Questions of National Identity in Palestinian Hip-Hop 2010 to 2021
Lead Research Organisation:
Birmingham City University
Department Name: ADM Birmingham School of Media
Abstract
This project explores an emerging form of popular music, derived from African American hip-hop, which is increasingly a voice for young Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, Israel and the wider Palestinian diaspora in the twenty-first century. This research accounts for the way different Palestinian artists use hip-hop as a means of creating collective political visions of Palestine. In the uprising of May 2021 one could hear Daboor & ShabJadeed's track 'Inn Ann' in Almanara Square in Ramallah, shopping malls in Nablus, and in the Lebanese civil protests of 2021.
Research into Palestinian Music has most often focused on folklore and heritage, and the relationship between music and resistance (cf Barghouthi 2013, Kanaaneh 2013), or biographies of the first Palestinian hip-hop band, DAM (Maria and Shihade 2012, Withers 2018, McDonald 2013). Further, McDonald's (2013) research into Palestinian hip-hop frames it within the binaries of cultural resistance as an alternative to armed resistance embraced by the PLO from 1964-1989, while Maira and Shihade (2012) present a more geopolitical and sociocultural analysis for hip-hop in Palestine, but both remain limited because they focus just on DAM. Neither study tackles the question of how hip-hop is used to articulate collective visions of Palestinian identity.
Furthermore, we lack historically- and culturally-located studies of this influential music within the contemporary Palestinian context. By paying attention to a larger group of artists, in the inter-Palestinian context, I will examine the visions articulated by music-makers in the Palestinian cultural scene.
The study is guided by a key research question:
How did Palestinian hip-hop artists use their music as a vehicle for articulating a collective political vision of Palestinian identity and nationhood during the period 2010 to 2021?
This raises subsidiary questions:
What cultural practices and role do these artists and their music take in Palestinian society?
What political visions are represented in these works?
What senses of cultural identity and nationhood are utilised and how do they relate to wider discourses of Palestinian liberation?
The research draws upon cultural studies approaches to popular music combined with ethnomusicological methods for the study of diasporal music cultures. I avoid the simple biographical approaches common in the studies of musicians and the tendency to emphasise fandom, following Hebdige (1979), in popular music studies.
Instead, I draw upon ethnographic interview to explore the discourses used by the artists in articulating the role of their music, along with the analysis of the lyrics and music. From Grazian (2003) ethnography to study the significance of space, but applied to cultures of production, from Gilroy (2002) the idea of diasporic cultures and African American music outside the USA, and from Hall (1981) the politics of the popular. Ethnomusicology offers key ways to study these practices of cultural production, including Feld's (2012) concept of Cosmopolitanism, Nettl's (2005) ideas around the politics of music, and Araújo's (2017) politics as Praxis. This contributes to our understanding of an understudied aspect of contemporary Palestinian culture, and models for localised reimagining of diasporal African-American musics.
Research into Palestinian Music has most often focused on folklore and heritage, and the relationship between music and resistance (cf Barghouthi 2013, Kanaaneh 2013), or biographies of the first Palestinian hip-hop band, DAM (Maria and Shihade 2012, Withers 2018, McDonald 2013). Further, McDonald's (2013) research into Palestinian hip-hop frames it within the binaries of cultural resistance as an alternative to armed resistance embraced by the PLO from 1964-1989, while Maira and Shihade (2012) present a more geopolitical and sociocultural analysis for hip-hop in Palestine, but both remain limited because they focus just on DAM. Neither study tackles the question of how hip-hop is used to articulate collective visions of Palestinian identity.
Furthermore, we lack historically- and culturally-located studies of this influential music within the contemporary Palestinian context. By paying attention to a larger group of artists, in the inter-Palestinian context, I will examine the visions articulated by music-makers in the Palestinian cultural scene.
The study is guided by a key research question:
How did Palestinian hip-hop artists use their music as a vehicle for articulating a collective political vision of Palestinian identity and nationhood during the period 2010 to 2021?
This raises subsidiary questions:
What cultural practices and role do these artists and their music take in Palestinian society?
What political visions are represented in these works?
What senses of cultural identity and nationhood are utilised and how do they relate to wider discourses of Palestinian liberation?
The research draws upon cultural studies approaches to popular music combined with ethnomusicological methods for the study of diasporal music cultures. I avoid the simple biographical approaches common in the studies of musicians and the tendency to emphasise fandom, following Hebdige (1979), in popular music studies.
Instead, I draw upon ethnographic interview to explore the discourses used by the artists in articulating the role of their music, along with the analysis of the lyrics and music. From Grazian (2003) ethnography to study the significance of space, but applied to cultures of production, from Gilroy (2002) the idea of diasporic cultures and African American music outside the USA, and from Hall (1981) the politics of the popular. Ethnomusicology offers key ways to study these practices of cultural production, including Feld's (2012) concept of Cosmopolitanism, Nettl's (2005) ideas around the politics of music, and Araújo's (2017) politics as Praxis. This contributes to our understanding of an understudied aspect of contemporary Palestinian culture, and models for localised reimagining of diasporal African-American musics.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Tim Wall (Primary Supervisor) | |
| Marah Khalifa (Student) |