In this interview, the managing editor of Tadween Publishing, Kylie Broderick, sits down with Sunaina Maira to discuss her book, Jil Oslo: Palestinian Hip Hop, Youth Culture, and the Youth Movement.
Summary of Jil Oslo:
Based on ethnographic research in Palestine, primarily during the Arab uprisings, this book explores the intersections between new youth cultures and protest politics among Palestinian youth in the West Bank and Israel. It focuses on Palestinian hip hop and the youth movement that emerged in 2011 as overlapping sites where new cultural and political imaginaries are being produced in the Oslo generation ("jil Oslo"). Challenging the Oslo framework of national politics and of cultural expression, these young artists and activists are rethinking and reviving the possibility of a decolonial present.
Sunaina Maira is Professor of Asian American Studies, and is affiliated with the Middle East/South Asia Studies program and with the Cultural Studies Graduate Group. Her research and teaching focus on Asian American youth culture and the politics of cultural production as well as political mobilization and transnational movements challenging militarization, imperialism, and settler colonialism. She is the author of Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City and Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire After 9/11. She co-edited Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America, which won the American Book Award in 1997, and Youthscapes: The Popular, the National, and the Global.
Maira’s recent publications include a book based on ethnographic research, Jil [Generation] Oslo: Palestinian Hip Hop, Youth Culture, and the Youth Movement(Tadween), and a volume co-edited with Piya Chatterjee, The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (University of Minnesota Press). Her new book project is a study of South Asian, Arab, and Afghan American youth and political movements focused on civil and human rights and issues of sovereignty and surveillance in the War on Terror. Maira launched a new section on West Asian American Studies in the Association for Asian American Studies and co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies on Asian/Arab American studies intersections. She has been involved with various civil and human rights campaigns and antiwar groups in the Bay.
Maira’s recent publications include a book based on ethnographic research, Jil [Generation] Oslo: Palestinian Hip Hop, Youth Culture, and the Youth Movement(Tadween), and a volume co-edited with Piya Chatterjee, The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (University of Minnesota Press). Her new book project is a study of South Asian, Arab, and Afghan American youth and political movements focused on civil and human rights and issues of sovereignty and surveillance in the War on Terror. Maira launched a new section on West Asian American Studies in the Association for Asian American Studies and co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies on Asian/Arab American studies intersections. She has been involved with various civil and human rights campaigns and antiwar groups in the Bay.
Kylie Broderick is the Managing Editor at Tadween Publishing and Jadaliyya e-zine, and occupies an executive administrative role within the Arab Studies Institute.
She graduated from George Mason University with an MA in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in 2017. Since that time, she has worked in various pursuits within the Arab Studies Institute, primarily in producing publications, projects, and events aimed at fostering new conversations and knowledge within the Middle Eastern studies community, and for new students within the field. Her interests include Middle Eastern developmental paradigms, politics, governance, and statecraft. Most of her work revolves around rectifying the dialectical inequalities between the Middle East and the western world, the hierarchical and biased knowledge production schema on the region, and discursive injustices in all forms.
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