Photo and Story by Habibah Abass
Desi-American rappers are using hip hop to point out the hypocrisy of their capitalist government and Arab rappers are right behind them, according to Nitasha Sharma, associate professor of African-American studies, Asian-American studies, and performance studies at Northwestern University in Evanston.
Sharma spoke about her research in ethnic and racialized hip hop to a crowd of approximately 60 people in a presentation at Northwestern University in Qatar Wednesday afternoon.
Her talk, titled “Rap, Race, Revolution: Post-9/11 Brown and a Hip Hop Critique of Empire,” explored how Desi (South Asian) rappers born in the United States express their identities, politics and alliances through their music, and also detail their experiences with racism.
“Their immigrant parents asked them to focus on education, marriage and economically stable careers,” said Sharma. “However Desi artists desired to understand unnamed forces that affected the lives of those around them, and their growing understanding of U.S. racial and economic policies is what drew them to hip hop culture,” she added.
Sharma discussed how Desi rappers use rhyme to analyze the link between the present and the past. Hip hop emerged in the 1970s as the voice of the marginalized black population in the United States in response to government neglect, and is now used by Desi- and Arab-American artists alike to describe cross racial struggles, she added.
“Desi deejays and rappers found that rap music’s analyses explain their confrontations with racism in their predominantly white middle class neighborhoods and schools,” she explained.
However, these Desi and Arab rappers have tended not to have huge fan bases since their music is so political, according to Sharma.
“In the 1990s, large record labels wielded their power to shape the tastes of the mostly white masses by backing depoliticized rap music that is built to block our demographic,” she explained.
“And yet around the world, from Algiers to Los Angeles, individuals continue to produce anti-colonial hip hop that challenges the positions of their oppression,” she added.
But because of the technological advancements in the past decade, this is beginning to change, according to Sharma.
“The digital revolution provided artists with a greater control over production and distribution, and they used the Internet to bypass commercial mainstream outlets,” she said, adding that these artists have now found customized global audiences through technology and the Internet.
Sharma also spoke about Arab rappers during the Arab Spring, whom she described as “mobilizing rhyme” and who functioned as “the voices of the revolution,” which was broadcast around the world. She played examples of Desi and Arab rap for the audience, such as lyrics from Karmacy’s “STOP.”
Sharma also explained how technology continues to shape hip hop and how artists continue to analyze cross-national politics and struggles.
“Rappers are using current technologies to create hip hop music that articulates post 9/11 rap; an anti-racist, global subject that critiques the empire,” she said.