„Asimilare condiționată”: Critica literară și problema muzicii hip-hop
“Conditional Assimilation”: Literary Criticism and the Issue of Hip-Hop Music

Summary/Abstract: This study analyzes the dynamics of critical reception and cultural legitimation of hip-hop music in postcommunist Romania, investigating the ways in which this “imported” phenomenon was integrated in the local intellectual discourse. Using the theoretical and methodological framework developed by Pierre Bourdieu in The Rules of Art (concepts such as field, habitus, symbolic capital, illusio, and nomos), the article proposes a critique of the strategies used to legitimize rap music by cultural actors such as G. P. Volceanov and Mihai Iovănel. The central thesis of the article defines the processes of legitimation as a form of “conditional assimilation.” Its main argument maintains that rap music managed to penetrate the Romanian literary field not through the recognition of the autonomy of its own field of cultural production, but through its subordination to the norms and values of poetry (particularly through its similarities with the so-called “Generation 2000” writers and their shared social engagement). The study demonstrates that, although the thesis “rap is poetry” provides the genre with the symbolic capital necessary to counter institutional marginalization, it operates through a form of reductionism that ignores the internal mechanisms, history, and power dynamics specific to hip-hop culture (underground vs. mainstream). In conclusion, the paper warns that the current critical discourse, despite its good intentions, risks turning hip-hop into a mere annex of the lyric genre, thereby preventing a deeper understanding of it as a distinct and complex cultural manifestation.

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