I love MIA and her music, and I love what she is trying to do. She is inserting her person and her craft into a space between the mainstream narrative of pop culture and the accepted norms of what south asian, womyn of color are “supposed” to prescribe to. However, because of the fact this is new territory she is embarking on, it is quite crucially imporant that she locate her politics and identify how she is informed- explicitly.
This is not to suggest that she hasnt tried, but i fear the way media translate her message to the masses…. a lot stands to get lost in translation. Media are created and informed by the dominant narrative- white, liberal, capitalist, patriachal ways of knowing. MIA does not fit into the mainstream narrative nor, indeed, does she fit with the accepted narrative of what constitutes the other. So what is happening instead is the following: the media are building this third way narrative about her using the language and tools of the other two storylines. The result: she is characterized as a mytical day-glo visionary underpinned by dangerous terrorist philosophies. The details of MIA as a brown female revolutionary speaking on behalf of an oppressed population on a tiny island in the Indian Ocean bores the socks off of the american apparel generation who understand skin color as trendy and war protest as a “cool” first and political second.
“Oh she’s a terrorist” or “oh her clothes are weird” are not unrelated characterizations which can be charted as better or worse on a hierachal scale. they are equally dangerous positions not just for her, but for all those who are othered, who falls through the cracks of nomative narrative. As a brown woman, for her blaze/claim a space to be who she wants to be, neither a pop tart, nor a bollywood princess, is a very difficult task indeed. she can nonetheless very easily be translated as the hysterical, weird, bizarre, perhaps even exotic but ultimately backward and uncivilized creature that the orientalist narrative dictates for brown, black, yellow, red, people.
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