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Phasing out gasoline cars and coal: What the U. She helped her husband start a far-right militia group. All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. By Joshua Mitnick. In this essay, I interrogate the racial representations through which Arab rappers are constructed and circulated in different forms of English language media and the political implications of these representations.
In doing so, I attempt to draw into focus the window which often frames Arab protagonists for an audience outside the Arab world. Slingshot Hip Hop is a documentary film about Palestinians making and performing rap music under the Israeli Occupation. It follows different rap crews from the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and inside Israel as they attempt to and are obstructed from taking the stage in one concert in the occupied West Bank. The film was released in and is screened regularly on US college campuses.
DAM, one of the Palestinian groups featured prominently in the film, arguably put Palestinian hip hop on a global map—their tracks and collaborations have perhaps done more than any single other Arab rap crew on the Eastern Mediterranean to draw global attention to Arabic rap from the Levant. They are Palestinians from the neglected city of Lyd, inside Israel. Only then did he look for and find the album Fear of a Black Planet. It is too simplistic to suggest that the trailer is somehow complicit in a misrepresentation of what Nafar explains in more detail in the film.
What makes this worthy of more extended analysis is that this trailer is not an isolated example. Considerable activist and academic energy since the second Intifada has sought to draw connections between the anti-racist struggles of African Americans in the US and Palestinians under occupation, many of them using the presence of hip hop as proof of this affinity and solidarity. Neither is this enthusiasm about the taking up of hip hop only applied to Palestinian subjects.
Dozens of articles appeared in the exciting first weeks of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions in that similarly sought and explored the creative connections between US hip hop and Arab street protest. Why has the connection with this interpretation of African-American urban life and political expression proved such a saleable and important connection in framing some Palestinian and other urban Arab perspectives?
For example, political scientist Hisham Aidi has convincingly explored the deliberate exploitation of African American political and musical expression by the US State Department in cultural programming geared for the Muslim world in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal.
That is, the tours are an example of neoliberal frameworks of representation that, in working to counter the negative backlash against neo-imperial policy, present images of African-American struggle for equality and history in the US as ideally American.
Like Slingshot, it also follows the lead-up to live hip hop concerts. In US state efforts to reach Arab audiences through hip hop, both the whitewashing of the legacy of American hip hop by aligning it with US state policy and blackwashing of the US abroad by associating it with popular music like hip hop become clear.
These are potentially very different political ideas. But they rely on essentially the same racialized constructions. In a time of increased interest in black-Arab solidarity organizing, I consider it worthwhile to examine carefully the navigations of similarity and difference that these political abstractions of race mobilize.
For the moment, however, I instead want to ask: Can blackness aid the project of whiteness? Allusions to blackness that are mobilized to frame and understand the figures of both the Arab protester and the terrorist-thug resonate on a racial spectrum that works to make familiar an Arab other that is otherwise irredeemably strange.
What political narratives does mobilizing blackness in this way serve? Blackwashed representations of Arab and Muslim actors depoliticize exciting and threatening Arab Others while simultaneously whitewashing US and European history, scrubbing the latter of elements of negative racial oppression retaining only the sense of victory over injustice and purging racial struggle of its class conflict and economic materiality.
We thus find ourselves in a political environment where media outlets all but fall over themselves to celebrate hip hop in the Arab street as non-violent speaking truth to power, while simultaneously framing rap as the insidious soundtrack to terrorism and the Muslim rapper as terrorist and terrorist as rap-inclined thug. SOAS Blog. Maxine Betteridge-Moes. Category: Music. April 16, pm. Tags africa 67 alumni 36 Black HIstory Month 23 China 45 clearing 18 climate change 38 community 21 coronavirus 21 COVID 70 culture 26 development 47 Development Studies 19 Donald Trump 19 economics 64 education 28 Environment 16 equality 20 Gender Studies 20 globalisation 24 human rights 72 India 33 language 16 law 27 london 32 London life 22 media 35 Middle East 35 Migration 21 music 44 peace 26 poetry 17 politics 67 postgraduate 79 race 19 refugees 16 refugees and immigration 20 soas SOAS University of London 43 student life 81 sustainability 22 undergraduate 85 United Nations 20 university 19 University of London women
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