Cultural Resistance, 911, and the War on Terror: Sensible Interventions by Jenifer Chao

Author:Jenifer Chao [Chao, Jenifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781351779432
Google: kaQzDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-01T07:58:19+00:00

It is this conceptualization of nationality that Paris seems to champion. His lyrics stress black people’s shared history of slavery, present dangers of self-destruction through criminality and black-on-black violence, and the ever-elusive hope of collective betterment.

Where acts of mourning, patriotism, and public commemoration all helped to create a sense of post-catastrophe national belonging and participation, Paris introduces other scenes and (virtual) spaces of being together and ways of communal participation and partaking. He is redrawing the cartography of the home-land. Rejecting the restrictive bonds of national identification, he raps mockingly in ‘What Would You Do’: ‘Now even niggas wavin’ flags like they lost they mind’ (27). Elsewhere in the album, rapper stic.man of dead prez promotes, instead, the red-black-green colors of the Pan-African flag. Amidst the post-9/11 clamor of being an American, what Paris and his guest rappers take pride in is being black. ‘Being’ black here does not imply an essentialist approach to blackness, as the album does reveal how blackness itself is rent by gender, class, generations, and political consciousness.22

Relatedly, what distinguishes Paris’s sonic and cultural nation from the various narrowly conceived post-9/11 expressions of nationalism are explicitly its global and outer-national referents of blackness. As Paul Gilroy (1993: 85) and other scholars have already pointed out, hip hop music itself is not a purely American creation, having been influenced by Caribbean characteristics and having undergone cross-border and cross-cultural processes in its development. One prominent indication of this transnational and transcultural connectedness can be seen in the appearance of various black guest rappers in the album with their different timbres and voices: from Capleton, a Jamaican reggae and dancehall artist, to the LA rapper Kam; from New York’s Public Enemy and the duo dead prez to the Peru-born rapper Felipe Andres Coronel, better-known as Immortal Technique. The album has even been hailed as ‘historic’ and ‘monumental’ by a reviewer from the San Francisco Bay View given that so many black revolutionary rappers are being heard on the same album.23 These voices, drastically divergent in terms of tempo, rhyming pattern, and vocal range, create a boisterous soundscape as each joins the communal ‘cipha’ in a running dialogue with Paris, rapping lines of their own, substantiating the main themes by performing the chorus, or firing off the response to Paris’s call. This call-and-response generates more than a just a polyphonic atmosphere but also what Gilroy has termed a ‘democratic, communitarian moment’ which underscores and anticipates, but does not guarantee, equal social relationships. ‘Lines between self and others are blurred and special forms of pleasure are created as a result of the meetings and conversations that are established between one fractured, incomplete, and unfinished racial self and others,’ says Gilroy (1993: 79). Commonality, group experience, individual and collective outlook are all emphasized here as the guests’ presence is needed to complete the song. However, gender equality is not validated as female vocal voices do appear in the album but are relegated to the chorus and to the background.24

The album’s communal atmosphere

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