From The Guardian

Using subversive pub quizzes and portraits, Muslim feminist artists are confronting perceptions of Islam and the male-dominated art world. Sara Wajid meets them

'Round six, question two: Jean Charles de Menezes was shot and killed when mistaken for a 'suicide bomber'." On news reports, shocked passengers in the tube carriage stated the Brazilian man was 'Asian, definitely Asian'. Does this suggest that a) all brown people look the same? or b) there are people in the world who believe Brazil is part of Asia?"

This is not your typical pub quiz question, but then the woman posing it is not your typical quizmaster. Artist Yara el-Sherbini is probably Britain's only Muslim quizmistress. Her quiz nights are the latest in a series of witty, perturbing live-art works which have included her demonstration of how to make a carpet bomb "Blue Peter-style" out of a Persian carpet and a stand-up set of her own transgressive material.

From The North Star

this past saturday and sunday, new york city's dusty randall's island hosted hordes of hip hop fans at the ROCK THE BELLS North American music festival, sponsored by Guerilla Union.

ROCK THE BELLS has called itself a "world-class hip hop plaftorm" and features over twenty politically conscious and activist hip hop acts, including big names such as rage against the machine, wu-tang clan, cypress hill, mos def, talib kweli, nas, EPMD, the roots, and rakim.

amazingly, of the fourteen performances scheduled this weekend for the main stage, only one featured a woman performer - erykah badu played one set on early sunday evening, as the sole woman included amongst the festival's main attractions.

From Mother Jones

batman needed a new Robin. His previous protégé had quit after his dad found out his teenage son was sneaking off to wear green tights. Then, in May 2004, a 16-year-old named Stephanie Brown stepped into comic-book history as Bruce Wayne's first female sidekick. When the caped crusader told her she got the job, she jumped in the air and shouted, "This is so totally cool!"

Stephanie's 71-day tenure as the Girl Wonder started off well. Drawn in a fun, Powerpuff Girls style, she trained hard, and even saved her mentor from a serial killer. But then, in a series of unfortunate events, Batman canned her, she accidentally set off a Gotham City gang war, and finally fell into the hands of a skull- faced villain called Black Mask, who tortured her to death with a power drill.

Her grisly demise hit fans hard, particularly the female readers who'd only just started enjoying the thrill of a Robin they could identify with. After the two previous boy Robins had retired and died, respectively, their uniforms were preserved behind glass inside the Batcave. But Baman never got around to memorializing Stephanie. More than two years later, a grassroots campaign based at the website Girl- Wonder.org is still aggressively lobbying DC Comics to give Stephanie her two-dimensional due. And the flames of discontent only grew higher when DC editor Dan DiDio told female fans at a recent comic convention that in his book, Stephanie "was never really a Robin."

From Clamor Magazine

Spoken-word artist Ursula Rucker, a premier social commentator of our time, has spent the last decade waxing philosophical about everything from slavery and politics to sexuality and womanhood. Writing since she was an adolescent, Rucker started recording her thoughts as a social documenter would and became one of the leading forces behind Philadelphia's "poetic revival." But Rucker's work stands out for its fluid integration of music - hip-hop, jazz, soul and world - mixed under her often understated, but commanding delivery. Ma'at Mama, Rucker's third album, was released this year and continues with her powerful blend of poetry, hip-hop, and social criticism, with creations that draw from her own experiences as a mother, daughter, and woman of her time. Rucker truly beckons the spirits of Zora Neale Hurston and Frida Kahlo - two of her influences - with the echoes of Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy to create a sound and vibrancy that is all her own.

Clamor had the opportunity to speak with the Ma'at Mama this past spring, in a spirited and inspiring conversation about creative energy, social justice, and the practice of elevating an art form.

From Ms. Magazine

Readers unfamiliar with the graphic sexuality that permeates commercial hip-hop should get ready for a shocking read. Through provocatively titled chapters such as "Sex, Power, and Punanny" and "Strip Tails: Booty Clappin', P-poppin', Shake Dancing," Sharpley- Whiting provides a sobering analysis of women's participation in the hypersexualized black-American, urban-youth culture known as hip-hop.

Commercial hip-hop, argues the author, relies on a "pimp-playa- bitch-ho" nexus that depicts young black men and women as selfish, sexualized, materialistic hustlers. These images encourage youth who listen to rap music, watch hip-hop music videos and chase the latest hip-hop fashions to think of themselves in these terms.

The most pernicious effect may be on black girls. In hip-hop's "masculine" version of black femininity, selling sex is central to a perverse sort of self- definition, and male-female relations pivot not on gender warfare but on sex as sport. Black women are expected to hustle men, give command performances as hos, "play" men for money, favors and pimp power, and live by the adage "it's my body and I'll do what I want with it." In the fantasy world of hip-hop's quasi- pornographic music videos, sex is simultaneously a way for black women to garner power and a way for men to devalue them.

From Washington Post

We don't need to talk about politics right now. We don't need to talk about Sri Lanka or Liberia or Edward Said or Gayatri Spivak or filmi or bhangra. We can strip ourselves from every moment of intertexuality, reference, and geography. In these next few breaths, you don't have to search anything related to Dravidian languages on Wikipedia.

For at least a few moments the only thing that matters is the sound of Kala, the second full-length from omni- pop warlord Mathangi Arulpragasam, better known as M.I.A. And what a sound it is: rivers of digital sandpaper, swarms of bleeps, frigid drum phalanxes, samples of birds, chirping choruses of children, rumbling crunk chants (in your choice of language), trimmed and sequenced and lifted into "songs."