Rowa Nabil

The present study examines the dynamics of youth artivism -artistic activism- in selected countries of the Arab World as manifested in protest songs, produced by young singers and bands during the popular uprisings between 2010 and 2013. The study analyzes the stylistic, linguistic, and aesthetic features of protest songs, and their function as instruments employed to articulate collective defiance, grievances, and aspirations. The study, also, investigates the political engagement of young Arab protest singers in the homeland and diaspora, by analyzing their role as activist-artists in generating songs that represent an alternative national consciousness reflective of the popular masses. This national-popular consciousness is represented and documented in the protest songs accompanying the eruption of popular political contention. Central to this research is the assertion that the cultural phenomenon of Arab artivism is best understood within its social, political, and historical contexts. Presenting a critical discussion of neo-Marxist and post-Marxist approaches, the study is informed by Antonio Gramsci’s concepts of ‘hegemony’ and ‘national-popular’ in an attempt to highlight the cultural paradigm of subversive artistic activism.

The paper traces subjectivity reconstruction in Latifa al-Zayyat’s self-referential life narrative Hamlet Taftīsh: Awrāq Shakhṣiyya [A Search Campaign: Personal Papers], first published in 1992. The paper contributes to the literature on al-Zayyat’s oeuvre by reading her narrative in light of life writing studies, focusing on prison memories and their bearings on subjectivity reconstruction. Adopting Caren Kaplan’s conceptualization of ‘outlaw genres’ as an analytic tool, the paper traces the disruption of the individuated authorial presence of the autonomous subject, and the organizational patterns of autobiography proper. The paper contends that these acts of subversion are liberatory narrative strategies that emerge as a response to the subject’s experiential realities of political activism and subsequent detention. Al-Zayyat employs episodic nonlinearity, polyphony of narrative voices, and overlapping discursive modes of self-narration as experimental interventions to reconstruct a fragmented multi-vocal subjectivity, troubled in and by its unfinished becoming. The paper also discusses al-Zayyat’s unpublished prison memoir, in an attempt to imagine its location in the trajectory of her becoming as an author and political activist. The paper concludes that al-Zayyat actively intervenes in the fabric of her life narrative with a collective authorial position to reconstruct her subjectivity through the negotiated co-presence of the private and public. The personal experiences of girlhood and marriage intertwine with the collective historical past of anticolonial resistance and sociopolitical struggles. The reconstructed subjectivity is, thus, manifested in a self-narrating subject actively re-formed through a pluralized ‘I,’ whose history is re-membered via self-identification with intersubjective pasts and collective memories.

A decolonial reading presupposes provincializing the Eurocentric modernity/coloniality, which evaluates non-European cultural traditions exclusively in light of the European model, and from within the European tradition, instead of perceiving these traditions from the outside, and from an external position. As a result, non-European cultures are recognized and framed as subordinate not for being unfamiliarly different to their Western counterpart, but for being a deformed aberration to the universalized monolithic norm. Under such coloniality of imagination, the particular complexities of the non-European imaginaire are devalued by the rhetoric of modernity. A decolonial reading of Khayri Shalabi’s imaginary travelogue Rehālāt al- Torshagi al-Halwagi fi al-Zamān (1983)1 embarks from exploring the poetics of deconstructing “the colonization of the imagination” (Quijano 23). The paper examines the revalidation of the local cultural heritage, and the restitution of narrative traditions as manifestations of alterity to modernity.

This paper analyzes the interaction between the musical productions and the cultural identity of young Arab musicians in Western diaspora. The theme of 'hybridity' tackles questions of cultural identity and identity politics, particularly when the musical performances in diaspora and imposed self-exile voice political struggles in the homeland, and manifest the musicians' national consciousness. Highlighting political aesthetics and ideologies of transnationalism, the present research examines the musical performances of two Arab bands in Western diaspora. The first is '47Soul', a London-based band of Palestinian origins that fuses the music folklore of the Levant, with electronic sonic systems, in musical hybrids negotiating the Palestinian musical identity. The second is 'Nas Jota,' a Sudanese music group and production platform based in the United States of America. Nas Jota produces Arabic hip-hop performances, mixed with African reggae, employing heteroglossic linguistic variations, to articulate political protest against the autocracy of Sudan's former regime. The paper aims to illustrate the transcultural exchange of musical and lyrical features reflective of the musical hybrids and hybrid identities emerging in light of the diasporic and exilic experiences. The paper places the musical hybrids in the cultural and political contexts of their composition and reception. Offering an interdisciplinary approach, the paper argues that the hybrid identities of these young Arab musicians is represented in the hybridity of the musical fusions. In addition, the engagement of the musical hybrids with national popular struggles in the homeland sheds light on national identity ties.

https://journals.ekb.eg/article_160208.html