Katy Khan’s research while affiliated with University of South Africa and other places

In African-American literary thought, Henry Louis Gates's book, The signifying monkey (1988) was a breakthrough in so far as it argued for a vernacular theory for cultural expression in black communities. However, some critics missed Gates's point, and began to suggest that a singing culture is biologically inherent in black people; that the evolution of different musical styles are sui generis to black people only and that unless one is coming from this black culture, one has no access to understanding the rhetorical devices used by black singers. This emphasis on cultural absolutism (Gilroy 1993) denies acknowledgement of creative diversity amongst black artists from America. This article uses some selected songs from Immortal Technique, one of the finest singers to debunk the above assumptions and reveal how the command of musical techniques or rhetorical devices in music is a function of communal socialisation as well as individual creativity and innovation. The article explores the notion of how particular styles in popular culture can create new meanings and content in black popular culture in America.

The aim of this article is to explore how black musicians, particularly those who proclaim a close relation with Islam, are using the cultural images from Islam to create new identities within black communities. Little has been written on the influence of Islam on female artists in African American communities. Since influence is not a one way road, this paper reveals that some female African American singers have appropriated the cultural symbols in Islam, recontextualised these symbols as female singers and manipulated them to speak to or elaborate on the women's new found Muslim identities. This paper selects some lyrics of Ms Undastood, a musician who openly proclaims her close relationship with and cites Sunni Islam names and the religious credo that she manipulates as a fertile source of her artistic imagination. It will be argued that the lyrics of this artist demonstrate a quest to create an ideal and alternative black community informed by the spiritual values of the Sunni version of Islam. Although in her lyrics she is aware of the struggles of beliefs within the versions of faiths articulated through Nation of Islam, The Five Percenters or the Nation of Gods and Earths, and Sunni Islam, Ms Undastood has drawn criticism for implying that Sunni Muslim values are better than those values in the other versions of Islam. However it will also be demonstrated that the political significance of her contribution to black females and Muslims is to have challenged the emerging mainstream but black male dominated Islamic popular musical culture.

This article explores the responses of African American musicians to the strictures placed on the production and circulation of information following the war on terror post 9/11. This date marks the intensification of the challenging of ‘war on terror’ ideology by black artists. 9/11 also ushered in a new morality in terms of which artists and democratic voices are subjected to extreme control by the government. Most black popular musicians, though American by citizenship, do not feel included in the American nation. There are noticeable and differentiable tendencies among musicians who adopt strategies of resistance to the American state, which the artists view as practising terrorism on its own people. The lyrics of Public Enemy and Talib Kweli are most trenchant in their critiques of American domestic and foreign policy in the period both before and after 9/11. A textual analysis of the music can help uncover the extent of social ideology in the music, which not only proclaims itself a crusade against American ‘war on terror’ ideology, but sometimes openly identifies its inspiration as deriving from Islam. While selected lyrics demonstrate a quest for the liberation of black Americans from the perceived injustices perpetrated by America on its black people and the Arabs in general, the singers articulate their visions from the contradictory ideological ground of being American, victim, and visionary artist for a better society.

The founding ideology of modern South Africa followed a unique path that favoured the discourse of racial purity, exclusion of political rights for blacks and the silencing of black narratives justified in the phenomena of ‘separate development’, officially called the apartheid system in 1948. In response to these exclusive racial politics, Africans in South Africa, with significant assistance from African countries from the north, gained independence in 1994. However, as early as 1994, a new discourse of black South African racial nationalism was promoted, and it named some blacks from the north as ‘economic refugees’ or ‘foreign guests’ and the intensity of this exclucive language resulted in the xenophobic attacks on foreign blacks carried out by ordinary South Africans in 2008, with more or less white and black elite approval. More than 65 black lives were lost in the new crusade to purify South Africa of black foreign elements. However, the discourse of racial purity, engendered in the sort of narrow nationalism promoted by both white and black supremacists before and after 1994 has not gone unchallenged. In some popular music, black South Africans have problematise notions of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘cultural diversity’, which underpin the liberal discourse of postapartheid South Africa. The tendency in some selected lyrics by black hip hop artists is to embrace ‘intercultural’ communication as a basis for renegotiating questions of identities in the context of the local and global crisis informed by residual ideologies of colonialism, apartheid, the Cold War and most recently, the War on Terror.

