Introduction: The Citational Hook

In the first two chapters of this book, the performance of listening in literary texts demonstrates how sound and silences can be embedded in a literary narrative. In the second half of this book, listening becomes part of a broader performance, whether on stage, on screen, or in music. Cultural interpretation—formulated in this chapter through the concept of the ‘citational hook,’ and in Chapter 5 as ‘covering’—demonstrates a kind of meta-listening. To interpret, one needs to know the song, the ritual, the language—just a few examples of things that we interpret in culture—intimately.

Accordingly, the interpretation of a song by a new performer offers the possibility of a change in the meaning of the narrative constituted in the song's lyrics. This chapter explores two such performances, examples of a cultural mode of listening I call the ‘citational hook.’ First, I consider a performance of the song ‘Eye of the Tiger’ (1982) composed and originally performed by Survivor, which Marjane, the main character from Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical animated film Persepolis (2007), sings as part of a musical montage that portrays her re-entry into life in Iran following her teenage years in exile in Vienna. The second performance is of the Supertramp hit ‘The Logical Song’ (1979), which is sung by Nihad, the villain in Wajdi Mouawad's 2003 play Incendies [Scorched]. As Nihad, a Lebanese sniper in his late teens, listens to the Supertramp recording on his Walkman, he sings along to ‘The Logical Song,’ using his automatic rifle as an air guitar. The performances in Persepolis and Incendies rely on media and cultural representations of Middle Eastern femininity and femininity that define and are defined by respective Western and masculine identity (in form) and Middle Eastern and feminine and masculine identities (in content).

In analyzing these scenes from Persepolis and Incendies I consider how media representations of Middle Eastern femininity and masculinity are questioned and complicated in the performance of the citational hook.