Title: The Song Readers
Description: This dissertation is an ethnographic study of Taiwan's hip-hop scene and an examination of rap music's emergence as a trenchant form of musical narrative discourse in the post-martial law era (1987 to the present). Its central argument is that performers have invoked rap as a storytelling practice to make sound and sense of the dramatic social and political transformations that transpired in the wake of Taiwan's democratization at the dusk of the twentieth century, and in the years thereafter. My discussion draws on a vibrant archive of materials collected over eighteen months of fieldwork and proceeds from two primary assumptions: first, that Taiwan rap is a narrative genre, with antecedents in an array of Afro-diasporic oral narrative traditions as well as local narrative traditions that employ speech-song techniques; and second, that storytelling can be understood as a process of collaborative social and political engagement that empowers artists and audiences to a sense of agency in the world they see around them.