In my pop culture intervention, I was aiming to answer — or at least ponder — a few personal questions that have bothered me throughout my college career. I think a lot about impacting the community around me, and I spend a lot of time frustrated with the fact that the systems we exist in seem so stuck in their harmful ways. How does one make a difference? Why do people revolt…or why should or shouldn’t they? Is real change enacted on systemic levels first, or on personal levels first? Why am I so often inspired by small-level movements of human purity and compassion, but so easily convinced that humans are selfish, that all systems are inherently corrupt and patriarchal, that all peace will find its way back into conflict? These questions are the reason I am majoring in my individualized program in Gallatin; I seek to understand the governing powers and cultural powers that be in order to ethically grapple with the two.
It is with these questions in mind that I entered our class, studied subversion and subculture, and considered the complexities and nuances of sociopolitical movements around the world with a more critical eye than ever before. I was taught to doubt the simple truths I’d accepted, and in turn challenge everything.
I chose tags “personal is political,” “my revolutionary square,” and “politics of location.” I conducted a series of interviews in which I asked my fellow students about the political wars they wage in their day to day lives, as well as what revolution means to them. I then wrote a poem about what revolution means to me, or more so about deconstructing and tearing apart and mulling over what I thought revolution meant to me. I checked my identity and the relevance/significance of my voice in this class, in an attempt to run my poem through the “politics of location,” and then I adjusted my poem accordingly. Not falsifying my truth, but rather recognizing what it means for something to be my truth. I touched on topics like the war on terror, and the very real way I saw it affecting the lives of my friends here at NYUAD. I explored whiteness, and the implicit underlying conversation I often felt occurring in this class. I also explored my own mixed racial identity, and what it means to me to be a westerner who benefits from today’s western neoimperialism, and yet whose ancestors were the victims of true western imperialism. In the context of our class, I think we can benefit from discussions of intersectionality. This has been a huge underlying theme of the semester, from Riz Ahmed (who grapples with Pakistani, Pakistani British, British actor, Pakistani British actor, and well-educated marginalized actor identities) to Alia Elmahdy (who grapples with femininity, sexuality, artistry, and Islam). I also think that pop culture is an exercise in small level revolutions, and so in this way, we cannot study popular culture without studying revolt.
Subsequently, attached please find my video and poem.
In class, I found that my peers offered less criticism than I thought they would. Maybe that was a result of time crunch, but honestly it seemed more to me the fact that I tried to tackle a lot of components in the project. There was the interviews, and the dialogue they present regarding three students personal relationships to revolution (lived experience, academic experience, and theoretical experience). But there was also my poem, clocking in at nearly three minutes and covering a very wide variety of topics. And then I also had very eclectic footage, contrasting clips of Ela in the library learning with footage of very real protests and other demonstrations of dissent. My aim was to cover as much as possible related to this complex and personally overwhelming topic as I could in one video. But I think the resulting effect was that my peers didn’t really know where to begin their responses.
Emina, though, said that she was curious about the connection between the interviews and the second, more artsy component of the project. In reflection: my intention was to put the opinions of my peers in conversation with my own opinions, and by transposing both with news coverage of protests, add a third opinion to the conversational mix.
You, professor, asked about the politics of location at play. I would have to agree that politics of location played a huge role in the creation of this project: it’s why I asked an Egyptian from Tahrir Square, an Ecuadorian from Harlem, and a Fulbright Scholar from Colorado to answer my questions. They provided an immense variety of responses. I also didn’t want it to be only my political location represented, because that is very important to me, harkening back to the attempts by Lamia Benyoussef (author of Gender and the Fractured Mythscapes of National Identity in Revolutionary Tunisia) to recognize her own identities and politics of location.
In conclusion: thank you for the learning opportunity of producing this final project.
It has been quite the self-reflecting and outward-looking journey.
May 18, 2017 at 9:09 am
Glad you found our concluding assignment fruitful and reflective–that is indeed what id hoped it would be for all of you–a way to think through the ways in which the course readings and discussions and viewing and hearings impacted you!
Really enjoyed your provocation—thanks for it and for being such a productive member of the class.
All the best!