In this interview interdisciplinary writer, researcher, and organizer Rayya El Zein talks to us about listening as an experience in Arab rap music. Rayya talks about how the Arab rapper was taken up as a figure of intrigue by foreign journalists and researchers during the Arab uprisings in 2011. We also tried to unpack the U.S. foreign policy known as rap diplomacy and how neoliberal Orientalism perceives young Arab rappers as agents of change on the chess board of diplomacy.
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Rayya is an interdisciplinary writer, researcher, and organizer. She has worked as a teacher, editor, and project manager among anthropologists, technologists, musicians, journalists, and performance artists. Her writing has recently appeared in the Journal of Palestine Studies and the Middle East Journal of Culture & Communication. She is currently the Forum Editor at Lateral, the journal of the Cultural Studies Association and a program manager at Code for Science & Society, a US-based tech non-profit. She tweets from @rayelz.
