This approach aligns itself with what Eric Selbin & Meghana Nayak describe as the ‘centring’ of IR on voices from the global north/west, “ certain political projects” and “completely multiple ways of understanding and living in the world”. Instead, aesthetic studies of IR recognise the inevitable distance between the represented and their representation and thus take representations themselves as a fundamental unit of analysis, generating a “more diverse but also more direct encounter with the political”.
“Representation is always an act of power” according to Robert Bleiker’s ‘The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory’, describing a shift away from mimetic approaches to the discipline which seek to “represent politics as realistically and authentically as possible”. Thus, hip hop is positioned as possible study material in IR to explore the role of lived experience and individual agency beneath the visible flows of power that are already so well recognised in the discipline- in effect, this discussion balances the importance of ‘keeping it real’ against ‘keeping it realist’ in studies of IR.
As such, a qualitative study of hip hop’s emergence and spread around the globe, tracing particular musical motifs and artists’ careers is advanced to assess to what extent the genre serves to challenge these existing understandings in IR. At a wider level, studies of IR tend to neglect the role of individual agency in favour of explanations resting on global power relations and structural forces. This, in addition to its spectacular spread globally and malleability in being able to take on localised meanings and sounds, makes it difficult to square with existing understandings of music in IR which conceptualise the role of sound in terms of top-down forces and domination by institutional, national and commercial interests. Hip hop places a particular emphasis on marginalised groups and ‘keeping it real’- a popular phrase in the hip hop community reflecting the importance of behaving and sharing messages consistent with ones’ personal experience.
0 kommentar(er)
