‘"Iraq is the New Black": A Case Study in Prefigurative Activist Hip Hop’

“Iraq is the new black”: A case study in prefigurative activist hip-hop Slides 1-3: Introduction & video clip I’m Rebecca and I’m a 2nd year doctoral student in Translation & Intercultural Studies. Today I’m going to theorise prefiguration through the specific case study of a contemporary hip hop music video, which is freely available on YouTube and has an activist agenda regarding the War on Terror. I’m going to present this as an example of aesthetic practice that prefigures an alternative form of epistemological social construction and political engagement in the globalised era. Change slide. The text we’ll be looking at is the official music video for the 2009 song “P.H.A.T.W.A.”, by Canadian-Iraqi rapper The Narcicyst, real name Yassin Alsalman. The video was directed by Alsalman’s sister and corresponds thematically to the rap lyrics. It combines music and comedy to tell the story of The Narcicyst and his friend attempting to catch a flight from Canada to New York for a music event, but missing the flight when The Narcicyst is hauled into an interrogation room for questioning on the basis that he’s an Arab and is wearing a T-shirt with a slogan on it about Saddam Hussein. So, it engages critically and performatively with the theme of increased suspicion/targeting of Muslims following 9/11. The acronym PHATWA is said to stand for ‘Political Hip Hop Attracting the World’s Attention’, but it is also a play on the Arabic word ‘fatwa’, or an Islamic decree, and the word ‘phat’ spelled with a PH which is slang for good or cool, and is often used to describe music. I’m going to play you the first minute or so of the video to give you a taste for the narrative as a whole. Play video.  Slide 4: Context of Study Right, so before proceeding with the text analysis, I’d first like to outline the broader theoretical context of the research. The point of departure for the study is the War on Terror discourse – or meta narrative – that has been prominent in international politics and the media since 9/11, and which reinvigorates Samuel Huntington’s much-criticised Clash of Civilisations thesis from the 1990s, which envisages Islamic civilisation as a monolithic and threatening bloc that the West must protect against. It’s an idea which, unfortunately, since events like the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the more recent rise of ISIS, sometimes seems in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy. But one of the effects of this socially-divisive kind of discourse is to mask the nuance and complexity of ongoing cultural and epistemological developments of the globalised era. In reality, many people’s lives today reveal an increasing intersectionality and fluidity of cultural values & interests, due to high levels of mobility, instantaneity of information flow, and the rise of social media, among other factors. This means that, as people’s identities increasingly absorb elements from diverse cultural sources and communities both virtual and real, they are forming new ways of thinking and being that are no-longer bounded by nationality and do not necessarily align with normative socio-political discourse. Elaborating on this, Jan Aarte Scholte writes about the globalisation of knowledge to refer to the shift away from the positivist assumptions underpinning European statecraft and liberal democratic society, which privilege scientific and rationalist modes of thought above all other forms of knowledge as a foundation for a profit-driven society. For many, this paradigm is no longer valid and new forms of social construction are emerging, which centre around other dimensions of the human experience. As Scholte puts it: “Rationalism may be expected to give way to other epistemologies when socio-historical conditions become ripe for such a transformation.” (2005: 258) Now, a useful framework with which to approach the complexity of globalised society I believe is the socio-narrative approach, which provides the analytical tools to make coherent links between the micro and the macro, and has the versatility to keep up with the fast-paced dynamics of societal evolution. The premise of this model is that human beings are story-telling creatures by nature, and that narratives are constitutive and not simply representative of reality. Briefly, the framework identifies 4 interrelated but distinct types of narrative: ontological which is personal identity; public narratives which are those disseminated by public institutions such as the government, the media, etc.; conceptual narratives which are academic narratives in any field of study; and meta narratives, which I mentioned earlier, which have a much wider reach and persist for longer, so they might be considered the defining narratives of an era or age. Among other things, the narrative approach reveals the non-inevitability of our social constructions of the world, because narratives are constantly changing, and because each individual ultimately has the agency to construct new narratives. That is not to say, however, that narratives cannot and do not become structurally entrenched and oppressive, or hegemonic. Indeed I would argue that the War on Terror meta narrative is the most topical example of this. The danger is that hegemonic narratives, being so widespread for such a long time, often come to be considered “self-evident” and can go unquestioned on a mass scale, marginalising certain groups of people whose narratives cannot be ‘heard’ at a given point in history. That is why there is a need for activism that does not simply reproduce these narrative structures. This ongoing interplay between dominance and resistance, or structure and agency, is expressed in the narrative model through the narrative features of normativeness and breach.  