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This article takes Canadian hip hop artist Drake, his celebrity and his body of work as a point of departure for an examination of discursive constructions of race, hip hop and Canada in intersection. Canada’s role in the global hip hop movement has always been contested; circumscribed from abroad by its proximity to the United States and at home by its ideological positioning of Black citizens and Black cultural production vis-à-vis the imagined nation. Framed by broader questions of the role of hip hop in the Canadian public sphere, this discursive analysis analyses the work and utterances of Drake as well as discourses produced about Drake through music criticism and by other hip hop artists. Drake’s public performance of Blackness via hip hop is framed by overlapping and competing ideologies. Drake ‐ whose public persona seems to embody a number of seemingly competing identities ‐ is ‘impossible’ in so far as he is the product of intersecting, circulating conceptualizations of Blackness that render only some performances of Blackness both commercially viable and authentically hip hop, while others remain impossible, unacceptable, unutterable or unimaginable both inside and outside the nation state.

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The Afrosphere is a diverse field of social media marked by a willingness to engage issues of shared or collective concern for inhabitants of the “Black Atlantic” or the “Black diaspora.” By looking at blogs as a form of public address, this analysis examines instances of religion in the Afrosphere as components of strategic identification around what Stephan Palmié terms “black collective selfhood.” Considering both the technological affordances and cultural contexts of blogging, this analysis explores the intersection of race and religion in the Afrosphere as constitutive of digital counterpublic discourse. Building on textual analysis of blog posts, this analysis outlines how meaning is formed, fixed, and contested in discussions of religion in the Afrosphere. This analysis argues that the intersection of race and religion within this digital counterpublic makes particular iterations of the Black diaspora visible.

The circulation of misinformation, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories related to the global pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus are often subjected to a hegemonic categorization that renders those ignoring social distancing recommendations or seeking alternative cures “covidiots.” This text examines the public circulation of those fragments of discourse simultaneously relegated to the edges of the pandemic and made hypervisible through mediated repetition.