Rayya El Zein | University of Pennsylvania (original) (raw)
Articles and Book Chapters by Rayya El Zein
Lateral, Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, 2021
In recent years, scholars in the fields of cultural studies, American studies, history, ethnic s... more In recent years, scholars in the fields of cultural studies, American studies, history, ethnic studies, and Middle East area studies have approached questions of race and racism in this geographic region with renewed critical vigor. Recent work deconstructing anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia in the Americas and Europe has put these patterns of discrimination into intersectional conversation with anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. New historical efforts have drawn attention to the legacies of slavery in the Ottoman, Persian, and Arab Empires, working to understand how forms of racialization and racial hierarchization predated and were exacerbated by the arrival of European imperial forces. At the same time, activists in the region draw attention to prevailing racism against migrant laborers, marginalized indigenous populations, and others as the afterlives of colonialism, war, austerity, and revolution carry on. Together, this academic and activist work asks for attention by leaders, community members, and scholars of this region to the particularities of racecraft in the region: How are "Blackness" and "whiteness" constructed in the Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish speaking worlds? What are the obstacles to discussing and identifying race particular to the histories of this region, its peoples, and its histories? This forum uses close readings of popular culture and political discourse across the Middle East and North Africa / Southwest Asia and North Africa (MENA/SWANA) in pursuit of these questions and others.
World Records, 2020
This piece draws from advances in comparative settler colonial studies to think intersectionally ... more This piece draws from advances in comparative settler colonial studies to think intersectionally about mourning as a practice of return. I analyze movement and stasis at West Bank border crossings in the sound installations of the Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme in order to explore listening as a critical practice of ‘being with’ others at a critical remove from Hannah Arendt’s theorizations of the political.
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2020
The opening of dozens of pubs, cafés and bars catering to an alternative ‘youth’ clientele illus... more The opening of dozens of pubs, cafés and bars catering to an alternative ‘youth’ clientele
illustrates how Ramallah, Beirut and Amman have benefited from a post-2008
investment boom that curates leisure and cultural production with bohemian, diy
and other ‘counterculture’ aesthetics. Yet, social expectations and price points in these
venues often betray the supposedly progressive politics of these ventures. In this article,
I acknowledge that it would be easy to dismiss this cosmopolitan growth and
the patterns of policing behavior they impose as an exclusionary and problematic
‘gentrification-as-liberation.’ But such a critique would miss the opportunity to engage
the affective and social struggle over visions of a social future enacted by urban Arab
youth in their choices of leisure consumption. I argue that being able to cogently
critique gentrifying processes in these cities means we must first understand the
development of counterculture and counter discourse as necessarily dialectical. The
micro-negotiations between competing or discrepant cosmopolitanisms offer important
insight into sociopolitical discourse and cosmopolitan feeling in urban centers
that did not, in large part, witness sustained mass protests in the years following the
Arab uprisings.
Drawing inspiration from Metro al-Madina's Hishik Bishik Show in Beirut, in CARGC Working Paper 8... more Drawing inspiration from Metro al-Madina's Hishik Bishik Show in Beirut, in CARGC Working Paper 8 El Zein weaves assessments of local and regional contexts, aesthetic and performance theory, thick description, participant observation, and interview to develop an approach to aesthetics in cultural production from the vantage of global media studies that she calls “vamping the archive.”
This module uses interdisciplinary exploration of strategies of performance ethnography to propos... more This module uses interdisciplinary exploration of strategies of performance ethnography to propose a methodological intervention into performance theory. It argues for a shift from subject-based readings of politics where demonstrable resistance is presented as performative of political agency. It asks, in what ways is literature about politics in live cultural production and in the performance of everyday life premised on looking for, finding, and theorizing resistance? Can the implicit expectation that agents perform resistance in order to be dynamic political subjects limit the ways in which political processes may be understood?
In 2013, four Palestinians incorporated Amoro Agriculture, Palestine's only mushroom farm. In the... more In 2013, four Palestinians incorporated Amoro Agriculture, Palestine's only mushroom farm. In the absence of an alternative to Israeli mushrooms on the Palestinian market, Amoro's products were welcomed as an engaged example of the boycott of Israeli goods and were hailed as an iteration of a Palestinian resistance economy based in the agricultural sector. Using the testimony of the farmers and their experience of what proved to be a short-lived agritech venture, this article explores questions of agricultural development in the occupied Palestinian territories generally, and the development of a " resistance economy " based in agriculture specifically. It argues for recentralizing the question of the development of agricultural labor in the occupied West Bank and for abandoning the depoliticizing romanticism that surrounds the land and the farmer in the discourses of Palestinian struggle. It further contends that growth in the agricultural sector needs to be addressed in a holistic fashion, which includes a recalibration of the relationship of capital and the quasi-state bureaucracy of the Palestinian Authority to labor.
