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 Chris Nickell
Chris Nickell received their PhD in music at New York University in fall 2019. Chris' dissertation drew on ethnographic fieldwork with participants in independent music scenes of Beirut, Lebanon to better understand how they mobilize performances of diverse musical masculinities to shore up their social status and defer threats of downward mobility. Chris is also a community organizer in Northern Manhattan and currently serves as Deputy Chief of Staff for State Senator Robert Jackson.