Links via Diigo (weekly)

• hawgblawg: Khaled: One of NPR's 50 Great Voices

  "Eyre's representation of Khaled as someone who is fighting for peace and love and against fundamentalist Islam is a comfortable image for the cosmopolitan Westerner to consume. As we listen to him, as we buy his recordings, we can imagine that we are somehow "doing good," maybe even striking a blow in favor of peace and against intolerance. A more complicated picture of Khaled, one that situates him in the ongoing struggles of Arabs in France for human rights and against racism and Islamophobia, a picture of Khaled as someone who, like most other Arabs, strongly feels that the Palestinians have been dealt a raw deal--this is not so easy to take on, for the presumptive fair-minded NPR listener who might be interested in World Music. It would be more comfortable for that listener to imagine that he was participating in the "rescue" of Khaled from fundamentalism.
  
  But isn't it the responsibility of experts in World Music like Banning Eyre to educate audiences about the music of the world and the contexts that produces that music, rather than just promote that music, in the conventional ways deployed by the World Music industry? "

  tags: algeria music rai representation media

• Rapper is No Friend of Haiti -- Wyclef Opposed Aristide - New America Media

  "Let us be clear. Jean and his uncle, the Haitian ambassador to the U.S., are both cozy with the self-appointed czar of Haiti, Bill Clinton, whose plans for the Caribbean nation are to make it a neo-colony for a reconstructed tourist industry and a pool of cheap labor for U.S. factories. Wyclef Jean is the perfect front man. The Haitian elite and its U.S./U.N. sponsors are counting on his appeal to the youth to derail the people’s movement for democracy and their call for the return of President Aristide. Most Haitians will not be hoodwinked by the likes of Wyclef Jean."

  tags: haiti imperialism hip-hop neocolonialism neoliberalism

• Is Holy Land Archaeology Being Hyped by Politics?

  "But Mazar is hardly an exception. Many scholars are concerned that archaeology is being used to score political points in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And nowhere more so than around the City of David, a rich archaeological mound just south of the Temple Mount and Al-Aqsa Mosque identified in the 19th century as the possible site of King David's ancient city, now covered with crowded Palestinian housing."

  tags: israel palestine antiquity academia imperialism orientalism

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.