Jil Oslo: Palestinian Hip Hop, Youth Culture, and the Youth Movement

by Sunaina Maira

Based on ethnographic research in Palestine, primarily during the Arab uprisings, this book explores the intersections between new youth cultures and protest politics among Palestinian youth in the West Bank and Israel. It focuses on Palestinian hip hop and the youth movement that emerged in 2011 as overlapping sites where new cultural and political imaginaries are being produced in the Oslo generation (jil Oslo). Challenging the Oslo framework of national politics and of cultural expression, these young artists and activists are rethinking and reviving the possibility of a decolonial present. "In her perceptive, sensitive, penetrating analysis of the post-Oslo generation of Palestinian youth, Sunaina Maira paints a dynamic picture of contemporary life, art, and politics for young Palestinians under occupation and within the '48 borders of Israel-an increasingly neoliberal world in which the Palestinian Authority is the face of the occupation, where claims of political malaise are shattered by new, energetic forms of political and cultural expression-from graffiti to Hip Hop, civil disobedience to BDS. A must-read for anyone remotely interested in the future of Palestine." Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times. "This rich and valuable book challenges us to think in radical terms about youth resistance in Palestine in the post-Oslo generation. These young people resist the demand to normalize their life under Israeli settler colonialism, while using popular culture to speak back against the necropolitical machinery of elimination. Maira's book gives us an inspiring and compelling reading of how popular culture becomes another site to narrate and reshape a new politics." Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, author of Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case-Study.

200 pages, Paperback

First published November 6, 2013

Reviews

[Miguel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Putting all my cards on the table, this review is tainted by my feelings on academic analyses of youth culture movements. I categorically dislike them. I think there is something lost when an observer enters into a "scene" or subculture and tries to present a certain account of that group. There are far too many capital interests imbricated in such an account. For an anthropologist, stumbling on a new musical genre community or fandom can be like a gold mine. For what it's worth, though, I think Maira is conscious of these pitfalls. Still, from my perspective, they are unavoidable. I would prefer to hear from representatives of the group directly. Accordingly, this text is at its best when it provides first hand accounts and quotations, of which it offers quite a few.

The text itself is rather beautiful, filled with color photos of graffiti and hip-hop performances. I thoroughly appreciate Maira's plainly stated activist investments and her attention to language in furtherance of those goals. She lets none of the naturalized discourse of the Israeli colonizing settlement go uninterrogated. She also makes sure to theorize "youth" as a category. Unfortunately, her analysis when it comes to expressing the particularities of hip-hop culture are not quite as incisive. Just as Maira's interested prose would indicate, she extols Palestinian hip-hop culture. And yet, many of the conclusions she draws do not feel impactful. Her claims are that Palestinian hip-hop culture has opened up new political imaginaries, internationalist tendencies, democratized activism in the realms of age, class, and to a certain extent, gender, and served as a cultural education for Palestinian youth. And yet, aren't these conclusions drawn about most youth movements even in other cultural and historical contexts?

Maira recounts the skilled weaving of "traditional" Palestinian aesthetic idioms into hip-hop with great relish. And yet, the status of hip-hop at large remains mostly assumed. Maira falls squarely into a binaristic logic of "conscious"/"gangsta" or "independent"/"commercial" and sometimes ends up coming off as an irritating poster on a mid-2000s hip-hop message board. Maira even goes so far as to explicitly reference this ideological conflict, but more as a historical curio than an ideological conflict which influences all her readings and arguments. Maira is intent on portraying a uniformly positive perspective on Palestinian hip-hop, a cultural idiom which is rife with tensions (particularly in regard to gender) that cannot be resolved with just good intentions.

Maira's prose and historical accounts are valued, but hip-hop more broadly deserves a more attentive reader. Or perhaps it deserves to be left alone, and not read in an academic setting at all.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perceptive critique of anti-establishment politics in the Oslo era. Also, a good, accessible meditation on youth as an analytical category. Considers the spectrum of fetishizing its potential to dismissing its sincerity, and gives us the theoretical formulation to discourse with youth in between these two polarities.