Slide 5: Narrativity & Affect Crucially to this study, narrativity also includes non-verbal forms of expression, which means that visual imagery, physical gestures, and music, for example, can all be brought into the scope of a socio-narrative analysis. This, I argue, makes the framework particularly amenable to the affective turn in cultural studies and critical theory, which has been gaining ground in recent years. Affect can be understood as the “broader, generic hit of the world” (Wetherall 2014), as distinct from the subjective shapings or packagings of emotions. So it is a social and relational phenomenon rather than a bounded and private one, and it is always rooted in the present moment, as an “emergent potentiality”. A focus on affect, I believe, can deepen our understanding of the workings of contemporary narrativity. Lauren Berlant describes public spheres, or narrative environments, as “affect worlds”; in her words these are “worlds to which people are bound, when they are, by affective projections of a constantly negotiated common interestedness” (2011: 226). Yet these affect worlds, as she and other theorists such as Judith Butler argue, are marked by increasing precarity within the context of the false promises of liberal democratic society. This is a state of affairs which is mobilising political expression that is often aesthetic or performative in nature. These can be seen as ‘affective practices’, or social practices that have as a key defining feature an affective or emotional quality. Now, to shift focus slightly, in speech act theory, J.L. Austin makes a distinction between constative and performative statements – the former being reports or descriptions, and the latter being statements that perform an action which changes something about reality, such as a marriage vow. In the context of digital culture, a distinction can be made between constative and performative forms of self-mediation (self-mediation understood as the participation of ordinary people in public culture through media technologies). An example of constative self-mediation might be grassroots journalism for example, but performative self-mediation goes further than this to thematise ordinary voices and identities, and, to quote Lillie Chouliaraki, involves textualities that “change both the genres of public communication and our modes of engagement with them” (2010: 229). So in this context, performativity, as embodied or affective knowledge, becomes a key narrative tool to enact breach of normative narrative world-making in contemporary times. We saw in the opening clip how The Narcicyst uses both music and comedy in performing his ontological experience. This use of aesthetics is a political tool designed to elicit affinity with the viewer while challenging dominant narratives that cast him in a certain light as a Muslim. I argue that this is a particularly persuasive form of activist self-mediation, because the somatic immediacy of aesthetics can throw the viewer out of unquestioned immersion in their normative narrative environment and open an affective space for new meanings to be narrativised. I’m going to now turn back to PHATWA to look at two salient narrative components of the text – character and temporality – in order to delve a bit deeper into how this form of aesthetic activism might work.  Slide 6: Rapper as Narrator So, The Narcicyst, in his capacity as rapper, is both the narrator and protagonist of the performative narrative that is PHATWA. This dual role is underscored by short sections of spoken, scripted dialogue, which we saw an example of in the clip, but which also occur halfway through the song when he is being interrogated, and again at the end when he is reunited with his friend Yusho. The Narcicyst is addressed in character by his real life nickname ‘Narcy’, which leads the viewer to believe that he is playing himself. However, he also assumes an archetypal role as any Arab or Muslim caught in a similar situation of precarity. The textual narrative can therefore be said to bridge fact and fiction performatively through the figure of Narcy, and to extend beyond its own performative world to represent or resonate with other, similar personal narratives. This blurring of boundaries between the diegetic and extra-diegetic is known as metalepsis, and it has an important socio-political function here as a means of affectively connecting with others. This can be seen in the context of what Denis-Constant Martin’s describes as hip hop’s ‘conscious individualism’ which breaks away from materialistic and consumerist trends and re-appropriates the genre in a way that (I quote) “makes the individual central in social representations, but also generates new forms of sociability; it appears complementary, not antagonistic, to humanism, solidarity, and tolerance” (2010: 265). In this way, performative individualism or self-mediation becomes a site to confront tensions between the local and the global, or the ontological and meta. There has indeed been increasing academic interest in “metanarrative” of the ‘Global Hip Hop Nation’ – a transnational community of affinity to which rappers constantly negotiate their belonging. H. Samy Alim