Counterorienting the war on terror: Arab hip hop and diasporic resistance

Abstract

This article discusses Arab hip hop as a transnational genre produced out of a state of upheaval, resisting political and economic oppression. One impact of the 9/11 attacks was to make Arabs and Muslims increasingly visible in the US public, reflecting what Nadine Naber has termed a "diaspora of empire." Arab hip hop points to a unique nexus reflecting the web of cultural and economic realities in the 21st century. I argue that sampling practices, sonic layering, and linguistic play in Arab hip hop allow artists to enact geographic and temporal flexibility and facilitate a diasporic resistance that challenges public fear and repressive state discourse. "Somos Sur," a 2014 track from French Chilean artist Ana Tijoux's album Vengo, features British Palestinian hip hop artist Shadia Mansour and a syncopated maqsoum beat, associated with Arab folk dance, interwoven with semitones.The song is a paean to revolutionary resistance, uniting those who are "callados, omitidos, invisibles" (silenced, neglected, invisible). A rough translation of Mansour's Arabic verse reads: "Music is the mother tongue of the world/She supports our existence, she protects our roots/She joins us from greater Syria to Africa to Latin America." The YouTube video, which has over six million views as of this writing, features Tijoux celebrating with a crowd wearing bright indigenous Andean clothing. Mansour dances dabke, a Levantine folk dance, in bare feet and an embroidered Palestinian dress (see Figure 1). "Somos Sur" foregrounds an infectious brass line that mimics the mijwiz, a nasal double-reed instrument.Mansour's fierce delivery coupled with the instrumentation, rhythm, and quarter tonality convey "sonic Arabness," a term I use to refer to a set of aural markers that have become associated with Arab culture. Tijoux and Mansour harness an infectious and disruptive energy in their collaboration, hailing anticolonial alliances between Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, and illustrating what Nitasha Sharma (2015) has called "post-9/11 Brown." In a section that introduces Mansour's verse, Tijoux lists Latin American and African countries impacted by colonial rule, finally proclaiming "Yo te quiero libre Palestina" (I want a free Palestine). This line is punctuated with a cry of zaghareet, a ululation signifying communal joy. Mansour's Arabic verse is rapid and virtuosic and her vocal performance is commanding. Neither the Spanish or Arabic lyrics are translated to English, suggesting the primary intended audiences for the track are Spanish and Arabic speaking. Summoning what Jayna Brown (2010) called "buzz and rumble" referencing Congolese and Angolan musics, Tijoux raps, "This is not utopia/This is a joyful dancing rebellion." For Brown, buzz and rumble describes sounds that are created in dystopian landscapes of devastation and violence: "The buzz and rumble is the sound of the new space the music creates, the space people create out of necessity for their sanity…[it] is the power that rides through these circumstances; improvising...

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