Sites and sights of postcolonial resistance: The social media and music videos of second-generation Italian rappers

This article explores how second-generation Italian rappers use social media and music videos as sites and sights of postcolonial resistance, engaging in both identity construction and counter-narrative production. Since its rise to popularity in the early 2000s, social media has been crucial for these artists’ career development and promotion, self-expression and communication with fans, the media, institutions and other artists. Music videos, uploaded to YouTube and cross-posted across platforms, serve as visual narratives that foreground their lived experiences and perspectives not widely represented in Italian media. Through an analysis of various artists’ social media and music video practices, I argue that these forms of digital media are central to a process called ‘rapping back’, through which they decolonize Italian identity and take back the narrative from those in the Italian media, political system and society that seek to other them.