Explores "political feeling" as a methodology for political ethnography of subcultural production... more Explores "political feeling" as a methodology for political ethnography of subcultural production. Based on research in Beirut and New York City.
This essay examines live performances by Arab hip hop artists in North America and Western Europe... more This essay examines live performances by Arab hip hop artists in North America and Western Europe. It analyzes concerts and live collaborations by Lowkey, Omar Offendum, Shadia Mansour, and Deeb, among others. Moving past a text-based analysis of song lyrics, this look at Arabic hip hop in performance offers an examination of the embodied interactions between performers and spectators. My specific focus on the performing bodies of MCs of Arab descent in the West allows me to theorize the political potential of their work in relation to growing post-national or trans-national communities. I build here off of a theoretical basis provided by Paolo Virno, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri’s ideas of the “multitude.” My analysis works toward a conceptualization of audience and performer interactions that welds aesthetic analysis of popular culture with contemporary political theory.
http://csalateral.org/wp/issue/5-1/hip-hop-blackwashing-el-zein/ This paper takes up a global an... more http://csalateral.org/wp/issue/5-1/hip-hop-blackwashing-el-zein/
This paper takes up a global analysis of how ideas of blackness, whiteness, and Arabness circulate in post-9/11 media accounts and argues that these concepts work to mediate Western understandings of politics in the Arab world.
Reviews by Rayya El Zein
without deeply engaging the voices of transgender people and the scholarship from transgender stu... more without deeply engaging the voices of transgender people and the scholarship from transgender studies.
Review of http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9780230278745
Review of My Voice is My Weapon: Music, Nationalism, and the Poetics of Palestinian Resistance by... more Review of My Voice is My Weapon: Music, Nationalism, and the Poetics of Palestinian Resistance by David A. McDonald. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013
David McDonald weaves geopolitical history and musical and performance analysis in his volume My Voice is My Weapon: Music, Nationalism, and the Poetics of Palestinian Resistance. The book is structured in nine chapters, which are lumped together into three sections. Throughout, McDonald refreshingly argues for a de- essentialising of Palestinian ‘national’ identity and understandings of ‘resistance’ attached to it by suggesting that different Palestinian audiences and performers have invoked various ideas of national belonging by performing resistance in dynamic and divergent ways.
Editing by Rayya El Zein
This issue of Shahadat (an online publication focusing on short-form creative writing in the Midd... more This issue of Shahadat (an online publication focusing on short-form creative writing in the Middle East and its diasporas) takes as its focus the popular literature of the Egyptian Revolution. Drawing on protest signs, graffiti, and street art in Tahrir to read the culture of resistance particular to the Egyptian Revolution, the curators examine how protesters changed the political narrative through the use of images, memorials, and expressions of daily life. Featuring examples from an extensive gallery of online images culled from the collections of several prominent Egyptian journalists and activists, the online piece is a visual tour of some of the creative production of Egypt's Revolution. A collaborative curation project split between New York City and Cairo, it is ArteEast's first critical look at the cultural production related to recent political developments in the Middle East.
Shahadat, Winter 2012
This edition of Shahadat's Exploring Popular Literature Series is a special issue on hip hop, edi... more This edition of Shahadat's Exploring Popular Literature Series is a special issue on hip hop, edited by Rayya El Zein. The issue functions as liner notes to an album filled with radical potential, and features translations of sixteen hip hop tracks by artists from Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and the Arab diaspora. Ranging from the highly political to the contemplative, these songs offer listeners and readers insight into the hopes and critiques of a generation of contemporary Arab hip hop artists.
Calls for Papers by Rayya El Zein
Lateral, the Journal of the Cultural Studies Association
Lateral invites proposals for contributions to a forum on "Cultural Constructions of Race and Rac... more Lateral invites proposals for contributions to a forum on "Cultural Constructions of Race and Racism in the Middle East and North Africa."
