Complementary to the research literature focusing on spontaneous, on-the-spot, translanguaging, our study on MC Yan's music video that raps the city and the Hong Kong identity shows that translanguaging can also be non-spontaneous, carefully and systemically crafted. Our study therefore fills the gap in literature by investigating whole-body, pre-crafted/scripted translanguaging.
In this paper, we focus on analysing MC Yan's 2014 YouTube urban spatial slam poetry video that raps the city and the Hong Kong identity. Widely respected as the “Godfather of Hip Hop and Rap in Hong Kong”, MC Yan has stuck to his alternative, conscious rap all through his indie hip hop career ever since the disbanding of the LMF in 2003. In this paper we present our analysis of MC Yan’s alternative rap practices as saturated with voices of a generation of people who have experienced the 1997 handover and are striving to assert a sense of Hong Kong identity. Drawing upon the theoretical lenses of translanguaging as flows (Lemke, 2016) and trans-semiotizing (Lin, 2015), the paper analyses the feeling and meaning of the music video and reveals that trans-languaging/trans-semiotizing, i.e. first-order languaging (Thibault, 2011), can be stylized, designed, pre-crafted/pre-scripted into artistic performance. Complementary to the research literature that focuses on spontaneous, on-the-spot, locally emergent translanguaging and trans-semiotizing, we have shown that they can also be non-spontaneous, carefully and systemically crafted for constructing feeling and meaning. Our enquiry therefore fills the research gap in the literature by investigating whole-body enacting of (partially) pre-crafted/scripted translanguaging and shedding light on designing planned/ designed translanguaging pedagogy and performance in creative arts and education settings. References: Lemke, J. (2015). Feeling and meaning: A unitary bio-semiotic account. In International HandbookofSemiotics (pp. 589-616). Springer, Dordrecht. Lemke, J. L. (2016). Translanguaging and Flows. Unpublished research manuscript. Lin, A. M. Y. (2015). Egalitarian bi/multilingualism and trans-semiotizing in a global world. In W. E. Wright, S. Boun, & O. García (Eds.), The handbook of bilingual and multilingual education (pp. 19-37). West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell. Thibault, P. J. (2011). First-order languaging dynamics and second-order language: the distributed language view. Ecological Psychology, 23(3), 210-245.
