Rap, Islam and Jihadi Cool: The attractions of the Western jihadi subculture

2021 ◽  
pp. 174165902110255
Author(s):  
Sune Qvotrup Jensen ◽  
Jeppe Fuglsang Larsen ◽  
Sveinung Sandberg
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
Hybrid Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

Recent scholarship has explored the potential of subcultural theory for understanding the convergence of Western street and jihadi subcultures. The role of jihadi rap in this radical hybrid culture, however, is yet uncharted. We argue that subcultural analysis allows an understanding of the aesthetic fascination of jihadism, sometimes referred to as jihadi cool, and that jihadi rap should be seen as an integrated part of this cultural amalgam. To better understand the role of hip-hop in the hybrid street-jihadi culture, this paper offers a historical analysis of the relationship between hip-hop and Islam and detailed insight into the more contemporary, and marginal, phenomena of jihadi rap. We track the continuities and discontinuities from the presence of Black Islam in early hip hop to recent convergences between hip hop and jihadism. Our analysis draws on Lévi-Strauss concepts of bricolage and floating signifiers. Subcultures and hip-hop music are seen as bricolages that draw on a multitude of cultural references with their own particular history. In these cultural bricolages, Islam often acts as a floating signifier, with different and often ambiguous meanings. We argue and demonstrate that Islam has a long history of being part of hip-hop rebellion and attraction and that this, channelled through jihadi rap, can contribute to jihadi cool and the contemporary pull of Western jihadi subcultures.

Idleness and Freedom in Michel de Montaigne’s “Essays”

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-202
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Spiritual Quest ◽  
Guiding Principle ◽  
Sextus Empiricus ◽  
History Of ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

The article advances a hypothesis about the composition of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Specialists in the intellectual history of the Renaissance have long considered the relationship among Montaigne’s thematically heterogeneous thoughts, which unfold unpredictably and often seen to contradict each other. The waywardness of those reflections over the years was a way for Montaigne to construct a self-portrait. Spontaneity of thought is the essence of the person depicted and an experimental literary technique that was unprecedented in its time and has still not been surpassed. Montaigne often writes about freedom of reflection and regards it as an extremely important topic. There have been many attempts to interpret the haphazardness of the Essays as the guiding principle in their composition. According to one such interpretation, the spontaneous digressions and readiness to take up very different philosophical notions is a form of of varietas and distinguo, which Montaigne understood in the context of Renaissance philosophy. Another interpretation argues that the Essays employ the rhetorical techniques of Renaissance legal commentary. A third opinion regards the Essays as an example of sprezzatura, a calculated negligence that calls attention to the aesthetic character of Montaigne’s writing. The author of the article argues for a different interpretation that is based on the concept of idleness to which Montaigne assigned great significance. He had a keen appreciation of the role of otium in the culture of ancient Rome and regarded leisure as an inner spiritual quest for self-knowledge. According to Montaigne, idleness permits self-directedness, and it is an ideal form in which to practice the freedom of thought that brings about consistency in writing, living and reality, in all of which Montaigne finds one general property - complete inconstancy. Socratic self-knowledge, a skepticism derived from Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus, and a rejection of the conventions of traditional rhetoric that was similar to Seneca’s critique of it were all brought to bear on the concept of idleness and made Montaigne’s intellectual and literary experimentation in the Essays possible.

MODERNITY AGAINST MODERNITY: WANG HUI'S CRITICAL HISTORY OF CHINESE THOUGHT

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
VIREN MURTHY
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Chinese Thought ◽  
Critical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Intervention ◽  
Chinese Intellectuals ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
The Relationship

In the last fifteen years or so, Chinese intellectuals have been heatedly debating the complex relationships between China's prospects, China's past, and the modern predicament. In this context Wang Hui has emerged as one of China's most challenging and controversial intellectuals. His work is controversial. At a time when intellectuals take modernization as a goal, Wang has consistently voiced reservations. Readers find his works challenging because, instead of criticizing modernity or capitalism from simple moral tenets, Wang has always sought to redefine the terms of the debate through detailed and sensitive historical analysis. Hence amidst his busy life as editor, professor, and polemicist, Wang has devoted more than ten years to writing his magisterial four volume book The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (Zhongguo sixiang de xingqi), in which he fundamentally rethinks the relationship between modernity and Chinese thought. However, Wang's book is not just an immense contribution to historical and historiographical scholarship; his work is a self-consciously political intervention. Specifically, he highlights the role of intellectual history as critique and attempts to recover repressed elements of the past in order to question the structures that govern the present. In the last line of the conclusion to his book he writes, “the history that modernity loftily and even proudly rejects contains the inspiration and possibilities for overcoming its crisis.” Taking China as his focus, Wang attempts to write this history.

