Shaping Hybrid Identities: A Textual Analysis of British Bhangra Lyrics

The article deals with a successful musical genre of the Asian diaspora in the United Kingdom. The fusion of Western pop sounds and traditional folk music original of the Punjab, British bhangra, is in fact an original reinvention mixing old and new sonorities as well as Eastern and Western instruments, languages (Punjabi and English) and cultures. The analysis of the lyrics of two bands – Asian Dub Foundation and Cornershop – has focussed on the distinctive linguistic features and discursive strategies that mark the encoding of British Asian identity and has compared the corresponding representations of identity-as-hybrid that emerge from the textual selection. In their own creative ways, both bands resort to ethnolects that work as in-group identity markers resisting complete assimilation by stressing difference. In both cases, peripheral representations, put forward by second-generation British youth and displacing conventional language (musical as well as verbal) from “inside out”, have been accepted into mainstream cultural production and allowed to participate in the interplay between dominant and marginal discourses, advancing new exciting ways of being British.