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Tightrope Dabke: Embodiment and Settler Citizenship on Turtle Island
Abstract
Scholarship on settler colonialism in Palestine and on Turtle Island highlights parallels between entwined processes of racialization and colonization (Abdulhadi & Olwan, 2015; Barakat, 2018; Mikdashi, 2017; Qutami, 2014; Salaita, 2016; Tabar & Desai, 2017). Such work provides key analytic and conceptual insights, however, it has yet to attend to how such processes are embodied, enacted and performed. My paper addresses questions of embodiment, subjectivity and citizenship for Palestinian, Arab and Muslim youth practicing and performing dabke (Palestinian folk-dancing) in the context of Canada’s 150th confederation anniversary yearlong celebrations. Through a 24-month critical performance ethnography I ask: what does it mean to dance a relationship to one stolen land on another stolen land? I examine the youth’s narratives of belonging to Canada and their relationships to Palestine, learning and performing dabke in Canada. I use critical spatial analysis and theories of cultural production to examine how their somatic experiences interact with cultural representation and self-representation. I argue that the youth’s engagement with dabke is a joyful expression of Palestine that proudly connects them to their land in embodied ways, as an imagined and idealized alternative site of Arab and Muslim subject formation. Nevertheless, the youth performing dabke are situated in settler discourses that shape their spatial imaginaries and practices to embody colonial power. In the end, I conclude that Arab and Muslim racial inequality is shaped by settler colonial relations to space and place. By closely examining embodiment and subject formation in youth on Turtle Island, this paper reorients debates of what it means to belong to settler states as racialized people. It examines how racism unevenly fashions both the structural subject positions available to settlers, and the pedagogical processes of social citizenship that shape their subjectivities. By centering somatic and spatial experiences in my analysis, I unpack how processes of power move through racialized socio-spatial and embodied flows to normalize settler colonial logics for youth subjectivity. Rather than an examination of overt state violence, my focus on disguised forms of state violence orients the field towards violence’s banality in shaping youth subjectivities. Furthermore, as an iconic example of joy, collectivity and relationship to occupied Palestine, dabke can help us understand the relationship between racialized belonging and settler citizenship for other transnational groups in North America living in the heart of states that colonize their homelands.
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