This paper seeks to engage the construction of urban “soundscapes” as a potential flashpoint for class conflict by analyzing auditory and visual representations of “the neighborhood” (al-houma) in a handful of Moroccan hip-hop videos. I begin by situating Moroccan hip-hop within transnationally circulating associations of hip-hop with “urban” life, as well as the political dynamics of North Africa’s colonial and postcolonial urban histories. I then analyze four videos comparatively, suggesting that each goes beyond lyrical and musical content of the songs to construct a sensory experience of the city—or neighborhood—for the listener-viewer. In giving attention to the political implications of each video, however, I argue that what distinguishes each is less what sort of “soundscape” emerges in his video but how each video teaches the audience to “hear” the Houma. While videos by mainstream rappers Muslim and Don Bigg figure urban space as threatening and in need of moral recuperation, they enact these pedagogies largely through indexical figurations of their respective soundscapes, that is, by directing the listener to attend to certain (inaudible) sounds and to interpret them in a certain way. By contrast, a video by El Haqed, known as a more staunchly oppositional figure, visually and sonically constructs a peri-urban lifeworld conditioned by neoliberal economic abandonment yet resistant to the postcolonial gaze. This contrast, I suggest, raises crucial questions about how hip-hop is linked to broader dynamics of cultural appropriation and “resistance” politics.
Keyword: urban
Review of The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom by Jessa Lingel (University of California Press)
What could we discover about the forces shaping the internet, and what could we learn about how to fight back against those forces if we committed to the metaphor of gentrification? In The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom, Jessa Lingel shows that gentrification can be a useful lens through which to expose how power and class play out in online space. In a moment of increasing techno-skepticism, The Gentrification of the Internet offers a starting point for action, grounded in the reality of urban gentrification activism with proven results.
Toward an Alaskan Critical Regionalist Pedagogy: Mapping the Cruise Ship Industry through Visual Spatial Tactics
In an era when urban space is theorized as an educative science enhancing productivity, business, and management, we witness the emergence of teaching as a dominant productive force for the first time in the history of capital. Given the decisive role of knowledge production in the development of globalized urbanization it becomes vital to identify critical pedagogies that not only engage the production of space but grasp the production of space as pedagogical. To do so, I attend to interventions into regionalist studies and the global city to argue for visual spatial tactics as a tool for a critical regionalist pedagogy capable of linking material, affective, and discursive practices with a placed-based approach to globalized urbanization. Students design a collaborative website documenting the spatial history of cruise ship tourism in Alaska as an argument over the right to the city. Identifying this living process—framing the cruise industry as a constitutive system fusing discourse, space, and identity to restructure history, nature, and region—becomes a means of questioning and revising otherwise generalized theories often brought to bear on tourist landscapes, on Alaska, and on critical pedagogy itself. This case study shows the emergence of the cruise ship city as inseparable from the onset of globalized urbanization and how it, in turn, provides edifying material to mobilize a critical regionalist pedagogy within contemporary forms of educative landscapes.
Art as Protest, Cooking as Resistance: Everyday Life in Taipei’s Housing Rights Movement
From 2010 to 2013, during the height of Taiwan’s housing rights movement, Participatory Art became instrumental in defending the right to the city. In this housing rights movement, artists, students, residents, and other professionals united to challenge neoliberal urban development. Two protest art projects in Taipei, Operation Little Barbarossa and Cooking at the Front Line, illustrate the interdisciplinary, trans-social strata collaboration. The artworks responded to encroachment on land and estate by the Taipei City government and real estate developers. The art forms employed included performance art, dance, writing, sculpture, graffiti, graphic design, and photography. Through everyday acts, such as cooking and driving, the two works lent voice and visibility to marginalized residents. The language and imagery of these protest gestures produced a theatricality that was at once jovial, amiable, critical, and contentious. The coexisting confrontational and convivial tones also encapsulate Taipei’s housing rights movement, in which the Taiwan Alliance for Victims of Urban Renewal exercised a central role. This article integrates findings from archival analysis, interviews, participation observation, and site visits. The content considers the relationship among Participatory Art, social activism, urban planning, and neoliberalism. The author also draws connections between the visual and cultural aspects of the featured Participatory Art. The text concludes that Operation Little Barbarossa and Cooking at the Front Line offer a broader and richer interpretation of Participatory Art. They demonstrate diverse adaptations and multiple approaches to facilitating socially-minded, collaborative art. They also confirm Participatory Art’s ability to agitate problematic dynamics in the (re)construction of global cities.
From Company Town to Post-Industrial: Inquiry on the Redistribution of Space and Capital with a Universal Basic Income
This paper considers what effects a universal basic income could have on disrupting social and economic inequality in the tensions of urban/rural divide. She frames her inquiry on the political economy of land and labor in the collapse of coal industry “company towns” and its structural aftermath in Central Appalachia.
Missives and Other Un-Notes
Beginning his series of disorienting and theatrical vignettes with an extended introduction, Gamboa describes his childhood and young adulthood coming of age in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s. It is through these stories of prejudice in elementary school and of mass action against police brutality and the national government’s neglect of communities of color, Gamboa implies, that readers should approach his text. Missives and other Un-notes skewers myths of US national identity, masculinity, and whiteness, placing readers in a dystopic world of violence, surveillance, and the constant threat of annihilation.
Introduction: Mobilisations, Interventions, and Cultural Policy
There are four themes that weave their way through the research thread on Mobilisations, Interventions, and Cultural Policy in this issue. First, there is concern with intervention—intervention into the politics and practices of social movements and intervention into the academy and its traditions of knowledge production. Second, each text is situated firmly within a recognition and appreciation of social movements as knowledge producers. Third, all three contributions are unequivocally located in an urban context and the contemporary condition of inhabiting the city. Finally, what emerges from each reflection is a commitment to militant research and practice, as one that keeps ever-present an awareness of the relationship of research to existing material social relations of power and a commitment to confronting and transforming these very relations.
Urban Interventions / Intervenzione Urbane
Urban Interventions is a series of collages by Alexander Dellantonio that take the urban terrain with its rapid changes as the matrix of inquiry, presenting the artists reflections on the city. The strong colours used by the artist echo the city’s images, places, people and situations and tattered billboard posters and manifestos torn off the buildings the militants fly-posted them on are reassembled to show the city and its inhabitants in movement. Dellantonio appropriates parts of the city and seeks to return them to the spectator. In so doing, these works not only engage the urban terrain as a space of politics, they also raise questions about mediation in the context of the current crisis of political representation that is being expressed by movements across the world, whether for example in Tahrir or Syntagma Square, at Occupy Wall Street or during the public sector strikes in the UK.
Commentary on “Urban Interventions / Intervenzione Urbane”
Gavin Grindon responds to ‘Urban Interventions / Intervenzione Urbane’ by Alexander Dellantonio.
Commentary on “Urban Interventions / Intervenzione Urbane”
Begüm Özden Firat responds to ‘Urban Interventions / Intervenzione Urbane’ by Alexander Dellantonio.
Postcool
Francesco Salvini asks what it means to translate the categories of postcolonial thought in the practices of organisation of a subaltern neighbourhood trapped in the hurricane of valorisation and abstraction of urban space. Salvini presents an analysis of what he calls an ‘audio-visual inquiry’ conducted by a collective of political activists organising in the Raval in Barcelona. The laboratory of Postcool sought to find ways to learn about the subaltern histories of the Raval that are made invisible. Salvini discusses the ways in which the collective investigated how these subaltern histories of the Raval inscribe themselves in the urban design of the city in their relevance for organising against gentrification in the context of postcolonial capitalism.