p Hop from '48 Palestine: Youth, Music, and the Present/Absent

Maira, S., Shihade, M.

This essay explores hip hop produced by Palestinian youth within the 1948 borders of Israel, a site that reveals some of the most acute contradictions of nationalism, citizenship, and settler colonialism. It focuses primarily on the pioneering Palestinian hip-hop group DAM, from Lid, and also on Arapeyat from Akka, Saz from Ramleh, and Awlad el Hara from Nazareth. The article offers the concept of the "present absent" as a profound analytic lens for understanding the fundamental contradictions of the social, political, and cultural conditions created by specific histories of settler colonialism for ’48 Palestinians, who are simultaneously visible/invisible, indigenous/inauthentic, and absent/present. We argue that this new genre of rap reimagines the geography of the nation, linking the experiences of these "’48 Palestinians" to those in the West Bank, in Gaza, and in the diaspora, and producing an archive of censored histories. The article situates this music within a genealogy of artistic and protest movements by ’48 Palestinians, providing a historical context for the national and political identities articulated in the music of a new generation of ’48 Palestinians. There are three major aspects of the articulation of the present/absent in ’48 Palestinian hip hop that we discuss: the critique of official narratives and state policies that rupture Israeli mythologies of democracy and inclusion; the rewriting of the ambiguity and alienation of being Palestinians from "’48"; and the attempt to connect Palestinians "inside" and "outside."

Staging Palestine in France-Algeria: Popular Theater and the Politics of Transcolonial Comparison

Harrison, O. C.

The ongoing uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East require that we reassess the national and regional paradigms that still prevail in Maghreb and Mashreq studies. Taking the double anniversaries of Algerian independence and of the Arab uprisings as my starting point, I analyze a transcolonial identification that continues to capture Maghrebi and Mashreqi imaginaries today: the figure of Palestine. Focusing on a 1971 play by the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine and the popular theater troupe Workers’ Cultural Action, Mohamed Take Your Suitcase, I argue that this play co-opts a figure central to Algerian state discourse, Palestine, in popular languages (Algerian Arabic and Berber) and forms in order to effect a double critique. On the one hand, it ridicules the discourse of fraternity deployed by the state, and its exploitation of the memory of the Algerian war and popular solidarity with Palestine. Far from constituting a manifesto for pan-Arab or pan-Islamic solidarity along identitarian lines, Kateb’s play gives shape to a postcolonial imaginary of emancipation that foreshadows ongoing prodemocracy struggles. Yet it also reactivates anticolonial discourse, exposing the persistence of colonial racism in contemporary France, where metaphors of hospitality have effaced the fraught history of (post)colonial immigration. Placing Mohamed Take Your Suitcase in the context of post-1967 Maghrebi and Franco-Maghrebi pro-Palestinian activism, my reading shows that Franco-Algerian as well as Maghreb-Mashreq relations are intricately connected to the question of Palestine, raising the question of the limits and potential of transcolonial politics.

What Happened to the Motley Crew?: C. L. R. James, Helio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness

Harris, L.

What happened to "the motley crew," the mobile, insurgent, creative social formation, crossing racial, gender and generational lines, that historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker identify as a crucial counterforce within the consolidation of capitalism, imperialism, and the modern state? I address that question by way of the twentieth-century aesthetic experiments undertaken by the Trinidadian writer and political activist C. L. R. James and the Brazilian visual artist and counterculturalist Hélio Oiticica. While Linebaugh and Rediker insist the motley crew disappeared in the nineteenth century, I argue that both James and Oiticica independently discovered its active remains in what I call "the aesthetic sociality of blackness," the popular practices they encountered among the predominantly black residents of the barrack-yards of Port of Spain and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. These experiments are marked by the claims they make on that sociality and the claims it makes on them. James’s novel Minty Alley and the banners/tents/capes that were the starting point for Oiticica’s Parangolé explore the creative practices they encountered in autonomously organized performative modes like cricket and samba and the forms of speech, gesture, shelter and adornment conventionally understood to embody "informal" social life. I examine the ways James’s and Oiticica’s claims take shape in these early works and the way the counterclaim of that aesthetic sociality irrupts into and rearranges these works, using them as vehicles for its own expression, which can be contained neither by the works themselves nor by the gesture (or the analytic) of appropriation.

Anti-Oedipus, Kinship, and the Subject of Affect: Reading Fanon with Deleuze and Guattari

Musser, A. J.

This essay reads Frantz Fanon and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari together based on their critiques of an Oedipal model of kinship. Though they have divergent reasons for rejecting this structure, merging these discourses brings into relief their overlapping interest in non-Oedipal relations. It also allows us to reconsider the theoretical implications of their work. On the one hand, it allows us to look more carefully at the affective implications of Fanon’s rejection of the Oedipus complex and understand his focus on solidarity in a new light. On the other hand, it renders Deleuze and Guattari’s abstractions more concrete and allows us to review the ethical stakes of their project by providing a historical foil for their theories. Ultimately, I argue, reading them together allows us to revisit queer concepts of kinship from different historical and theoretical frames.

Ocular Anthropomorphisms: Eugenics and Primatology at the Threshold of the "Almost Human"

Glick, M. H.

From the moment Charles Darwin proposed Africa as the site of human origins, scientists and the lay public alike labored to reconcile contemporary racial hierarchies with the possibility of a universal African birthplace. Previous historical treatments of this phenomenon have focused on the search for the "missing link" in Asia and Europe, an investigation that, if successful, would have effectively established a separate ancestry for the white races. This essay identifies a new component of this history: the racialization of higher-order primates within the nascent discipline of primatology and within US popular culture between the 1910s and 1930s. Departing from Donna Haraway’s originary work on the field, this essay argues that primatology was in fact built upon preexisting scientific racial ideologies, such that the animals themselves became parsed according to racial categorizations. In particular, the anthropomorphization and "whitening" of the chimpanzee on the one hand, and the bestialization and "blackening" of the gorilla on the other, provided a forum for ideas about biological essentialism, evolutionary capabilities, and racial difference. This alternative history is revealed through an examination of the photographic archives and written work of longtime eugenicist and founding primatologist Robert Mearns Yerkes, and through a contextualization of these documents within contemporary scientific and popular cultures. By tracing the lineage of American primatology to the closing arc of eugenic science, this essay seeks to enrich and reimagine the relationship between practices of racialization and speciation within the larger histories of evolutionary thought and racial formation.

Casio [photograph]

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