Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

The paper is concerned with the social and cultural impact of experimental music projects in Germany and their emerging networks with cultural institutions in the MENA region, demonstrating how the notion of "conflict" in electro-acoustic experiments can challenge postcolonial narratives.

Paper long abstract:

The study of popular music from the MENA region has long been dominated by narratives that not only foster the orientalization and politicization of Arabic musicians, but subsume music from the MENA region under the umbrella of "Arabic music" and "sounds of resistance", thus maintaining postcolonial struggles of musicians and power structures based on past and present geopolitical interests of Europe and North-America. Such narratives disregard individual class struggles and ranging social and economic opportunities across different diasporic communities. As a result of narratives that reproduce the eroticization of the female body to the fetishization of resistance and humanitarianism, musicians with kin relations to the MENA regions have found ways to create opportunities from such narratives through self-exotisation strategies in DIY music productions. Drawing on the narrational strategies of dominant forces within the Euro-American world music market, this paper will focus on the use of "productive conflict" in counter-hegemonic collaborative music projects to deconstruct narratives of victimhood and humanitarianism. Planet Ears, a newly established platform in Germany, aims to challenge the idea of a harmonic and hybrid perception of contemporary Arabic music, and instead publically showcase the impact of human movement, as well as the social and political potential of productive conflicts and fluid processes in collaborative music-making. The resulting experimental music projects illustrate Mieke Bal's notion of migratory aesthetics as the underlying logic of contemporary cultural production, creating opportunities for changing discourses and commercial, as well as academic, narratives on music from the MENA region.