describes this as: “A multilingual, multi-ethnic nation, with an international reach, a fluid capacity to cross borders, and a reluctance to adhere to the geopolitical givens of the present.” (Alim 2009)  Slide 7: Temporality Another important feature of narrativity is temporality, and this is something that comes through very strongly in PHATWA as a thematic device to enhance its socio-political import. I’d like to read you this comment from a viewer about the video that I found online: I think some of the attractive nature of this video is in the fact that it is extremely unique to the world today and the fear of terror from somewhere in the Middle East. The Narcicyst seems to add a new dimension to the daily struggles that people of Muslim descent face in the modern world. The social context of this music video is the reason for its attraction and makes me wonder if this video would mean anything to someone 20 years prior or 20 years later. (Egheitzman 2011) This specific relationship of precarity to the current temporal order that is experienced by Narcy as a Muslim and also by his friend Yusho as a black man is I believe summarised by the exchange that we saw earlier in the clip, which I would argue is the thematic crux of the whole narrative: Yusho: “Who do you think they’re gonna harass more? Me or you?” Narcy: “Man obviously me. You know Iraq is the new black”. But the temporal dimension goes further than this to include historicity, or the meta narrative of the Clash of Civilisations, which is expressed visually when Narcy is awaiting detention. As we can see here, there is an animated cartoon image of the Crusades hanging ominously over his head, and it isn’t clear if he is narrating this in his own mind or if he’s being narrated this way by the world, because these are lightning strikes pointing at him rather than thought bubbles. Narcy looks passive and resigned here, but, at the same time, the very articulation of the narrative is an act of defiance that creatively breaks from the historical repetition being evoked. In other words, he ‘performs’ his precarious ontological relationship to the temporal order, and simultaneously prefigures a new relationship to it – enacting a new form of social construction through aesthetic transcendence that is designed to affectively empower others, not only himself. Slide 8: Pictures So, these are just some assorted screenshots from the video. At the top is Narcy with some hooded Guantanamo Bay figures dancing in the background. These appear several times throughout the video, drawing a parallel between Narcy and other Muslims unlawfully detained under the pretext of the War on Terror. At the bottom he is under interrogation, with his name being crossed off a list of Arab or Islamic names that are deemed suspect. These two pictures highlight Narcy’s archetypal role representing many others having similar problems, or worse. And in the middle he is lifting his shirt to reveal CDs strapped to his chest instead of bombs – so this is an example of the video’s comedic exploitation of the conflict between the different value structures contained within the text – the one imposed on Narcy by society and his chosen or aspired to narrative as a hip hop artist. Both sets of values are part of his ontological experience as a Western Muslim, and here and in the video as a whole he attempts to transcend the contradiction and form a new narrative combining the two. So viewers who subscribe uncritically to the Clash of Civilisations or War on Terror meta narrative may be forced to stop and reflect on this if it shocks or surprises them, and the aesthetic element of humour may make them receptive to an affective reality not accounted for by their belief system. Slide 9: Conclusion To conclude, through the analytical framework of the socio-narrative model, enriched by developments in cultural studies and critical theory, I have sought to demonstrate how the music video PHATWA by The Narcicyst can be seen as a prefigurative form of political engagement and world-making in the globalised era. The prefigurative quality of the narrative derives from its deviance from the epistemological norms of liberal democratic society, which are rooted in the increasingly obsolete positivist paradigm of thought. In refusing to be subordinated to the hegemonic political order and side-stepping the hierarchical structures of the state which divest him of agency in the context of the War on Terror meta narrative, Narcy finds a way to both assert himself and empower others which is done on his own terms, not through making any claims or demands, but through performativity and aesthetics connecting him horizontally to the diverse community of affinity that is the Global Hip Hop Nation. I’d like to finish with a quote from Globalisation and Media Studies scholar Kirsty Best, who explains that younger generations’ engagement with aesthetics may be misinterpreted as an active refusal to engage in politics “because the type of knowing is not the rational, deliberative sort aspired to in democratic debate.” She says, “The problem, however, is not of an active refusal to know but of a drive for meaning which takes its route through alternative ways of knowing – identity, intentionality, affect, visceral ethics (…) The possibilities for sympathy created by the shock of new forms of communicated imagery and the ambiguous nature of identity are possibilities that flicker with varying degrees of intensity and can be fanned into a strong flame.” (2009: 80) 8