Networked Music and Political Borders:
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article analyses Instagram’s impact on the Palestinian and Middle Eastern music scenes, particularly in rap and electronic music, showing how this platform allows artists to circumvent geopolitical obstacles related to the Israeli occupation and obstructed state borders. Based on ethnographic research conducted between 2022 and 2025, including numerous interviews with Palestinian, Jordanian, and Lebanese musicians, this study highlights Instagram as a pivotal space for collaboration, dissemination, promotion, and event organisation, despite constant prohibitions and risks. Through the example of the Doun Juthour collective, this article also illustrates the tactical adaptations of artists in the face of repression, their use of digital tools to maintain a vibrant and interconnected scene, even beyond borders. Furthermore, this work questions the dynamics of global hegemony embodied by Instagram, drawing on Gramsci’s theory to understand the complex coexistence between domination—via norms, algorithms and censorship—and resistance, embodied in strategies of war of position. Artists adopt, negotiate and reinvent these tools, creating a form of Palestinian and Middle Eastern “digital locality” marked by tension between dependence and protest. It also highlights the paradoxes of digital technology, which broadens creative possibilities while weakening physical spaces and reproducing processes of marginalization. The article concludes that musicians’ relationship with digital technology is ambivalent: combining constraints, innovations and resistance, it reveals a music scene that is both vulnerable and inventive in the midst of a violent political context.
Author: Michel, Thomas
Language: English
Topic: Music History and Culture
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7128186553
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