Insa Sané, the word-DJ: Using Hip Hop Composition Techniques to Celebrate Plural Cultural Identities

Insa Sané is a French children’s and YA author of Senegalese descent. Before writing for young people, he performed as a rapper and a slam poet. I propose to show how this musical
background deeply influences his literary work. Not only does Sané write about topics like street violence, drugs, and racism, that are often dealt with in hip hop music, but his whole way of writing also bears the traces of hip hop musicality. I plan to first highlight those traces through narratological analysis, showing how the structures of some of Sané’s novels
imitate typical structures of songs. I will then bring to light the influence of hip hop through intertextual analysis, showing that Sané’s massive integration of quotes and his particular
use of them is close to sampling, an essential technique in hip hop music. In Sané’s work, the sampling technique does not only serve the musicality of his literary work, the eclectic
choice of the ‘samples’ of quotes (from French rap, African-American soul, American TV series, African aphorisms and classical French poems) is also a way to celebrate plural cultural identities and to specifically address young readers who share Sané’s cultural references. I will mobilize discourse analysis and Alain Montandon’s notion of sociopoetics (so-ciopoétique) to show this last point, that also resonates with postcolonial writings.