Rave-Nationalism
Club Culture is Not Innocent
A few months ago I was met with a young potentially queer-coded pair - complete with pink hair and piercings - boasting about the vitality of Israel’s nightlife. It was a ‘Visit Israel’ tourist industry advertisement that popped up at the start of a Youtube video. During one of the most violent, horrific genocides of our time, committed against Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli state, this use of nightlife as a ‘selling point’ stood out.
Art and music are not just innocent players in the realm of global politics and war. They have always been forms of soft power in the construction of nation-states. In colonial mentality, images and cultures of beauty through art construct supremacy and superiority for some while dehumanising others. While established art forms are often analysed through the lens of nationalism, we don’t immediately think of our club cultures in these proccesses. Despite its veneer of freedom and progressiveness, nightlife can be as bloody as the rest of them. In fact, there are many instances in which queer celebration, partying, clubbing, ideology, and the state collide, and not just oppositionally. Here, they shake hands as allies.
Brands, companies and political parties tagging themselves on to queer joy, communities, and practices is known as pinkwashing. Pinkwashing is when LGBTQIA+ movements are appropriated to promote corporate or political agendas. In other words, companies or state bodies market themselves as “queer-friendly” to gain favour with progressives all while masking violent and oppressive projects. Nightlife is deeply tied to urban queer culture, activism and community-making; the modern gay liberation movement is often said to have originated with riots at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar. Given how wrapped up clubbing is with queer communities, club culture then becomes a tool in the pinkwashing box.
Israel's strategic promotion of its vibrant nightlife culture is a component of its pinkwashing strategy to establish itself as the queer centre of the region. Throughout history, colonialism has created a social order that places certain groups of people above others by emphasising specific aspects of society as "civilised." This has been used to justify the violence that supports this hierarchy. The progressiveness associated with nightlife and queer identities constructs an image of Western liberalism as an ideal to aspire to. Queerness and nationalism, tied together as friendly bedfellows is called homonationalism. Coined by Puar in Terrorist Assemblages, this is the strategic inclusion of some queer subjects in a way that rests on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. It is a form of nationalist superiority and sexual exceptionalism that creates an image of the right kind of gay citizen. The wrong gay of course, located the bodies of the oppressed and colonised.
Here is a section from a statement from “A Liberatory Demand from Queers in Palestine” that captures the tactical use of queerness in Israel’s pinkwashing and homonationalist strategies:
“In line with its long-standing exploitation of liberal identity politics, Israel has been weaponizing queer bodies to counter any support for Palestine and any critique of its settler-colonial project. Israelis (politicians, organizations, and “civilians”) have been mobilizing colonial dichotomies such as “civilized” and “barbaric”, “human” and “animal” and other dehumanizing binaries as discourse that legitimized attacks on Palestinians. Within this settler-colonial rhetoric, Israel seeks to garner and mobilize support from Western governments and liberal societies by portraying itself as a nation that respects freedom, diversity and human rights, that is fighting a “monstrous” and oppressive society [...] Israeli society continues to weaponize queerness for the purposes of justifying war and colonial repression, as if their bombs, apartheid walls, guns, knives, and bulldozers are selective of who they harm based on sexuality and gender”
Club, rave and dance music culture is also a part of IDF military culture. Israeli military youth have a specific relationship with psy-trance raves, often celebrating the end of mandatory military conscription through partying in Israel, Goa and beyond. Videos of Israeli rave-blockades, stopping vital aid from entering Gaza by dancing to psy-trance have surfaced on social media. The recuperation of rave as a tool of such violence requires us to question any symbolic representations of rave as inherently progressive. As Melpignano states, “the relationship between the IDF and dance is a long and institutionalised one”. In her analysis of social media videos of IDF soldiers dancing, Melpignano makes the point that dance advances state polity by reinforcing the army’s necropower, or the political dictation of death: the right to kill, or to let die. By dancing on social media in full military gear, the IDF reaffirms its military power - dancing, cruelly, mockingly, through death and destruction of Palestine and its people. Dance here is a form of soft power for the exercise of military control.
Much like when BAE Systems, a major British supplier of weapons and arms sponsored Pride in London, these are examples of how queer joy and party culture is weaponised. Israel’s club culture has been called ‘glitter-washing’ - using the glint of a disco ball to shield our eyes away from utter violence and oppression. Failure to acknowledge the ease with which dance music cultures are recuperated in violent regimes makes its participants more vulnerable to supporting its cooptation. There is a symbiotic relationship between club cultures and ideologies. Looking closely at the former tells us about the latter.
Soft Power and British Values
Sporting and cultural events are used as forms of soft power. For instance, when a country hosts the Olympics, they often put on elaborate performances that showcase their nation's history and culture, essentially using it as a tool to attract and influence people. In the case of the UK's 2012 Olympics, British pop music played a significant role in the opening ceremony. The British music industry and associated cultural institutions, narratives, and myths, are a part of the country's soft power assets.
“Soft power is concerned with the attractiveness of a nation – the business of inspiring others to want what you have – though often focused on intangible and elusive notions such as “culture, political values and foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate and possessed of moral authority)” (Huang & Ding, 2006:23 quoting Nye).”
Although the Olympic Games showcased pop and rock music, British rave and its stories of exceptionalism have contributed to the country's soft power. UK rave culture that emerged in the 80s and 90s are so often celebrated as an important part of British youth culture history. However, the tales that are celebrated repeatedly in books, media, literature, and exhibitions often portray a selective narrative. These accounts are romanticised and so annoyingly repetitive - you only need to scratch the surface to see how the overrepresentation of rave in institutions overshadows the true diversity of club cultures. Instead of being a form of countercultural resistance, the large-scale parties that developed from smaller early raves can be seen as promoting the entrepreneurial spirit encouraged by Thatcherism.
