DAM vs. The Fear of the Nation-state
See below two videos: first, an interview with DAM, a Palestinian hip-hop group; and second, a virulent nationalist, racist rant by Pat Condell from the UK, who says of himself "I don’t have much of a formal education – which is good, because it means I can actually read and write. But it also means I don’t have a great deal of what you might call actual knowledge."
Based on DAM's music videos, which can be seen on their MySpace page, the group appears to think critically about the social conditions of people of color of the "East" as well as those of the Global North. We can hear in some of their music critical responses to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Yet (understandably), their music also engages a binary argument based in the traditional economic model (see Foucault's "Two Lectures" in Power/Knowledge), i.e., Israelis - evil | Palestinians - better. Concomitantly, though, DAM provides us with representations of the techniques of power and the group does, if ever so briefly, address how power works through subjects in the video for the song, "Dedication."
The interview with DAM posted here counters Condell in that it it represents the cracks in the intent of Condell's rhetoric. In the interview DAM even takes the reporter to task in a way that links his cultural assumptions with those of Condell's. In both the interview and DAM's video for their song "Dedication," they suggest the ubiquitous tyranny of the West. The group argues that youth subcultures of the Global South are not trying to be Northerners; instead, as DAM astutely states, subcultures, in effect, "take" what is needed or what is "good" from Northern popular culture in order to tell their own story (in depiction of history and in creation of the contemporary moment) as Palestinians. Hence, DAM provides an agentic argument about how youth artists make creative choices--where they ingeminate the demand to have the social conditions of their lives made visible and where they choose to re-appropriate aspects of mainstream Northern culture as well as its subjugated/local knowledges for their own political use.
Interview with DAM
The Trouble with Islam by Pat Condell