In this contribution, Chris Nickell and Adam Benkato think together about the mobilization of Blackness in Arabic hip hop from two different contexts: a rap battle in Beirut, Lebanon and music videos from Benghazi, Libya. In both, hip hop artists confront Blackness with the nation through the Afro-diasporic medium of hip hop. Although the examples we consider here participate, in several ways, in hip hop’s larger generic functions as a globalized Black medium of resistance, they also bolster pre-existing discourses of race and racism, anti-Blackness in particular. We argue that this seeming contradiction—instances of anti-Blackness appearing in an iteration of a Black expressive form—is in fact a feature, not a bug, of the flexible way the genre works. We have paired these two examples, which we describe and analyze individually given their differing social contexts as well as our differing research focuses, in order to glimpse the discursive level at which racecraft functions.
Articles by Adam Benkato
Adam Benkato is a Libyan American scholar and archivist currently teaching at UC Berkeley’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. His work investigates a wide variety of Iranian and Arabic sources, medieval to modern, through the lenses of material philology, sociolinguistics, archive studies, and postcolonialism. He is co-founder/editor of Lamma: A Journal of Libyan Studies.