Just as China has opened the country to economic free trade and financial liberalisation, so the country has also witnessed significant developments in the cultural fronts. One such development that is fast gaining currency is the presence of American-derived Hip hop music in Chinese restaurants and music centres patronised by Chinese youths. Chinese youth who have had contact with the outside world are mostly responsible for bringing the musical genre of Hip hop into China. High technology that China now commands has also made the transfer of cultural flows in the name of Hip hop possible. But it is important to point out that the direction of the growth and movement of Hip hop has not been one way with China only receiving, and America creating the tunes. Chinese youths who are innovative with technology have also introduced patterns of tunes and themes unique to China, which also resonate with youth cultures world wide. The aim of this article is therefore, to identify some selected Chine artists in Hip hop, and analyse their lyrics composed in the English language.

There is a widely-held perception that male-produced music videos accord women low status and describe stereotyped women as ‘bitch’, ‘video vixen’. There is some truth that male artists and producers slot the image of women into the frame in which women are ‘othered’ as inferior and morally degraded. However, this article will explore the following: When women flaunt their sexualities and bodies in either male- or female-produced music videos, is there a possible subversion of both male and female attitudes that are rooted in the patriarchal conception of women? How have women who participated in either maleor female-produced music videos sought to contextualise their experiences of oppression and finding their voices? These questions shall be explored through an exploration of the politics involved in the debates on female representation in America. The aim of the article is not to analyse the videos, but to bring to the surface the complex trends in the debates on women representations. Therefore, the emphasis of the analysis is not so much on the lyrics but on the critical space provided by the debates on black female representations in video music.

This article explores the theme of religion in the lyrics of Kanye West's Jesus Walks, Scarface's Somebody and Lupe Fiasco's Muhammad Walks Lyrics. Since the time of slavery, African Americans have evolved the musical genre described as Negro spirituals. While these songs mined themes on the quest for freedom, they also offered a veiled critique of the capitalist system that forcibly brought blacks to America. Black musicians have used songs with a religious undertone to attempt to come to terms with their subordinated life in a racial context. They have used the figures of God, Muhammad and Jesus as narrative tropes of the quest for political saviours. Religious discourse has therefore been instrumental in helping African Americans to create a new sense of community growing out of hundreds of years of domination by the white establishment. The songs analysed in this article indicate the power of narrative in providing alternative ideological options for African Americans.

The aim of this article is to render thinkable the idea of reading the Zimbabwean national anthem, Simudzai Mureza weZimbabwe, as a political biography. Biographies are people's lives narrated by others. However, the act of writing the lives of the nation in the form of an anthem, and then projecting these experiences as epitomising the lives of the individuals within the nation, is in fact marked by a disjuncture. This happens because by their very nature, acts of narrating individual or collective identities should always be viewed as approximations of that lived reality. Furthermore, national anthems as wish lists are based on some selected themes deemed of national importance by others and not everybody. This problem is at the heart of reading the Zimbabwean national anthem as a political biography. This article argues that if it is remembered that the lyrics of Simudzai Mureza weZimbabwe were composed by a literary figure, and selected and adopted by the Government of Zimbabwe, amongst other compositions, then there is reason to believe that there are, from that competition, some versions of the national anthem that were turned down, whose lyrical content Zimbabweans may never come to know of. Read from this “subversive” perspective, the Zimbabwean national anthem is a political biography “complete in its incompleteness” or incomplete in it completeness.2 The formulation that a text says more in what it does not say than in what it says suggests that there cannot be any text that can claim to be total, whole, or complete. For further elaboration of this concept see Macherey (1978).

Although there has been substantial exchange of commercial goods between Zimbabwe and South Africa, little has been written about the two countries’ cultural exchanges that predate colonialism. The aim of this article is firstly to explore the musical global flows that were initiated by the Zimbabwean-born Dorothy Masuka and the different kinds of musical cooperations that Masuka entered into with South Africa's musical legend, Miriam Makeba, and then secondly to underline the importance of the formation of Africa's transnational identities as they are revealed in Masuka's musical career.