Search

During a short stay in Ghat in 1850, the British explorer James Richardson arranged for Muhammad Sharif to translate a list of words and phrases into the Tuareg variety spoken by the Uraghen tribe of the area, variably termed Tamahaq or Tamajeq by its speakers at the time. This article provides a transcription, retranscription, retranslation, and analysis of this previously unpublished material. The results provide data relevant to sociolinguistic variation in Ghat, proving the importance of variation even within a single idiolect, including for reflexes of the key Tuareg shibboleth *z > h vs. > z, ž. These phrases also reveal some morphological archaisms not otherwise attested in Tuareg, most notably traces of a person marking system matching the Ghadamsi “future”.

In this contribution, Chris Nickell and Adam Benkato think together about the mobilization of Blackness in Arabic hip hop from two different contexts: a rap battle in Beirut, Lebanon and music videos from Benghazi, Libya. In both, hip hop artists confront Blackness with the nation through the Afro-diasporic medium of hip hop. Although the examples we consider here participate, in several ways, in hip hop's larger generic functions as a globalized Black medium of resistance, they also bolster pre-existing discourses of race and racism, anti-Blackness in particular. We argue that this seeming contradiction--instances of anti-Blackness appearing in an iteration of a Black expressive form--is in fact a feature, not a bug, of the flexible way the genre works. We have paired these two examples, which we describe and analyze individually given their differing social contexts as well as our differing research focuses, in order to glimpse the discursive level at which racecraft functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]