Have you ever listened to Chinese rap music? The answer to this question is very likely to be negative, and the reasons quite understandable. However, to scholars and curious music lovers, rap music turns out to be a creative and very informative window to question further Chinese society, its boiling youth and its fast-paced modern development. Based on a PhD defended in January 2024 and conducted for five years between Chengdu, Beijing and Paris, this session aims to unravel some of the most interesting outcomes of my research. I’ll focus more thoroughly on the localisation, the cultural legitimisation and the political negotiations at stake in the practice of Chinese rap. Overall, I’ll defend – in the direct heritage of cultural and popular music studies – that Chinese rap consists in a valuable artistic vehicle that should be seriously tackled in order to improve our understanding of the cultural and socio-political challenges at stake in 2024 China.

This session will be preceded by a discussion on fieldwork and ethnographic methods with Bristol PhD students  (3-4pm) in room G.12, Victoria Rooms.      

Grégoire Bienvenu holds two PhDs from the Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Paris, France) and the Communication University of China (中国传媒大学, Beijing). His doctoral research focused on Chinese rap music and adopted a mix-method combining ethnography and corpus analysis anchored in a Cultural Studies perspective. More broadly, his teachings tackle international communication, cultural flows and contra-flows and Chinese popular culture.