New Texts Out Now: Hisham Aidi, Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture: In the early 2000s, I was working as a cultural reporter covering Harlem and the South Bronx, writing about migration, youth culture, and gentrification. Back then, I was also doing some work as a DJ and concert-promoting. Harlem is a cultural cauldron—you have these dizzying flows between West Africa, Western Europe, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. I was witnessing up close the making, remaking, and globalization of black culture. I was struck by the connections between the urban periphery and the international system, how the ghetto and the barrio are linked to the global. And then of course with the post-9/11 crackdown on Muslim communities in the US and Europe—and New York saw a great deal of that—I became interested in how Muslim youth were responding to the range of punitive policies they were facing. What was the cultural and political response to the security politics? As I detail, a range of movements have emerged in American and European cities (separatist, integrationist, Islamist, secular, etc), but I am particularly struck by the turn towards race activism and black politics. 9/11 was in many ways the Muslim diaspora’s racial baptism. There is a very keen interest among young Muslims today in Fanon, Malcolm X, Aimé Césaire, and other figures of the black struggle. As I write in the introduction, “Muslims, in the last decade, have discovered race as a political tool, and the ghetto as a site of struggle; black internationalism increasingly provides an archive from which young Muslims in Europe and the US can draw on.” In short—in this book, I try to understand America’s relationship to the Muslim world through the prism of black internationalism and music. The second experience: in late 2005, I was in Brazil working on a piece on the affirmative action debate in that country. I found myself in Salvador, Bahia, in the favela of Liberdade, talking to some Afro-Brazilian converts to Islam—and that got me thinking about just how different the discourse on Islam and the Middle East in South America is from the discourse in North America and Europe. The narratives and policies about Islam and Muslims that we generally find in the US and Western Europe (the security policies, xenophobic movements, etc) are generally absent in South America. I try to present Brazil as a counter-example. What is it about Latin American Orientalism, and domestic/foreign policy in Brazil—and South American writ large—that makes life for Arabs and Muslims there less politically stressful than it is in Western Europe or America?
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 20:31:05 +0000
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