Racionais MC’s: The Constitution of Negro Drama as a Subject of Resistance

Abstract

This essay aims to analyze, from an ethical-political perspective and drawing on contemporary theoretical tools, the musical production of the rap group Racionais MC’s, which provides the conditions for reflecting on a praxis of resistance, on certain interlocutions with the Black movement in Brazil, and on the confrontations that become necessary in light of such reflection. Methodologically, the essay is divided into three sections corresponding to successive periods of the group’s production, with the aim of showing (1) how the rappers initially take strong class-based positions, intensified in their critique of racial and social inequality, while simultaneously maintaining misogynistic stances during this early moment of their production; (2) how this first moment finds continuity in a second period also marked by social critique, incorporating what I call an “ostentatious-becoming” in the group’s production, during which we see the class critique diminish; and finally, (3) how this ostentatious becoming becomes even more evident in the third moment of their production, also characterized by a certain social critique and by the abandonment of their earlier misogynistic positions. This trajectory results in the idea that the subject of resistance possesses simultaneously subjugated and subjectifying aspects, expressing a subjectivity constituted both by external mechanisms of power and by the subject’s own ethical work of the self upon the self.