Hip Hop – IPDGC Smart Power

Cultural Diplomacy in Multiple Dimensions

March 30, 2012Cultural Diplomacy, public diplomacy1 Comment

It’s been “all Public Diplomacy all the time” this week at George Washington University, with many exciting events surrounding the IPDGC’s Hip Hop Diplomacy: Connecting Through Culture conference on Tuesday afternoon, 3/27. (Note: here’s the conference final program; check the IPDGC website soon for the full conference video.)

Tara S at IPDGC conference — Tara Sonenshine

First, we are delighted to see that conference keynote speaker Tara Sonenshine, currently Executive Vice President at the U.S. Institute of Peace, has just been confirmed by the Senate as the new Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.

Ms. Sonenshine spoke passionately at the IPDGC conference about the importance of addressing challenges to women. She emphasized the power of individuals, and the role of cultural exchange in inspiring individuals to action. She described public diplomacy as a key “inclusionary” strategy that can help put women together with powerful institutions of government and business. Getting women into such loci of power “is a national security issue for us, and for everyone,” Ms. Sonenshine noted.

Tiffany at IPDGC conference — Tiffany Roberts Sahaydak

After her remarks, a terrific panel took the conference floor to talk about their international public diplomacy experience sharing sports, music, and journalism skills with young women (and men) around the world. U.S. Soccer star Tiffany Roberts Sahaydak joined award-winning hip hop and R&B artist Toni Blackman, directors of the youth media training organization GlobalGirl Media (Therese Steiner and Tumi Mosadi), rising Moroccan hip hop star Soultana, and top Zimbabwean women’s basketball coach Belia Zibowa.

Toni B at IPDGC conference — Toni Blackman

Listening to this amazing panel, I recalled last week’s article by Dr. Philip Seib, reflecting on a recent cultural diplomacy conference in the U.K. Seib wrote, “Still needing to be better defined … is the state’s role vis-à-vis the cultural community and the individual artist in the course of these diplomatic ventures.” And in fact our conference was an unusual opportunity to hear vivid descriptions and powerful insights from these artists / experts, right alongside the essential policy overview provided by Ambassador Adam Ereli, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, and a valuable presentation on private sector support for international youth sports outreach from GWU professor Lisa Delpy Neirotti (rounded out by some thoughts of my own on the interrelationship of media and cultural exchange in public diplomacy.)

Adam Ereli at IPDGC conference — Amb. Adam Ereli

Meanwhile, all week IPDGC made the most of the DC presence of two of the conference’s international participants. Tumi Mosadi, who coordinates GlobalGirl Media’s project in Soweto, is today joining a field trip of Washington DC high school students to NBC studios as part of the Prime Movers Media journalism training program sponsored by GWU’s School of Media and Public Affairs (SMPA). Yesterday, Ms. Mosadi had the opportunity to shadow SMPA alum Coleen King at MSNBC’s Chris Matthews news program, and she met with SMPA alum Jayne Orenstein at the Washington Post on Wednesday to talk video-journalism.

Tumi and Therese of GGM at IPDGC conference — Tumi Mosadi and Therese Steiner

Also on Wednesday, Tumi and GlobalGirl Media President Therese Steiner screened a powerful GGM documentary film on the impact of HIV/AIDS on young women in Soweto at GWU’s Department of Global Health (School of Public Health), as well as at State Department’s Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator. IPDGC sends a big thank you to all our GWU colleagues for these collaborations.

Soultana at Marrakesh Lounge in Adams Morgan

And IPDGC provided night life as well: Moroccan hip hopper Soultanaperformed her work – including hit single Sawt Nssa (Voice of Women) – to lively audiences at DC venues Marrakesh Lounge and 19th Bar. (Just as a reminder of the power of international exchanges to connect and build, it was Kendra Salois, former U.S. Fulbright Student in Morocco and current Ph.D. candidate at U. Cal Berkeley, who connected the IPDGC team – not normally famed as music impresarios – with the performance organizers. Our thanks go to Kendra and to Darby Hickey for making the performances possible.)

Hip Hop Diplomacy

March 21, 2012public diplomacyLeave a Comment

Dan Sreebny (@pd_dan) has had a couple of interesting tweets lately about various cultural diplomacy programs by the State Department featuring Hip Hop music and dance. In Egypt, the U.S. Embassy and the Brooklyn Academy of Music teamed up to bring the Rennie Harris Puremovement Dance Company (RHPM) to perform as part of a Middle Eastern tour. In Lebanon, Chen Lo and the Liberation Family performed as part of State’s Rhythm Road program, which sends American bands around the world.You can get a sense of Chen Lo’s group from this concert in Algiers:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef5Oirc4T10&w=420&h=315]

These efforts are part of a long tradition of using music as an integral part of U.S. public diplomacy efforts abroad. This blog’s name is an homage to those programs, which in their earliest days featured “Jazz Ambassadors” like Dave Brubeck and Louis Armstrong. A major underlying rational for these programs is that music and other arts are seen as being less overtly political than traditional diplomacy and thus able to bridge gaps created by policy differences between the U.S. and other countries, something USC’s Phil Seib blogged about last week.

Hip Hop is in many ways ideally suited to these programs because of its wide appeal to young people (and some of us older folks) around the world.

