Music is a medium that has allowed me to express my resistance, solidarity, and political alliances with local and inthernational movements in the age of globalizing forces.
Through the album Sweet as Broken Dates: Lost Somali Tapes from the Horn of Africa, I learned about the Somali civil war and its cultural repression that forced artists to hide their tapes in a bunker in order to protect their musical heritage. Through Radio Alhara, I’ve explored Palestinian solidarity through oral mediums and soundscapes. And in the Vulture Prince album, I experienced the poetics of pain, grief, and friendship through Arooj Aftab’s Urdu mother tongue.
Music is a crucial part in the path towards liberation, with its rhythms, melodies, and cadences. It asks for individual and collective movement, for experimentation and play, and for fluidity. Bearing witness and grooving to music from different corners of the world is also a way to challenge the epistemic and musical dominance of Western imperial forces. It’s a part of resisting the monoculture tendencies of knowledge production in the Global North, as Robin Wall Kimmerer beautifully argues in her writings.
But becoming a witness and a listener comes with the responsibility of acknowledging longstanding traditions and understanding their historical and cultural relevance in relation to Global South communities. This was a topic of discussion during the last edition of the festival, where conversations about cultural appropriation were alive within those days. In hindsight, these discussions stemmed from important questions: considering the academic and white-majority audiences within the degrowth movement, of which the festival is inevitably a mirror, how dto we avoid uncritically consuming music from the Global South? In what ways can the festival embody a deep-rooted and informed praxis of allyship by going beyond the performative? How do we recentre music as a political element, while also allowing it to be fun, playful and not always oh so serious? bell hooks, and the black feminist tradition at large, has brought nuanced reflections to this topic when she argued that “cultural, ethnic, and racial differences” are “continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance the white palate”, meaning that “the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten”.
I wish I could tell you that we came up with a straightforward answer to this, but we did not. However, it became clear for us that the gift of music comes with responsibilities: of bringing information, cultivating awareness, according due credit, striving for nuance, and embodying a praxis of allyship. Music asks us to reify our political commitments and to take them from the theoretical to the practical. And ultimately, it call us to question our desires and to reflect on how they may inform our politics and our understanding of difference.