Cultural resonance: Between hip-hop culture & the sociopolitical development of youth artivists in Palestine

ABSTRACT

Youth sociopolitical development is explored in the context of a hip-hop arts workshop in the Palestinian West Bank. Workshop youth created art vividly expressing their perspectives gained while navigating the Israeli apartheid state. The youth participants’ art is analyzed here to shine a light on its liberatory content, and also to better understand what it is about the genre of hip-hop that affords intifadeh or uprising. The concept of resonance is offered as a way to describe sympathetic vibration between youth voices and hip-hop conventions, including artists repping their hood, preserving culture through sampling, and battling the oppressive “big they.”

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my deepest feelings of gratitude to my brother in spirit Ibrahim Maali for his visionary actions to bring hip-hop education to global contexts, particularly his homeland Palestine. I also want to offer a full-hearted thank you and salaam to the entire community at Alrowwad Cultural Arts Society for sharing their perspectives and their pedagogies with me. I hope these words add a few droplets of fuel to the collective Black+Palestinian intifada. I would also like to thank the Learners’ Voices working group who created a platform to discuss many of the themes that I eventually took up within this article. In particular, my conversations and colloborations with Lisette Lopez were critical in laying out the conceptual frameorks I used to analyze these occurences.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All music referenced in this article has been cited in the Songs Referenced section of the works cited. Links are provided so that readers can intersperse their reading with listening to primary sources.

2. The term Global South Side draws on notions of the Global South, which has traditionally described formerly or currently colonized international regions, mostly in the southern hemisphere (including Africa, Asia, and South America). The notion of the Global South Side highlights the ways in which colonization happens on hyperlocal scales, so that one side of town (i.e. the northside) can act as the colonizer and another side of town (i.e. the southside) like the colonized.

3. My thinking on the big they is also influenced by Slavoj Zizek (2011) and his description of Lacan’s notion of “the big other.” Lacan’s “big other” is an amorphous symbolic persona that is ever present in a person’s psychic space, for example my God, my Nation, or my Enemy. We are constantly acting in ways that are referential to these grand personas, because they are constantly watching. Our actions have meaning to the extent to which they are received or felt by the big others in our life.