Pantomime Terror: Music and Politics

by John Hutnyk

Overview

Pantomime is a theatrical form that has come to rule our everyday lives as terror. In the early years of the 21st century, a dissembling political demonology has sometimes placed otherwise merely lyrical musicians in a volatile predicament. The discussion here is of Fun-da-Mental's Aki Nawaz portrayed as a 'suicide rapper', Asian Dub Foundation striking poses from the street in support of youth in Paris and Algiers, and M.I.A., born free fighting immigration crackdown with atrocity video. Along the way, bus bombs, comedy circuits, critical theory, Arabian Nights, Bradley Wiggins, Dinarzade, Karl Marx, Paris boulevards, Molotov, Mao, the Eiffel Tower, reserve armies, lists, Richard Wagner, Samina Malik, Slavoj Žižek, Freudian slips, red-heads, Guantanamo. The book offers some sharp critiques of our contemporary complacency, and the failures of theory as more than ten years of war on terror turns anxiety at home and drone-strike assassinations abroad into a normal everyday. This pantomime is a terror story told over and over to distract from the workings of a despotic power. The need for an adequate (winning) counter-narrative was never more clear.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782792093
Publisher:	Hunt, John Publishing
Publication date:	02/28/2014
Pages:	222
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.63(h) x 0.53(d)

About the Author

John Hutnyk is Professor in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements x

1 Introduction:

London Bus

Pantomime

War Diary

Mediation

The Orange jumpsuit

Alerts.

2 DIY Cookbook 25

Visiting the Kumars

A Suicide Rapper

1001 Nights

Cookbook DIY

Pantomime Video

The Ramp Arts Interlude (notes from a screening)

All is War

Back to the Kumars.

3 Dub at the Movies 66

Representing La Haine

Zizek-degree-zero

Derrida Writes the Way

The Eiffel Tower

Ruffians, Rabble, Rogues and Repetition

Musical Interlude

Riff-raff

Reserve Army

Coda: Tire Battle of Algiers

Molotov.

4 Scheherazade's Sister, M.I.A. 124

Cultural Projects

Storyteller Nights M.I.A.

Born Free

Sell Out, or Tiocfaidh ár lá

Witticisms and Wagner

Despot Culture

Scheherazade in Guantdnamo.

References 190

Editorial Reviews

Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne - This book starts with the countless provocations that surround us in the ambient war on terror. However, rather than retreating into either loathsome self-pity or indignant self-righteousness, Hutnyk responds with the thumping provocation to think and get real!

From the Publisher