Political Poetics of Arab Rap as a Form of Memorial Culture

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyse modern Arab rap culture in the politics of memory. The author analyses the tactics and strategies of imagining and inventing the past, its ideologically and politically motivated reinterpretations in the discourse of Arabic rap. The novelty of the study lies in the analysis of Arabic rap as a form of memory politics, since most academic studies of memorial culture are limited to the analysis of the visualization and actualization of the past in the nationalist and political imagination, which leads to ignoring the texts of modern mass culture and consumer society as forms and dimensions of the mnemonic space. The article analyses the contribution of Arabic rap to the formation and development of modern memorial culture in contexts of the historical memory of the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa. The article also analyses a wide range of problems presented in the Arabic rap discourse. It is presumed that texts of the rap singers inspire the fragmentation of the Arab societies, actualising and visualising various versions of the memorial culture. It is assumed that rap as a form of mass culture can significantly influence the politics of memory as one of the spaces for the actualization and visualization of various memorial canons inspired by the generational differences in ideological and political preferences of Arab societies in contexts of the transformation of collective historical memory.