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This manuscript examines Marshall Bruce Mathers III, known both as Eminem and Slim Shady, as he employs pedestrian speech acts to walk the edge between “here and there.” Walking is the discursive process through which a subject is constituted by the relationship it creates with the Other. de Certeau outlines three stages through which this process occurs: (1) appropriation, in which the speaker acquires the language of a given culture to bear the burden of his/her own experience; (2) a “spatial acting-out of the place,” through which the speaker airs his/her position with relation to the language; and (3) allocution, through which the speaker posits the Other as the reference point for the speaker’s own subjectivity and negotiates the relationship between the two positions (97-98). Eminem’s commercial success is examined in terms of these three stages as a method for understanding his representative strategy and his continued commercial success in a popular music as a transracial medium.
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