The Giorgi Tsereteli Oriental Institute at Ilia State University in collaboration with the Univer... more The Giorgi Tsereteli Oriental Institute at Ilia State University in collaboration with the University of Vienna, Al Akhwayn University (Morocco), and the Georgian State Museum of Folk and Applied Arts announces the 8th International Conference on Popular Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa: Popular Culture between Site and Flow, to be held 28 - 30 September 2017 in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Papers by Rayya El Zein
Lateral, Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, 2021
In recent years, scholars in the fields of cultural studies, American studies, history, ethnic s... more In recent years, scholars in the fields of cultural studies, American studies, history, ethnic studies, and Middle East area studies have approached questions of race and racism in this geographic region with renewed critical vigor. Recent work deconstructing anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia in the Americas and Europe has put these patterns of discrimination into intersectional conversation with anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. New historical efforts have drawn attention to the legacies of slavery in the Ottoman, Persian, and Arab Empires, working to understand how forms of racialization and racial hierarchization predated and were exacerbated by the arrival of European imperial forces. At the same time, activists in the region draw attention to prevailing racism against migrant laborers, marginalized indigenous populations, and others as the afterlives of colonialism, war, austerity, and revolution carry on. Together, this academic and activist work asks for attention by leaders, community members, and scholars of this region to the particularities of racecraft in the region: How are "Blackness" and "whiteness" constructed in the Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish speaking worlds? What are the obstacles to discussing and identifying race particular to the histories of this region, its peoples, and its histories? This forum uses close readings of popular culture and political discourse across the Middle East and North Africa / Southwest Asia and North Africa (MENA/SWANA) in pursuit of these questions and others.
World Records, 2020
This piece draws from advances in comparative settler colonial studies to think intersectionally ... more This piece draws from advances in comparative settler colonial studies to think intersectionally about mourning as a practice of return. I analyze movement and stasis at West Bank border crossings in the sound installations of the Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme in order to explore listening as a critical practice of ‘being with’ others at a critical remove from Hannah Arendt’s theorizations of the political.
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2020
The opening of dozens of pubs, cafés and bars catering to an alternative ‘youth’ clientele illus... more The opening of dozens of pubs, cafés and bars catering to an alternative ‘youth’ clientele
illustrates how Ramallah, Beirut and Amman have benefited from a post-2008
investment boom that curates leisure and cultural production with bohemian, diy
and other ‘counterculture’ aesthetics. Yet, social expectations and price points in these
venues often betray the supposedly progressive politics of these ventures. In this article,
I acknowledge that it would be easy to dismiss this cosmopolitan growth and
the patterns of policing behavior they impose as an exclusionary and problematic
‘gentrification-as-liberation.’ But such a critique would miss the opportunity to engage
the affective and social struggle over visions of a social future enacted by urban Arab
youth in their choices of leisure consumption. I argue that being able to cogently
critique gentrifying processes in these cities means we must first understand the
development of counterculture and counter discourse as necessarily dialectical. The
micro-negotiations between competing or discrepant cosmopolitanisms offer important
insight into sociopolitical discourse and cosmopolitan feeling in urban centers
that did not, in large part, witness sustained mass protests in the years following the
Arab uprisings.
Drawing inspiration from Metro al-Madina's Hishik Bishik Show in Beirut, in CARGC Working Paper 8... more Drawing inspiration from Metro al-Madina's Hishik Bishik Show in Beirut, in CARGC Working Paper 8 El Zein weaves assessments of local and regional contexts, aesthetic and performance theory, thick description, participant observation, and interview to develop an approach to aesthetics in cultural production from the vantage of global media studies that she calls “vamping the archive.”
This module uses interdisciplinary exploration of strategies of performance ethnography to propos... more This module uses interdisciplinary exploration of strategies of performance ethnography to propose a methodological intervention into performance theory. It argues for a shift from subject-based readings of politics where demonstrable resistance is presented as performative of political agency. It asks, in what ways is literature about politics in live cultural production and in the performance of everyday life premised on looking for, finding, and theorizing resistance? Can the implicit expectation that agents perform resistance in order to be dynamic political subjects limit the ways in which political processes may be understood?
In 2013, four Palestinians incorporated Amoro Agriculture, Palestine's only mushroom farm. In the... more In 2013, four Palestinians incorporated Amoro Agriculture, Palestine's only mushroom farm. In the absence of an alternative to Israeli mushrooms on the Palestinian market, Amoro's products were welcomed as an engaged example of the boycott of Israeli goods and were hailed as an iteration of a Palestinian resistance economy based in the agricultural sector. Using the testimony of the farmers and their experience of what proved to be a short-lived agritech venture, this article explores questions of agricultural development in the occupied Palestinian territories generally, and the development of a " resistance economy " based in agriculture specifically. It argues for recentralizing the question of the development of agricultural labor in the occupied West Bank and for abandoning the depoliticizing romanticism that surrounds the land and the farmer in the discourses of Palestinian struggle. It further contends that growth in the agricultural sector needs to be addressed in a holistic fashion, which includes a recalibration of the relationship of capital and the quasi-state bureaucracy of the Palestinian Authority to labor.
