes the source of yet another expression of the postcolonialist “rooted cosmopolitanism” that is a connecting thread among many chapters in this volume. In her “ethno-socio-linguistic analysis,” the author explores, in a pluriversalist idiom, the transnational linkages cutting across national cultural musics and “plurilithic Englishes” across the African and European contexts, not to mention an at least imag- ined routing to the United States experience of slavery and its aftermath.