Nightlife's appearance of freedom and progressiveness has made it particularly susceptible to being co-opted in nationalist narratives about British cultural history. While white British rave culture is continuously recalled and remembered as pivotal, Caspar Melville in his book, ‘It’s a London Thing’ calls this "historical racialised amnesia" that overlooks the Black and Brown cultures for whom dance and music always formed a relationship between individual and community. If we look at raving as a cultural output of neoliberalism, it is easy to see how its celebration in national institutions promotes individualism under the guise of creative freedom and resistance.
Two winners of the Turner prize, one of the highest accolades in British art, and representatives of the UK at the Venice Biennale, Jeremy Deller and Mark Leckey, independently created artworks about rave culture. Both artists share an overt focus on British history, nostalgia and community-making in their respective practice. Leckey’s piece Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore of found VHS footage of UK clubs cultures from the 1970s-90s is a celebration of British dance culture and is considered Leckey’s breakthrough piece. 15 minutes long, the video shows masses of people dancing, from Northern soul through to 90s acid house. The ghost-like quality of the VHS camera appeals to viewers’ sense of nostalgia. Compiling dance scenes across different eras unifies British dance history into an interconnected and linear sequence. Additionally, Leckey claimed that the impulse to create Fiorucci was his nostalgia for the UK, therefore tying rave culture directly to his sense of national identity. In one scene in Fiorucci, a man exclaims to a crowd of dancing people “we do not need anybody, we are IN-DE-PENDENT!”
Art institutions possess a kind of soft power that influences the cultural values, beliefs, and inclinations of communities by exhibiting certain works of art and curated narratives informed by the political and ideological leanings of the state. Neoliberal capitalism dominates British life and enacts necropolitics by letting people die as a result of the erosion of fundamental public services like healthcare and housing. The public, on top of this, is encouraged to be self-sufficient and rely on the market to meet their needs - the sharp edges of this softened through romantic stories of self-suffiency and independence in cultural narratives like rave. IN-DE-PENDENT indeed. Rave in national institutions is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
In an analysis of UK rave, Van Veen cites Zizek in saying that obedience demands the fantasy of liberty. The mythologies of rave celebrated and the weaponisation of queerness and dance in the IDF’s military colonial projects show how nightlife is so easily recuperated in nationalist strategies.
Israel is a bloody and violent outcome of British Imperialism. Through the Balfour Declaration, Britain promised Palestinian land to the Zionist Federation and subsequently facilitated the migration of Zionists to Palestine. Palestinian scholar, Edward Said said that The Balfour Declaration was “made by a European power [...] about a non-European territory [..] in a flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority resident in that territory”.
In addition to the brute force of military power, both Britain and Israel tactically use the soft power of culture, media and nightlife to present themselves as progressive, forward-thinking states on a global stage. Nationalism is deeply concerned with myth-making in the image of colonisation and civilisation. Rave, nightlife, queer identities and their myth-making qualities are easily recuperated to reify nation-states. However, club activists and organisers are finally reckoning with the hollow appropriation of revolutionary language that launders the nightlife industry’s complicity.
The materialist turn in club activism
As ravers, cultural workers, and club workers, we have a responsibility to interrogate the purpose, form, and function of our work within a global context, as well as any complicity we have in soft power strategies. In the past, club activism has focused primarily on visibility politics, but the limitations of such campaigns have become increasingly apparent. In light the escalation of Palestinian oppression, club organisers are using thier resource and activism to push for action in the industry.
A recent boycott campaign led by Strike Germany has had a huge impact. Strike Germany is “a call for international cultural workers to strike from German cultural institutions. It is a call to refuse German cultural institutions' use of McCarthyist policies that suppress freedom of expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine.” As a result of Strike Germany, the Berlin Senate reversed its decision to introduce a clause requiring cultural funding applicants to accept an IHRA definition of antisemitism, which forbid criticism of Israel. This decision was made after a number of international DJs publically withdrew from CTM Festival, following the Strike Germany Campaign.
In recognising the precarious labour conditions of many club workers, groups like Ravers for Palestine have launched a strike fund to recoup fees lost by artists who want to withdraw from boycotted institutions. In a recent article on this mobilisation for Dazed, Ravers for Palestine explains the importance of the strike fund: “Our strike fund is there to ensure that precarious DJs and musicians are able to withdraw their labour in solidarity with Palestine [...] By fostering mutual aid, we also want to show that there are alternatives to the prevailing economy of clout and influence, which often works to discipline and depoliticise artists.”
Club activism is changing. Organisers like Ravers for Palestine are focusing on material strategies, rather than just the symbolic representations that nightlife has for so long been clouded by. Reckoning with the recuperation of clubbing, queer culture and nightlife in violent regimes is vital in understanding the best use of club resource. We are rightly witnessing a reevaluation of the nature and purpose of liberatory work in cultural industries, and nightlife is not immune to these changes. A shift away from the symbolic representation of clubbing - i.e. what it means, and towards the material impact of our work i.e. what it does is a necessary move forward. Club cultures are not innocent.
“The more platform at volume we are given the more we owe our voices to the silenced and the oppressed. We write on behalf of those who cannot speak and those punished for their speech. Writing is a social exercise and demands the highest of ethics. At least, at the very least, it demands that our art is not produced, distributed, consumed or celebrated at the expense of human life.
Really, this is the bare minimum”
- Noor Naga, from a speech for No Arms in the Arts, March 26th
~ from the river to the sea ~