By the 1930s, Egypt was the unrivalled node of commodified music production in the Arab world. Musicians were attaining previously unthinkable celebrity amongst mass listening publics with the growing circulation of commodified recorded sound and the hunger of mass readerships for printed materials on music and, more so, on the lives and opinions of musicians. Using interwar texts published in Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Tunisia that circulated much further afield, I examine early twentieth century printed commentary on Arabic music, its history and its celebrities to trace the ways in which such materials effected the re-signification of both music and musicians as bearers of socio-political meaning. To invoke music was increasingly to evoke a positionality in relation to collective aspirations, yearnings that were inseparable from the complex of national consciousness and its narratives. This cultural commodity fetishism, I argue, created incentives and opportunities for local and foreign state powers to position themselves as caretakers of the nation through public performance of public roles as caretakers of the nation’s music. The increasing centrality and growth of literate urban middle classes to state power and legitimacy meant that such performance had to compete for the favor of an ever-expanding mass public, thus deepening the state’s dependence on mass communications infrastructure to compete in the new arena of mass cultural politics. The paper then turns to the development of Arabic-language radio broadcast services as an instrument of state power. I trace the political instrumentalization of Arabic music and musical celebrity in the first years of Egyptian State Broadcasting and the BBC Arabic Service through an examination of the Marconi Company archives, the British Broadcasting Corporation written archives, and the British Foreign, Colonial and India Offices records. Building on recent work by Arturo Marzano, Rebecca Scales and Andrea Stanton on other Arabic-language radio broadcast services, I show how both British and Egyptian state bodies assembled ‘native’ and orientalist knowledge, massive infrastructural outlays and know-how, inventive systems of collecting audience feedback, and musical celebrities ‘in the flesh’ to channel the mass yearnings of Arabic listeners in the service of projects for regional and global hegemony.

This paper explores the ambivalence of belonging and national identity among urban middle-class youths in post-revolution Egypt. Independent music producers’ represent the new generation of urban middle-class Egyptian youths who aspire for alternative lives and cultures independent from the state-controlled mainstream media, and whose lives have been shaped by the hopes of the 2011 Arab Spring and the frustrations of its aftermath. By examining music producers’ artwork, artistic labor, and relation to the audience, I focus on a common lyrical theme in independent music producers’ songs: their ambivalence towards the nation. The paper traces the music producers’ simultaneous attachment to and estrangement from the nation. On the one hand, independent music producers describe a sense of estrangement from “the nation” and “the people” in the aftermath of the counterrevolution and the resurgence of populist authoritarianism. On the other hand, independent music producers also express their affective attachments to the nation by describing the ways their career aspirations are embedded in local social networks and the ways their artistic expressions are rooted in the Egyptian cultural milieu. I propose that the coexistence of hope and despair has shaped a widespread ambivalence towards the nation among middle-class youths after the 2011 revolution. In the case of independent music producers, this ambivalence reflects the relative independence media producers have garnered in the digital age, and the ways in which this independence is smothered by populist aesthetics suffused by the state-controlled media industry. I argue that independent music producers register the ways youths in Egypt are refusing the official national identities imposed by the state and established media industry. Instead, these producers address their audience not as members of the nation, but rather as listeners who share the same ambivalence towards the nation. In so doing, the affective affinities coalesced by independent music production and its expression of national ambivalence lay down the groundwork for alternative forms of belonging. In the face of the homogenizing populist aesthetics of the authoritarian regime in Egypt, independent music production is expressive of counter-aesthetics for those who yearn to belong and yet fail but to share their collective ambivalence.

