Subaltern voices and postcolonial schizophrenia: The political tensions of M.I.A.’s Kala

ABSTRACT

Banned from the U.S. during the “war on terror,” the British/Sri Lankan hip-hop artist M.I.A. responded by recording her 2007 album Kala in multiple locations throughout the global South, collating indigenous musical styles and unorthodox recording techniques. Via a critical/cultural analysis, this paper explores M.I.A.’s work on Kala as subaltern resistance mobilized by “differential movement,” particularly in its mode of production, which operated outside of, and in opposition to, institutional mechanisms designed to expunge or neutralize politically subversive art and artists. Yet M.I.A.’s musical sampling also surfaces conflicts between creative freedom and cultural appropriation, emblematizing “postcolonialist/postmodern schizophrenia” (Vályi, 2011. Remixing cultures: Bartók and Kodály in the age of indigenous cultural rights. In K. McLeod & R. Kuenzli (Eds.), Cutting across media: Appropriation art, interventionist collage, and copyright law (pp. 219–236). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.).

KEYWORDS:

• Differential movement
• M.I.A
• musical production
• interventionist collage
• postcolonial schizophrenia

Notes

1 Drawn from the political philosophy of the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, the term “subaltern” refers in its most basic sense to a subordinated class of people, marginalized through dominant ideologies and social formations, yet harboring the potential for resistance to power structures. The term has been taken up in the global Subaltern Studies project to address “the politics of the people” (Guha, 1988, p. 40) in terms of the autonomy and capacity for self-representation of subaltern groups, especially in the context of postcolonial theory. Today, the term “subaltern” encompasses a wide range of meanings, all concerned with challenges to power in societies.

2 A note on terminology is necessary here: appellations such as “First” and “Third” World, “global North and South,” and other similar markers of political and economic disparity have been rightly criticized for reinscribing binaries and effacing differences within these overgeneralized categories. However, I use these terms deliberately in this paper in order to draw attention to the hierarchical dualism at work in these conceptualizations.

3 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Sri Lankan separatist group with whom Arulpragasam’s father was associated.