Explores "political feeling" as a methodology for political ethnography of subcultural production... more Explores "political feeling" as a methodology for political ethnography of subcultural production. Based on research in Beirut and New York City.
This essay examines live performances by Arab hip hop artists in North America and Western Europe... more This essay examines live performances by Arab hip hop artists in North America and Western Europe. It analyzes concerts and live collaborations by Lowkey, Omar Offendum, Shadia Mansour, and Deeb, among others. Moving past a text-based analysis of song lyrics, this look at Arabic hip hop in performance offers an examination of the embodied interactions between performers and spectators. My specific focus on the performing bodies of MCs of Arab descent in the West allows me to theorize the political potential of their work in relation to growing post-national or trans-national communities. I build here off of a theoretical basis provided by Paolo Virno, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri’s ideas of the “multitude.” My analysis works toward a conceptualization of audience and performer interactions that welds aesthetic analysis of popular culture with contemporary political theory.
http://csalateral.org/wp/issue/5-1/hip-hop-blackwashing-el-zein/ This paper takes up a global an... more http://csalateral.org/wp/issue/5-1/hip-hop-blackwashing-el-zein/
This paper takes up a global analysis of how ideas of blackness, whiteness, and Arabness circulate in post-9/11 media accounts and argues that these concepts work to mediate Western understandings of politics in the Arab world.
without deeply engaging the voices of transgender people and the scholarship from transgender stu... more without deeply engaging the voices of transgender people and the scholarship from transgender studies.
Review of http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9780230278745
Review of My Voice is My Weapon: Music, Nationalism, and the Poetics of Palestinian Resistance by... more Review of My Voice is My Weapon: Music, Nationalism, and the Poetics of Palestinian Resistance by David A. McDonald. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013
David McDonald weaves geopolitical history and musical and performance analysis in his volume My Voice is My Weapon: Music, Nationalism, and the Poetics of Palestinian Resistance. The book is structured in nine chapters, which are lumped together into three sections. Throughout, McDonald refreshingly argues for a de- essentialising of Palestinian ‘national’ identity and understandings of ‘resistance’ attached to it by suggesting that different Palestinian audiences and performers have invoked various ideas of national belonging by performing resistance in dynamic and divergent ways.
This issue of Shahadat (an online publication focusing on short-form creative writing in the Midd... more This issue of Shahadat (an online publication focusing on short-form creative writing in the Middle East and its diasporas) takes as its focus the popular literature of the Egyptian Revolution. Drawing on protest signs, graffiti, and street art in Tahrir to read the culture of resistance particular to the Egyptian Revolution, the curators examine how protesters changed the political narrative through the use of images, memorials, and expressions of daily life. Featuring examples from an extensive gallery of online images culled from the collections of several prominent Egyptian journalists and activists, the online piece is a visual tour of some of the creative production of Egypt's Revolution. A collaborative curation project split between New York City and Cairo, it is ArteEast's first critical look at the cultural production related to recent political developments in the Middle East.
Shahadat, Winter 2012
This edition of Shahadat's Exploring Popular Literature Series is a special issue on hip hop, edi... more This edition of Shahadat's Exploring Popular Literature Series is a special issue on hip hop, edited by Rayya El Zein. The issue functions as liner notes to an album filled with radical potential, and features translations of sixteen hip hop tracks by artists from Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and the Arab diaspora. Ranging from the highly political to the contemplative, these songs offer listeners and readers insight into the hopes and critiques of a generation of contemporary Arab hip hop artists.
Lateral, the Journal of the Cultural Studies Association
Lateral invites proposals for contributions to a forum on "Cultural Constructions of Race and Rac... more Lateral invites proposals for contributions to a forum on "Cultural Constructions of Race and Racism in the Middle East and North Africa."
The Giorgi Tsereteli Oriental Institute at Ilia State University in collaboration with the Univer... more The Giorgi Tsereteli Oriental Institute at Ilia State University in collaboration with the University of Vienna, Al Akhwayn University (Morocco), and the Georgian State Museum of Folk and Applied Arts announces the 8th International Conference on Popular Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa: Popular Culture between Site and Flow, to be held 28 - 30 September 2017 in Tbilisi, Georgia.