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Women Changing the Nature of War Photography
The Sound of Resistance
We often engage with musical practices as strategies of resistance that may be cathartic, communicative, and subversive. Laments negotiate loss through the expression of sentiment, protest songs criticize political affairs through social commentary and satirical humor, and the act of performance affirms the right to construct a cultural space in opposition to conditions of cultural hegemony and political and military oppression. Particularly efficacious in its potential for social transformation, musical activity can demonstrate a commitment to a particular cause or mediate experience through representations of personal and cultural identity. Music is not only a means of expression that sublimates the experience of daily life, but a critical form of dialogue by which citizens participate in public life.
Scores of twentieth-century dissidents have turned to song and symphony as vehicles to mobilize against censorship, fascism, and racism. Decades after state censorship of his Lady Macbeth opera, Dmitri Shostakovich risked arrest with his audacious setting of Yevtushenko's poem "Babi Yar" in his Symphony No. 13, which commemorated the Nazi massacre of 200,000 Jews near Kiev during WWII. "Look Out, Verwoerd" by South African singer/activist Vuyisile Mini, offered an ominous, albeit melodic warning to the first engineer of Apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, while inspiring countless South Africans to organize for their rights as citizens in 1950's South Africa. 
Bob Marley, in addition to being one of the world's all-time greatest songwriters, was also a vocal advocate of peace and black power in the political tumult of 1970's Jamaica.
In an increasingly globalized world, artists borrow and exchange musical styles and genres as they express affinity between conditions of marginalization and oppression. Basque nationalists Negu Gorriak syncretize punk, ska, reggae, and rai styles into their militant protest music, and moreover, they attribute their breakdancing, graffiti writing, and rapping to the influence of Public Enemy. Reggaeton's dem-
bow rhythm is a mash-up of Brooklyn hiphop and Jamaican dancehall that blasted out of San Juan's housing projects in the 1990s and today galvanizes U.S. activists for immigrant rights in the States. While some may lament the commodification of these styles into idiomatic cliches, the distribution of LPs, cassettes, CDs, satellite and online media helps facilitate solidarity between fans and producers on a global scale.
Antiwar solidarity may take the form of protest songs like Bob Dylan's "Masters of War," Chava Alberstein's "Chad Gadya," and the Dixie Chick's album "The Long Way Around," or as reception among audiences, such as the current popularity of Megadeath's "Holy War" among college-age youth in Cairo. Antiwar resistance may also be the bold expression of alternate and creative ways of life under conditions of military aggression.
Make Music Not War aims to give exposure to music that is created and performed by those immediately affected by political and military oppression who are committed to using their music as a force for justice.
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