Der Staat als Genossenschaft

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Historical Analysis ◽  
State Level ◽  
The State ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
University College London ◽  
Legal Thinking ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
The Relationship

Langtext engl.: Otto von Gierke (1841–1921) has had a lasting influence on key terms and concepts related to the modern understanding of the state. This volume is divided into three systematic parts, in which Gierke's political and legal thinking is analysed from the different specialist perspectives of sociology, history, political science and jurisprudence. The focus of these different perspectives is his organic understanding of law and the state, which he consciously developed in different genres. At the same time, it also becomes clear what, if anything, can be taken from Otto von Gierke’s ideas for our own contemporary understanding of the state. The principle of subsidiarity and Gierke's strong emphasis on the role of communities and corporations below the state level, for example, make this particularly tangible. Gierke's work develops the relationship between cooperative law and constitutional law, thus succeeding in developing an innovative, organic understanding of law and the state on the basis of a comprehensive historical analysis. Prof. Dr. Peter Schröder is Professor of the History of Political Thought in the Department of History at University College London. With contributions by Niall Bond, Martin Espenhorst, Ben Holland, Céline Jouin, Jasper Kunstreich, Peter Nitschke, Tilman Repgen, Joachim Rückert, Jan Schröder, Peter Schröder and Helga Spindler.

Between Live Performance and Mediated Narrative

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eli T. Bacon
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
A Cappella ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Visual Discourse ◽  
Communicative Strategies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers how the history and development of battle rapping has influenced the wider trajectory of hip hop music and culture. Starting with a history of battle rap, told with an eye toward changes in the purpose(s), communicative practices, and modes of circulation of battles, the chapter labels three distinct eras: the Party Era (1970–1981), Lyricist Era (1981–1999), and Theatrical Era (1999 to present). These three eras trace the shift to written and rote preparations within rap battle culture, the more prominent role of visual discourse within battles, and a musical shift to an a cappella format. Moving from the very center of hip hop culture, to the peripheries, and back to somewhere in between, rap battling has come to be framed as a subculture within hip hop. Within this frame, the communicative strategies of battle rappers require “decoding,” as does the relationship between battle rap subcultures and hip hop culture. To explicate this argument, the second section decodes some of the communicative practices of a contemporary written battle.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

Muscovy and the Tatars

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-431
Author(s):  
Bulat R. Rakhimzianov
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Political ◽  
East European ◽  
Central Eurasia ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mutual Relations ◽  
Forest Line ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article explores relations between Muscovy and the so-called Later Golden Horde successor states that existed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on the territory of Desht-i Qipchaq (the Qipchaq Steppe, a part of the East European steppe bounded roughly by the Oskol and Tobol rivers, the steppe-forest line, and the Caspian and Aral Seas). As a part of, and later a successor to, the Juchid ulus (also known as the Golden Horde), Muscovy adopted a number of its political and social institutions. The most crucial events in the almost six-century-long history of relations between Muscovy and the Tatars (13–18th centuries) were the Mongol invasion of the Northern, Eastern and parts of the Southern Rus’ principalities between 1237 and 1241, and the Muscovite annexation of the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates between 1552 and 1556. According to the model proposed here, the Tatars began as the dominant partner in these mutual relations; however, from the beginning of the seventeenth century this role was gradually inverted. Indicators of a change in the relationship between the Muscovite grand principality and the Golden Horde can be found in the diplomatic contacts between Muscovy and the Tatar khanates. The main goal of the article is to reveal the changing position of Muscovy within the system of the Later Golden Horde successor states. An additional goal is to revisit the role of the Tatar khanates in the political history of Central Eurasia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

International Legal Thought

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Kleinlein
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

