This essay negotiates the critical tension between race as an analytic and social construct by examining how race becomes socialized in and through the production and presentation of Arab culture in two ethnographic case studies: how Syrian musicians negotiate musical multiculturalism as they integrate into German society and how independent musicians in Egypt navigate the racialized entanglements of national and international security logics that privilege Western foreigners. Both these case studies center the “foreigner” subject as one who embodies proximity to white power and delimits the boundaries of such power. We argue that the category of foreigner is thus a racialized construct that not only complicates the Black–white binary of race relations but strategically evades explicit discourses and practices of racecraft that are violent, discriminatory, and exclusionary. By provincializing critical race theory through the particularities of Arab lived experience, we illustrate how local social categories are entangled with historic legacies of empire and contemporary global logics of racialized difference while remaining sensitive to how conceptions of difference exceed Euro-American categories of race. Our work therefore directs attention towards alternative enactments of racialization within the Global South.
Articles by Darci Sprengel
Darci Sprengel is a Junior Research Fellow in Music at the University of Oxford. Her first book manuscript in progress, "Postponed Endings:" Youth Music and Affective Politics in Post-Revolution Egypt, examines DIY music in Egypt in relation to notions of desirable political action within conditions of military-capitalism. She has two additional research projects. The first analyzes music streaming technologies in the Global South using a feminist and critical race approach to digital media. The second explores the influence of sub-Saharan African culture in Egyptian popular culture, interrogating the politics of Arab anti-Blackness through the lens of critical race theory. She received her PhD in ethnomusicology with a concentration in gender studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her publications appear or are forthcoming in Popular Music; Culture, Theory & Critique; International Journal of Middle East Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Sound Studies. She has taught at the University of Oxford, Beloit College, The American University in Cairo, and UCLA.