Celebrating the culture of SWANA – South West Asia and North Africa – in New York. From the NY Magazine:
The community has always been here. New York’s diasporas hailing from Middle Eastern and North African countries are fixtures in a city where practically every street corner has a bodega, halal cart, or Crown Fried Chicken. They haven’t always, however, been able to show pride in where they came from without fear of reprisal. These days, it feels very different to be Arab, or Iranian, or Muslim in this city than it did 25 years ago post-9/11. Over the past decade, and particularly after the war on Gaza, a new generation of artists, chefs, comedians, designers, and others has built unprecedented cultural and political capital. Together, they’re what you might call a scene. Where our diasporas once seemed siloed, the new SWANA scene is increasingly united across identities — Iraqi, Yemeni, Egyptian, Sudanese, Mauritanian, Afghan — and bound together by shared values. It was born out of the pain of the genocide in Gaza, which has led many young people to search for community in the city and build it where it didn’t exist. They found it at protests and in bars and cafés, at comedy shows and clothing pop-ups and fundraisers that turned into all-day hangs. And they found it in the election of the city’s first Muslim mayor and in the Syrian American First Lady.
Anyone missing? Oh yes – the Jews, busy with the “genocide” in Gaza. Not part of SWANA.
…and indeed about the MIddle East itself – can be turned into a screed of hate bigotry ignorance and – tellingly – power superiority over other cultures. It is interesting too how what presents as the activism of cultural kindness is actually rather poisonous. This magazine is already notorious for this and one wonders if that is what attracted its new owner James Murdoch to this once fun groundbreaking mag @NYMag or whether he will urgently wish to change its darkening tone….
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