That said, as Seib intimates, it’s obviously a bit ridiculous to pretend that art, music very much included, is apolitical. Furthermore, from the earliest days of post-war American public diplomacy the art and artists State has chosen to export through these programs have often been chosen expressly because of their political value. Much has been written, for instance, about the debates in U.S. policy circles about which art to include in the famous American Exhibition in Moscow in 1959 (famous for the Kitchen Debate). And even the Jazz Messengers were seen by President Eisenhower and others as helping to counter America’s well-deserved bad reputation regarding race, while at the same time potentially opening up politicized critiques of American hypocrisy.

Hip Hop, of course, is also no stranger to political firestorms, and the best of it — like the best of virtually all artistic genres and mediums — is often overtly political, especially about culture. Whether it’s Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” NWA’s “F*** tha Police,” or Jay Z’s “99 Problems,” (all links very much NSFW) Hip Hop (and Rap) frequently touch on important themes of racism, police brutality, and economic disenfranchisement.

Contrary to the purported apolitical intent of many cultural diplomacy programs involving the arts, I think their value lies precisely in their manifest and latent political content. Sure, State isn’t about to send Nas on a world tour (though that would be awesome on many levels…), but there is still a great value in not being afraid of a musical genre just because it has a negative stereotype among certain circles in the U.S., including many political circles.

Yet these same domestic political issues force the State Department to walk a tightrope with these programs: They can’t promote even remotely controversial artists lest they raise the hackles of members of Congress who control the purse strings for such programs. This is especially difficult for public diplomacy programs because, for many reasons including their long-term effects horizon and measurement issues, it is often difficult to “prove” their worth empirically to legislators looking for reasons to slash budgets. Programs tainted with being “politicized” are especially likely to receive scrutiny.

Yet I’d argue that perhaps the greatest value of the Jazz Messengers was precisely that they sparked conversations about America’s race problem, something many Americans would prefer to ignore, while at the same time celebrating not only American culture generally, but African American culture specifically. In that case, there was also an added benefit of subtly demonstrating American values by opening up such a discussion of race, something that shows, I think, the difference between good public diplomacy and propaganda.

All of this will be front and center, by the way, at next Tuesday’s IPDGC conference “Hip Hop Diplomacy: Connecting Through Culture,” from 2-5 at the State Room at the Elliott School for International Affairs on the GWU campus. RSVP now because seats are limited!

Hip Hop, Soccer, and Women’s Voices

March 8, 2012public diplomacyLeave a Comment

It’s March 8 — International Women’s Day — and a great occasion to introduce two remarkable women who will travel to Washington DC later this month to speak at George Washington University.

Tumi Mosadi, not yet 30, directs GlobalGirl Media in Johannesburg, South Africa, teaching social media and video-journalism skills to high school girls who are struggling against stacked odds: poverty, disease, violence. Through Tumi’s dedication, these girls find their voices. They learn to tell their own stories, and the stories of those around them. When South Africa hosted the 2010 soccer World Cup, Tumi helped the girls talk about what this remarkable event meant for them as citizens of South Africa, even if soccer is not traditionally a girls’ game there. Since 2011, Tumi has helped the girls find their voices to talk about HIV and AIDS.

Soultana, at 25, is a Moroccan rap star, still a rarity in that North African country. With fellow members of the trio “Tigresse Flow” she won several national music awards in Morocco, including the prize for best emerging talent at the prestigious annual Mawazine festival. Last year, Soultana released a solo music video: “Sawt Nssa” or “The Voice of Women.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK9Pcvf8CG4]

Soultana raps about poverty, double standards, and exploitation. She sings “The woman’s voice is what I’m calling / The girl’s voice that is lost in my country / The voice of those who want to talk, who want to say: a voice of all women who want a sign.”

So what do these remarkable women have in common? And what brings them together at GWU later this month?

What Tumi and Soultana share is their embrace of cross-cultural dialogue and international partnerships — and specifically their participation in programs that are part of United States cultural diplomacy.

Global Girl Media works to give girls a journalist’s voice, with programs in Los Angeles, South Africa and elsewhere. U.S. Embassy public diplomacy grants help send American volunteer mentors/trainers to South Africa. At the U.S. Consulate in Johannesburg, I saw clearly the thirst for such programs and opportunities, and their potential for great impact. But Tumi herself can speak from the inside, can talk about what she’s learned as a trainer and mentor about effectiveness, and about the changes she has seen in the lives of the participating girls.

Half a continent away, Soultana came to know several young U.S. Fulbright researchers who were studying hip hop culture in Morocco, and helped guide them through Casablanca’s complex cultural scene. Last year, she visited the U.S. via the International Visitors Leadership Program, adding on an artists’ residency and New York festival performance. At the U.S. Embassy in Morocco, I saw first-hand the emerging power of young aspirations and voices in that country, which, just as in the U.S., are so often expressed through music. But Soultana herself can speak about how it feels to be a young, pioneering woman expressing the concerns of a generation. And her prior experience in America will help her to tell us these things in our own language of cultural understanding.

The best news is that both of these remarkable individuals will be featured speakers at “Hip Hop Diplomacy: Connecting Through Culture,” a conference the IPDGC will host on March 27, from 2:00 – 5:00 pm at the Elliott School of International Relations. Click on the link for details, and to RSVP. We hope to see you there!