Israeli Mediterranean Music: Straddling Disputed Territories Author(s): Amy Horowitz Source: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 112, No. 445, Theorizing the Hybrid (Summer, 1999), pp. 450-463 Published by: American Folklore Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/541372 Accessed: 10/05/2010 01:12 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=illinois and http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=folk. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Illinois Press and American Folklore Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of American Folklore. http://www.jstor.org AMY HOROWITZ Israeli Mediterranean Music StraddlingDisputed Territories IsraeliMediterranean music is a contemporaryhybrid music genre createdby Mizra- him-African and Asian IsraeliJews with rootsin Islamiccountries. Israeli Mediterra- nean musicintegrates the disparatemusical styles thatflourished in the new state. The musicmade its retaildebut in cassetteform amidstvegetables and householdappliances in Tel Aviv's outdoormarketplaces. Initially rejected by the EurocentricIsraeli music industrybecause its Arabicsound violated prevailing national and artisticcategories, the musicinfiltrated the Israelimainstream in the 1990s and helpedto resetthe boundaries of nationalidentity. Using Israeli Mediterranean music and musiciansas itsfocal point, this articleexamines hybridity as a deliberateartistic process through which Mizrahi musicianscreate musical products as well as institutionsthat can challengetheir margi- nalizationby the mainstreammusic industry and the widerIsraeli society. THIS ARTICLEEXPLORES HYBRIDITY as the process by which musicians combine preexisting, and often seemingly disparate,genres in their creativepractice. For musi- cians, this hybrid composition involving their choice of musicalforms and poetic lyrics is a conscious, strategicact. Hybridity is thoroughly intentional-an aspect of artistic interactionsin a multiculturaland multivocal social field. Hybrid musiciansin Israel, the focus of this study, also have made tactical use of technological innovation, particularlythe cassette recorder. Used in conjunction with the multiple cultural resources on which they draw, the cassetterecorder has empowered hybrid artistsin profound ways. That emergent genres are composites of preexistingforms has long been understood by students of folklore. However, previous ways of describing this phenomenon- diffusionand creolization,for example-were item oriented. These approachessought to atomize, codify, or classifysongs, stories, food, and craftsas a means of unearthing their disparatehistorical origins. While such analysisidentifies constituent parts and perhapsartistic wholes of culturalproducts, it failsto illuminatethe human agency that supportsthe creative act of transformingconstituent parts into a coherent and aesthetic whole. Moreover, tracing the geographicaljourneys of cultural products through Amy Horowitz is Directorof theJerusalem Project of the SmithsonianInstitution's Center for Folklifeand CulturalHeritage Journalof AmericanFolklore 112(445):450-463. Copyright ? 1999, American Folklore Society. Horowitz, IsraeliMediterranean Music 451 history too often teaches little about the social and political forces that shaped the consciousnesscreating and appreciatingthem. As an analytic perspective, hybridityshifts the focus from artisticpieces and mixed wholes to the performing artist'sagency; it explores her or his aesthetic, social, and political intentions in selecting and conjoining particularcompositional elements. This approachgrounds the inquiry in the interplayof human actions and aestheticsin local communities ratherthan in ideal abstractionssuch as regionaltypes and communicative codes. Attending to agency, one sees that artistsworking in multicultural,multivocal settingsstruggle to create their own lives, culture, and history. Hybridity theory presumes from the beginning that cultural forms are complex, unlikely, and of diverse origins;it asks not so much where the forms (or their parts) came from but why performerschose to create these particulargenres. Hybridity also presumes that cultures are in contact, most likely on unequal terms, that some tradi- tions are dominant and others are marginalized, and that musical institutions are controlled by a dominant culture. The work of students of hybridity is to describe these historicalconditions and show how artistsdevelop forms that thrive in them and bring economic and cultural rewards.Just as American Indians developed hybrid variationsof corn to meet differentconditions, creative artistsfashion vital new forms that flourishin local environmentsand help their communities thrive. In the context of AfricanAmerican creativepractice, Bernice Johnson Reagon uses the notion of "straddling"to describehybridity. She says, For those of us who straddle,there is a thirdplace we go and in that place, the rules and the structuresof both cultures are suspended. We negotiate a new system, which itself is usually a moving and shifting system. It is a hybrid system. So we don't move totally from one place to the other place, but we constructa new network of rules,regulations, and standards that are a shiftingblend. We walk inside of that network for the rest of our lives, if we stay sane. [1991:115] For Reagon, straddlingproduces something more than new forms;it createsalternative institutionalpractices that will support culturaldiversity and foster an environment of creative collaboration.Reagon's contention seems to be that negotiating new systems and constructingnew rules to walk inside is a prerequisitefor sanityin heterogeneous, sometimes disputedterritory. Straddlingconjures an image of simultaneouslybalancing on two gallopinghorses, a stance Reagon envisions as central to surviving the disjuncturesbetween African and American cultures and the asymmetriesexperienced by African Americans in the United States. The third, constantly changing place, won only by risking the race, describesa dynamic equilibrium, feet positioned adeptly on a pair of horses running againstthe wind. As will be seen below, the same image describescertain Israeli artists. I apply Reagon's notion of straddlingto African Israeliand Asian Israelimusicians whose struggleagainst cultural hegemony in Israelexpressed itself in the formulationof IsraeliMediterranean music, a hybrid music genre that made its commercial cassette debut in the 1970s on cassettessold among the vegetable and household appliancestalls in Tel Aviv's central bus station marketplace.Labeled culturally inferior and "too Arabic,"the music was rejected by many Ashkenazi (EuropeanJewish) radio editors, 452 Journalof AmericanFolklore 112 (1999) record companies, and listeners.Yet North African and Middle EasternJewish musi- cians continued to produce the cassettes,which sold by the hundredsof thousandsin their neighborhoods in the 1980s and, by the 1990s, infiltratednational airwavesand mainstreamcultural institutions. This articlefocuses on hybridityas a processby which African and Asian Israelimusicians and producers created not only the music but the conditions in which their emerging hybrid music could flourish. Africanand Asian Israelis-Jews from Islamiccountries-are often referredto by the panethnic marker Mizrahim,or "Easterners."In the late 1960s, Mizrahi musicians began creating a hybrid music genre, IsraeliMediterranean music. Rooted in both Arab and Jewish cultures,Israeli Mediterranean music challengedthe dominant Euro- Israelimusic styles that were the designatedheirs to Shirey Erez Israel("Songs of the Land of Israel"),the carefullycomposed, official soundtrackof the Jewish ingathering. Israeli Mediterranean musicians straddled the disputed cultural territories in Israeli society by juxtaposing the repertoire of state-sanctioned Shirey Erez Israel and its successorswith vibrantand somewhat contentious Middle Easternstyles. They recon- figured dominant Euro-Israelimusics with marginalizedArabic aesthetics,straddling the disputedterritory of Israeland, to a degree, redrawingits culturaland historicalmap. When understood as a form of musical straddling, Israeli Mediterraneanmusic subverted the carefully defined Euro-Israelisoundtrack. The music's Arabic voicing suggestedthat at least some Israeliswere indigenous to the Middle East.As the Middle East peace process reconfiguresIsrael's geopolitical relations, the music's capacity to perform across still-volatileregional and