Thursday October 16, 2025 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Join the87press for a very special Hummingbirds event featuring Alia Al Ghussain and Rayya El Zein to celebrate the launch of Filling the Head: Listening to Rap in Arabic (Indiana University Press, 2025).
Based on ethnographic research in Ramallah (Palestine), Amman (Jordan), and Beirut (Lebanon), Filling the Head reveals how youths in these cities have maneuvered the challenges of making music while also navigating shifting geopolitical landscapes. Through these everyday experiences of being moved by music or ideas, Rayya El Zein explores how ordinary patterns of motion and emotion provide a space for political engagement when spectacular political movements like protests, strikes, or revolutions feel far away, forced, or otherwise impossible. In contrast to existing narratives that equate rap with popular political resistance against oppressive regimes, she argues instead for affective engagement through istifzaz―provocation or surprise―as well as yearning. Within this avant-garde genre, there is no design to reach the masses with a political message; in fact, as El Zein demonstrates, the refusal of artists to confine their lyrical or musical experimentation to an ethos of resistance creates an aesthetic whose lack of singular politics defines it.
Hummingbirds is a literary salon curated by the87press aiming to hold space for authors and interlocutors to have conversations about recently published work. This iteration charts a new thread in that conversation which aims to bring academic publishing to a community audience.
Host: Azad Ashim Sharma, Founding Director of the87press.
Interlocutor: Alia Al Ghussain
Author: Rayya El Zein
TICKETS CAN BE BOOKED HERE: