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COMMColloquium

Singing for the People: Populist Sentiment and Resistance Music in Egypt, and Morocco

Salma El idrissi, PhD Candidate, Cornell University

2pm in 102 Mann

Reception to follow in the Hub

 

 

Key (1961) defines latent public opinion as “as "those opinions held by private persons which governments find it prudent to heed". Latent public opinion is known to create anxiety among the elite in democratic and non-democratic countries alike. In non-democratic contexts, latent opinion(s) are the implicit consequence of political censorship and censors’ attempts to sanction individual freedom of speech. It is a negative sentiment toward the ‘tyranny’ of the elite and their oppression of the ‘ordinary people’. Following Mudde's (2017, p. 29) definition of populism, this sentiment can be plausibly qualified as ‘populist’.

I argue that under such conditions, artists are potential whistleblowers of latent opinions. Thanks to it equivocal nature and openness to interpretation, art and artistic creativity could compensate human need for communicating opinions and sentiments in the public sphere, while still complying with the guidelines of censors and elite institutions.   

However, the connection between art and its audience, which is in this case the mere people, cannot be achieved without the use of a tacit encoding system that is mutually understandable by the artist and the audience. The encoding system could be a range of populist and cultural symbols corresponding to the identity and collective memory of a community or a group of people. As (Agosín, 1990, p. 36) notes, art under dictatorship requires “the active collaboration of the viewer [, the reader and listener] to complement utterances or to implement meaning”.

In my dissertation, I am intending to investigate the use of art in conveying a latent, populist worldview of reality under non-democratic systems, as opposed to democratic regimes. My main question is:  How is the populist discourse constructed through artistic media in democratic and non-democratic countries? What are the main differences/similarities?

 

Salma El idrissi (she/her/hers) is a PhD candidate in the department of communication at Cornell University. Her research interests revolve around global media, especially the expression of different political ideologies and identities around the world, as well as historical events that shaped the present political discourse. She also believes that content analysis is better done in the native language of the media in question. Her past research involved critical and common languages such as Arabic, French, English, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew (and Farsi/Dari (Both spoken in Iran and Afghanistan) in upcoming research!).

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