Brazilian b-boy, or breakdancer, Mateus Melo performs in the streets of Mumbai, India ahead of the November 2019 Red Bull BC One World Championships. From its origins in 1970s New York, hip hop is now one of America’s biggest cultural exports, and in many ways it now represents the global sound and sight of rebellion.
This month has been marked by jubilant celebrations of the 50th anniversary of hip hop, inarguably one of the most impactful art forms of the last century. What started out at a party in the Bronx with two turntables, a microphone and a young Jamaican-American named DJ Kool Herc, morphed into a vibrant, complex and multifaceted culture of deejaying, breakdancing, graffiti art and emceeing that can be found today, in some iteration, in every corner of the globe.
But one thing that seems to have been lost in all of the festivities is how miraculous it is that hip hop, and its many derivatives, managed to survive half a century at all, given all the natural barriers it faced and blatant attempts to thwart its growth and self-actualisation. Let’s not forget, the party where DJ Kool Herc unveiled his musical innovation took place in a corner of 1970s New York that was rife with poverty, violence, drugs, gangs and police brutality, a place where its primarily Black and Latino residents were reeling from the impact of deindustrialisation, high unemployment, the only recent end to racial segregation, crumbling public services, slum housing created by racist housing policies, and an escalating War on Drugs. Against this backdrop, it is not difficult to see hip hop’s ascendancy as a powerful act of collective resistance.
Indeed, from rap’s highly questionable (and now seemingly permanent) commercial pivot from searing socio-political commentary and jazz-inflected optimism to endless, dark tales of sex, drugs and violence, to rappers everywhere from the United States to the United Kingdom and China being the targets of overzealous policing, surveillance and censorship, the journey to hip hop’s golden anniversary has been one of dogged resilience.
And perhaps it is this resilience – coupled with hip hop’s alchemic ability to absorb various languages, sounds and influences, reinforced by particular elements of the culture (graffiti tagging, breaking and cyphering, for example) that require both the reclaiming of public space and public participation – that has seen hip hop come to represent the global sight and sound of rebellion. All of which provides a compelling springboard to explore the idea of culture as resistance, the theme of this, the last of our summer specials.
Whether it is the Palestinian stand-up comedians who see their work as an “act of defiance” in the face of an increasingly repressive occupation, or the African farmers growing and selling rare, agroecological produce in a bid to overturn an unsustainable and inequitable global food system, or the Tunisian musicians battling years of exclusion and underdevelopment to practice a centuries-old form of praise music that celebrates its West African origins, these stories show us the many ways in which cultural practice is an act of withstanding.
As centuries of conquest have shown, once the land has been conquered and the people uprooted, once new rulers, laws and languages have been imposed, and the names of people and places have been changed, all that remains is memory and the collective desire to keep it alive. Two of the most powerful stories in this series – one looking at Indigenous “sexual dissidents” in Bolivia reclaiming their identity from the clutches of ‘pink capitalism’, and the other spotlighting the campaign for justice for the more than 600 Yenish children that were victims of an unspeakable, barely known cultural genocide in Switzerland between 1926 and 1972 – provide pertinent reminders of what it is to “fight the power” as Chuck D, frontman of the seminal hip hop group Public Enemy, so famously implored. Culture is resistance and its potential – to affirm, to allow people to transcend their oppression, to forge community, and ultimately, to liberate – is boundless.
From checkpoints to punchlines: the emergence of Palestinian stand-up comedy
By Stefano Lorusso
Stand-up comedian Khaled Tayeh performs during an open mic night at the Ashtar Theatre in Ramallah on 13 May 2023.
[...] “At the time, I was full of insecurities, but it turned out to be a success,” he recalls. “I realised that if you have the ability to laugh at yourself and the struggles you face, no one can hurt you anymore. You strip away the seriousness from subjects that weigh you down and render them powerless. In the end, comedy becomes a psychological game, providing a protective shield,” Tayeh explains.
Read the full article on Equal Times.
In Africa, the “powerful, political act” of agroecological farming is being supported by the Slow Food movement
By Amy Fallon
Although agriculture accounts for about a quarter of Uganda’s GDP, agroecological produce, particularly in the commercial sector, is in the minority. Slow Food Uganda is one of the organisations trying to change that.
[...] With severe drought in the Horn of Africa, global food price inflation, the grain crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, the multi-faceted impacts of climate change, and not to mention the lingering effects of the coronavirus pandemic, an estimated 20 per cent of people in sub-Saharan Africa (some 282 million people) face insecurity and undernourishment, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute, more than double the share of any other region.
Read the full article on Equal Times.
Stambeli’s last dance in Tunis
By Ricard González
Riadh Ezzawech, in the ‘zawiya’ (a small Sufi shrine) dedicated to the Sufi master Sidi Ali Lasmar.
[...] Huda Mzioudet, a researcher specialising in the Black community in Tunisia, qualifies this view: “I think stambeli is slowly losing its status as a source of pride for Black Tunisians, as it is not the only form of artistic expression with which Black Tunisians identify. And the fact that it has been ‘hijacked’ by ‘White’ Tunisians, who have culturally appropriated it, makes them feel alienated from it.” It is still, however, “a source of pride for a section of the Black population in Tunis, who are followers of Sufism”, he adds.
Read the full article on Equal Times.
The Maricas Bolivia Movement is waging a cross-cutting, decolonial fight for the emancipation of sexual dissidents
By Marco Marchese
A street action by the Maricas Bolivia Movement in front of the San Francisco Basilica in La Paz on 12 May 2023.
[...] “Calling ourselves ‘maricas’ wasn’t easy at first, because it’s a word that has always violated our bodies, but thanks to the feminist training provided by Mujeres Creando and the literature of Latin American marica intellectuals, we learned about the strategy of reclaiming a term used as an insult and resignifying it.”
Read the full article on Equal Times.
The cultural genocide committed against the Yenish people in Switzerland is a crime that remains unpunished
By Benoît Collet
A montage of archive photographs, from left to right: Yenish children in a caravan in the 1930s; Alfred Siegfried, director of Pro Juventute, with abducted Yenish children; Alfred Siegfried was head of Pro Juventute until 1957; Yenish children being taken into a home by an employee of Pro Juventute.
[...] “Girls and boys were raped, malnourished, ostracised and forbidden from speaking their language. Those were the worst forms of repression. In addition to the direct victims, children and grandchildren are often affected in various ways by the consequences of their parents’ abductions,” says Will Wottreng, who fights to bring these crimes to light.
