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Dancing Dabke on Turtle Island: Unpacking the Entanglements of Racialization and Colonization
Abstract
This paper examines how racialization colonizes and colonization racializes in the contemporary settler colonial context of Turtle Island/North America for youth cultivating a relationship to Palestine. Through a critical performance ethnography of a youth dabke group in Canada, my research asks: what does it mean to dance a relationship to one stolen land on another stolen land? In this paper, I unpack how the entwined processes of racialization and colonization shape Muslim diasporic and transnational sensibilities regarding identity, embodiment, and place. In unpacking processes of racialization, I also unpack the social construction of settlerhood such that Muslim youth subjectivity is shaped by political processes of Othering that offer the youth citizenship as neoliberal, multicultural settler subjects. I argue that those racialized as Muslim are in a double bind, accepted in the settler state and nation insofar as they play the part of the neoliberal multicultural settler subject while simultaneously recognizing that Canada is a settler project similar to Israel. In this empirical study, I engaged in a critical performance ethnography where youth learn the folk dance as a means of linking to Palestinian identity. For 24 months, I explored what stories the youth had of their relationship to Canada (Turtle Island), what stories they had of their relationship to Palestine, and what stories they had of their relationship to doing dabke. I examined how those shifted and expressed themselves during my study in a variety of settings. Those settings included studio practices and rehearsals, performances, festivals, and social settings. I find that the youth take up dabke not just as a dance but as a form of self-making that situates how their bodies are positioned in and respond to the world. For the youth involved in the group, dabke functions as a stomping proclamation of Palestine, transgressing boundaries of political belonging and exile in ways that link to and supersede speech or other political action. At the same time, dabke functions as a way to gain acceptance for their Palestinian identity as part of a multicultural settler state whose legitimacy is being challenged by its own Indigenous people. In tracking how dabke is taken up as a cultural practice by Muslim youth, my study traces how Muslim youth seeking out a relationship with Palestine are negotiating with a specific technique of political Otherness, the neoliberal multicultural settler subject, enacted through cultural processes that both reproduce and reconfigure symbolic elements.
Discipline
Education
Geographic Area
North America
Sub Area
Cultural Studies