11.8.12 Links Roundup
- Black Women, Black Criticism, And The Unremovable Veil Of Jezebel (The Feminist Wire)
When I entered academe ten years ago, I fancied it as safe space—a world away from the violence and the continuous threat of such “out there”—a world most definitely unaccompanied by ubiquitous black female stereotypes. I was wrong. For black women choosing not to “stay in their lane,” academia can be a microcosm of the life world “out there.” I learned this lesson approximately 1 year, 7 months, and 11 days ago—the last time I wrote anything for the public sphere.
Growing up, I was always a firecracker, one to speak my truth as I viewed it, regardless. My parents encouraged it. However, it was my intellectual mentors who fortified it. Like an M.C. they pushed me to “go hard” no matter what and no matter who. I spent years in the cut learning the critical grammar of bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Hortense Spillers, and others like Stuart Hall, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Ferdinand de Saussure, etc. etc. While in graduate school my mentors seemed to take extra care to ensure that I was equally sufficient in multiple fields and ready to parlay with the best of minds regardless of context. They trained me as a multi-disciplinary critic and I loved it!! That is, until the day I decided to actually use those skills in the public domain—post graduate school.
Soosan Firooz is being touted as Afghanistan’s first female rapper, a voice for women’s rights and political consciousness in a country that has been torn up by war, extremism and political transition for decades. She has emerged in a nascent hip-hop scene in Afghanistan, where so far only a handful of (male) rappers have begun to garner a following. Hip-hop is often a potent voice of the marginalised, and a form that offers the chance for forceful voices to lend a public narrative to suffering. Firooz’s gender makes waves in itself, drawing attention from international press as the first woman to be seen in the hip-hop scene in her country and butting heads with the fundamentalist and traditionalist elements within her own country.
The act of making music is a radical one in itself. Afghanistan and its people have spent decades with their politics dominated by militancy and by foreign invasion, and censorship of music, along with other forms of expression, has been an intrinsic part of that long experience. The gradual evolution of music censorship can be traced back to the beginning of communist rule under Nur Muhammad Taraki in 1978. According to a 2001 article by John Baily, the Taliban’s suppression of music is rooted in the beginning of the censorship of this period, when refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan enforced a total ban on music in order to preserve a constant state of mourning.
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