This paper posits yearning as an affective schema through which to understand the political potency in practices of distinction among producers and listeners of experimental Arabic rap in the Arabic-speaking Levant. In doing so, it directs attention to shifting structures of feeling in Ramallah, Amman, and Beirut -- cities that largely did not witness paradigm-challenging protests during the years 2010-2013. Proposing an alternative framework to the expectation for resistance or agentive empowerment this musical subgenre in particular has been assumed to provide in the wake of the short-lived Arab Uprisings, this research explores how experimental rap music produces stillness. That is, this paper examines emergent political formations when live music does not seem to excite, rouse, or “hype” a gathered audience. How to understand the aesthetic and political innovation and the invitations to polyphony in rap music that renders them quiet, pensive, or in tears? Tracing the development of lyricism and rhythms that refuse strategies to “hype” or keep audiences in a “shouting place,” this paper explores how musicians address and relate loss to gathered listeners. Building on testimony from listeners about the kind of music and lyricism they seek, this paper is grounded in a proposal to trace an aesthetics of istfza/istifzaz, or provocation or surprise, in the lyrical work of the Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese rappers boikutt, El Rass, Al Darwish, and Nasser al-Touffar. Building on recent suggestions to map an aesthetics of glitch in electronic music onto the these rappers’ work, this paper pushes these aesthetic readings by situating the affinity for surprise, noise, and istifzaz in affective frameworks and geopolitical frustrations that link audiences in Ramallah, Amman, and Beirut. In theorizing yearning as a potently political condition, this paper works to re-positions the listener as entrenched in and interpellated by moving constellations of heterogeneous bodies. The proposal I build interprets political processes not in the performance of noticeable activities that distinguish unique individuals as having agency, but in the affective experiences that allow alienated individuals to recognize themselves in shifting coalitions and structures of belonging.

This paper turns to aftermath of the concert by Lebanese band, Mashrou Leila, in Egypt in September of 2018, where several audience members raised the rainbow flag in solidarity with the band’s openly-queer lead singer. After images of the flag-raising circulated across social media, Egyptian authorities arrested dozens of citizens on charges of “debauchery.” While dominant discourse in US and Egyptian press diagnosed the incident as either a showing of power by the Egyptian security state or the hegemonic infiltration of an imperial West, this paper opts for an understanding of panics about the body as ones that are also always about pleasure. With this in mind, it turns to the production of the Egyptian musalsal, or Arabic-language television drama, Awalem Khafeya (“Hidden Worlds”) which retold the events around the performance and its aftermath. The story, told as a murder-mystery which uncovers state corruption in Egypt, explores the leakage of information, substances, and bodies into and outside of Egypt in the contemporary media landscape. By focusing on the program’s storyline around the Mashrou Leila concert and its rearticulation of nationality, musical genre, and lyrical content, this paper places at the foreground the affectivity of restaging the moral panic. In particular, this paper explores the desire to locate the channels of exposure and corruption which gave way to the flag-raising incident and render them visible, locatable, and legible. It is particularly interested in the tropes of fear, corruption, and exposure of this restaging, but also the elements of fun, humor, and darkness which are always part of an ambivalent constellation of feelings undergirding panic. By exploring the affectivity of the moral panic, this paper then reconceptualizes it as part of a pleasurable mode of knowledge production. In this way, it shows how its materialization works not as a method of recontaining or rerouting power, but of reamplifying it. In doing so, it departs from a conspiratorial or directed analytic of power which is located in the battlefield between state and citizen, or East and West, but one which is located in the very act of restaging.

In late 2016 Benghazi, a popular singer was arrested for performing during a high school graduation party to female students and their parents, accused of moral corruption and leading the youth astray. Only a year and a half prior, this same singer had released a song praising the armed forces which eventually arrested him. This paper surveys militia-directed praise songs in post-Gaddafi Libya, songs which have not always engendered protection for their authors from the same authorities for which they yearned and yet have contributed to the political-affective apparatus through which militia-centered power structures are constituted. Indeed, a range of quotidian sonic practices have produced militia authority in the post-Gaddafi years. From concerts to checkpoints, airport announcements to constructed silences, the daily interactions of militia members and civilians have built structures of possibility and constraint. In this context, the protest slogan, “we want an army and we want police,” has circulated not in opposition to ostensible chaos, but rather in relation to the uneven protections these structures have afforded. One of the approaches some musicians have taken toward gaining the protections and privileges that might come with militia proximity is to dedicate songs more and less explicitly to particular armed groups. Such songs often circulate with video imagery of soldiers training, fighting, and sometimes praying, alongside civilians singing together or as if in unison while alone. They use language that valorizes the “men of [the] army,” the men or the army of “my country,” men who “came for you [enemies/ terrorists].” A majority of these songs emerged in support of the particular militia faction that called itself “The Libyan Army,” that headed by Khalifa Haftar, and reflected developments specific to Eastern Libya. Yet across factions, the thematic repertoire of similar songs remains closely related. This paper examines the politics of these militia-directed praise songs, their circulations, and their conditions of production as sites for the working out of post-Gaddafi yearnings for non-war. It argues for two paradoxical readings: of the militarized language and imagery of these songs as desire for non-war, and of desire for non-war as a yearning for (post-)Gaddafi.