This contribution reflects on the role of tradition-building in international law, the implications of the recent ‘turn to history’ and the ‘presentisms’ discernible in the history of international legal thought. It first analyses how international legal thought created its own tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These projects of establishing a tradition implied a considerable amount of what historians would reject as ‘presentism’. Remarkably, critical scholars of our day and age who unsettled celebratory histories of international law and unveiled ‘colonial origins’ of international law were also criticized for committing the ‘sin of anachronism’. This contribution therefore examines the basis of this critique and defends ‘presentism’ in international legal thought. However, the ‘paradox of instrumentalism’ remains: The ‘better’ historical analysis becomes, the more it loses its critical potential for current international law. At best, the turn to history activates a potential of disciplinary self-reflection.

AI Narratives

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Intelligent Machines ◽  
Narrative History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Imaginative Thinking ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This book is the first to examine the history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines. As real artificial intelligence (AI) begins to touch on all aspects of our lives, this long narrative history shapes how the technology is developed, deployed, and regulated. It is therefore a crucial social and ethical issue. Part I of this book provides a historical overview from ancient Greece to the start of modernity. These chapters explore the revealing prehistory of key concerns of contemporary AI discourse, from the nature of mind and creativity to issues of power and rights, from the tension between fascination and ambivalence to investigations into artificial voices and technophobia. Part II focuses on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in which a greater density of narratives emerged alongside rapid developments in AI technology. These chapters reveal not only how AI narratives have consistently been entangled with the emergence of real robotics and AI, but also how they offer a rich source of insight into how we might live with these revolutionary machines. Through their close textual engagements, these chapters explore the relationship between imaginative narratives and contemporary debates about AI’s social, ethical, and philosophical consequences, including questions of dehumanization, automation, anthropomorphization, cybernetics, cyberpunk, immortality, slavery, and governance. The contributions, from leading humanities and social science scholars, show that narratives about AI offer a crucial epistemic site for exploring contemporary debates about these powerful new technologies.

scholarly journals White Pop, Shiny Armour and a Sling and Stone: Indigenous Expressions of Contemporary Congregational Song Exploring Christian-Māori Identity

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 123
Author(s):  
Shannon Said
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Cultural Backgrounds ◽  
Congregational Song ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
Pentecostal Churches ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Sydney Australia

It has taken many years for different styles of music to be utilised within Pentecostal churches as acceptable forms of worship. These shifts in musical sensibilities, which draw upon elements of pop, rock and hip hop, have allowed for a contemporisation of music that functions as worship within these settings, and although still debated within and across some denominations, there is a growing acceptance amongst Western churches of these styles. Whilst these developments have taken place over the past few decades, there is an ongoing resistance by Pentecostal churches to embrace Indigenous musical expressions of worship, which are usually treated as token recognitions of minority groups, and at worst, demonised as irredeemable musical forms. This article draws upon interview data with Christian-Māori leaders from New Zealand and focus group participants of a diaspora Māori church in southwest Sydney, Australia, who considered their views as Christian musicians and ministers. These perspectives seek to challenge the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations within a church setting and create a more inclusive philosophy and practice towards being ‘one in Christ’ with the role of music as worship acting as a case study throughout. It also considers how Indigenous forms of worship impact cultural identity, where Christian worship drawing upon Māori language and music forms has led to deeper connections to congregants’ cultural backgrounds.

scholarly journals Designing for international law: The architecture of international organizations 1922–1952

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Miriam Bak McKenna
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
International Law ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
International Organization ◽  
International Labour Organization ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Physical Manifestation ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Do So

Abstract Situating itself in current debates over the international legal archive, this article delves into the material and conceptual implications of architecture for international law. To do so I trace the architectural developments of international law’s organizational and administrative spaces during the early to mid twentieth century. These architectural endeavours unfolded in three main stages: the years 1922–1926, during which the International Labour Organization (ILO) building, the first building exclusively designed for an international organization was constructed; the years 1927–1937 which saw the great polemic between modernist and classical architects over the building of the Palace of Nations; and the years 1947–1952, with the triumph of modernism, represented by the UN Headquarters in New York. These events provide an illuminating allegorical insight into the physical manifestation, modes of self-expression, and transformation of international law during this era, particularly the relationship between international law and the function and role of international organizations.

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