Since the beginning of large-scale migration from Turkey to Germany in the 1960s, Anatolian dance traditions have played an important role in the self-representation, political advocacy, and communal identifications of immigrants from Turkey and their descendants in Germany. Through the 1980s, the performance of Anatolian dance in the German diaspora emphasized a desire to maintain continuity with regional traditions in Turkey. More recently, a new generation of dancers and choreographers in Germany have drawn inspiration from Anatolian dance while seeking to reimagine its possibilities and potential for artistic, cultural, and political expression. In this paper, I discuss the choreographic work of Kadir Memiş, also known as Amigo, a Berlin-based choreographer and dancer who has pioneered a unique style of dance known as zeybreak. Zeybreak is a dance style that draws inspiration and elements both from the zeybek dance tradition of western Anatolia and from breakdance, a synthesis that Memiş situates in his experiences as a second generation Turkish German growing up in Berlin in the 1980s. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin as well as the work of Anatolian dance scholars such as Metin And and Arzu Öztürkmen, I analyze Memiş’s creative reimagining of zeybek within the larger context of transformations in the practice and meaning of Anatolian dance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I also consider Memiş’s choreographic work as it relates to issues and conflicts in the representation of Turkish diasporic identity in contemporary Germany. Finally, I discuss the work of Memiş in introducing zeybreak to dancers and audiences in Turkey, considering the multiple paths of artistic exchange and circulation of ideas connecting Turkey with its diasporas. I argue in conclusion that Memiş’s work as a choreographer evokes the multiple senses of belonging characteristic of Turkish diasporic communities in Germany, and that his transformation of zeybek into zeybreak challenges understandings of Anatolia and its expressive culture as inextricably bound with the representation of regional identities.

In 2011, the lead singer of the rock band, Cairokee, navigated through Egypt’s Tahrir Square and sang one of the most iconic songs of the Uprising: “Sut al-Hurriyya” [“The Sound of Freedom”]. Amir Eid navigated the Square’s congested streets as demonstrators mouthed the lyrics of his hopeful song and held handwritten posters up high. It was a moment ripe with promise and dreams. Five years later, after what many have deemed a failed revolution, scholars points to the State’s authoritative crackdown on outspoken artists, bloggers, and activists, as well as the pervasive pressures for many to self-censor. As a guest on Abo Hafiza’s prominent Internet comedy, Amir Eid sang a new interpretation of his song. This time, he sat on a couch in his sweatpants while a camera paned anomalous images of empty Cairo streets. As he sighed and sank into his seat, demonstrators in his living room held up handwritten posters. With stoic and almost comedic seriousness, each protester sang into the camera: “The Revolution did not happen in my country.” In this paper, I investigate the hidden transcripts of Cairokee’s reconfigured songs. Initially an anthem for the Egyptian uprising, this new song is a stinging critique of Egypt’s centralized State media and its selective memory of the Uprising. Drawing on James Scott’s notion of hidden transcripts (1990) and the complicit role of media in Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Happen (1991), I investigate the Band’s political shift. And, following ethnographic research and interviews between January and July of 2011 and in the cyber realm thereafter, I ask: How does Cairokee continue to embed their political critiques in their self-censored rock songs? And, in their use of rouse, humor, even overt disenchantment, how do their songs operate as new forms of musical activism?

The Arab music scene in Buenos Aires is one that is experiencing a renewed vitality due to the popularity of relatively recent mediums such as telenovelas, dance trends and pop song hits that invoke, at best, orientalist notions of Middle Eastern culture and music. The gross misconceptions that these mediums engender have nonetheless provided for an increased interest in perceived Arab music practice. As this has led to an escalation in the performance activities of Syrian-Argentine musicians and dancers in Buenos Aires, it has also repositioned the parameters of the Arab music field, instigated new interactions between all of those involved in the Arab musicking process, and redistributed relations of power. In seeking to interpret negotiations of cultural, political, and economic capital amongst Syrian-Argentine musicians and dancers, the examination of diasporic subjectivities and discourses of homeland, migration, exclusion and displacement reveals the effects of such circumstances on concepts of tradition, performance practice, and one’s perceived “right” to perform Syrian music. By employing Mette Berg’s concept of “diasporic generations”, I classify performers’ self-positioning and classifications of others in order to evaluate the ways that Syrian-Argentine musicians negotiate space and capital within the Arab music field. While the subjectivities expressed by individuals reveal diverse perceptions of tradition between diasporic generations, ideas about the transgenerational nature of musical concepts provide unifying threads amidst a culturally, religiously, and generationally divided community.

The 1879 revolt of Ahmed ‘Urabi and the subsequent British occupation of Egypt are often considered to be the opening movements of Egyptian nationalism. Yet the entire decade of the 1870s was a vibrant period of intellectual exploration and debate in which basic questions of identity were being raised at every level of society. In order to better understand these pivotal years, I translated the play "Abu Raida al-Barbari," written by the nationalist author Yaʿqūb Ṣannūʿa during his brief career as a playwright sometime between 1870 and 1872. This was one of the first plays ever to be written in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, and Ṣannūʿa’s creative and idiosyncratic orthography allowed him to present his audience with a world in which Cairene Arabic was the norm and all other forms of speech marked one as an outsider. By focusing on the pidgin Arabic of the titular character Abu Raida (a Nubian servant in the household of a wealthy Egyptian widow), it can be seen how Ṣannūʿa used the comedic nature of “incorrect” speech to construct a vision of blackness which could serve as a foil for his larger nationalist project. By analyzing nonstandard variations in phonetics, syntax, lexicon, and pragmatics, I show the deep connections between race making and nationalizing in this crucial period.

The pervasiveness of poetry's involvement in the social, historical, and political aspects of the tribal lifestyle make it a rich area for investigation. The attachment of the tribal community to poetry is one of veneration and survival. For a tribal people who has long cherished an entirely oral tradition, poetry is everything. The tribal poetry has served a multitude of ends and has taken an infinite number of forms, stretching from the most serious genres, such as heroic epics, to the most entertaining ones, such as nursery rhymes. This paper examines the performative nature of tribal poetry, represented by the form of hedaya. My primary motive is to highlight the ways in which this poetic form in particular challenges the official historical narrative provided by the Saudi government. Limiting its investigation of the hedaya to the form’s relation to history and memory, the paper concerns itself with hedaya-as-performance. It argues that the hedaya, exemplifying Diana Taylor's notion of the repertoire, offers a special opportunity to understand how the invention of this tradition responds to different interpretations of history. Having been part of the hedaya tradition for a considerable part of my life, I will mainly draw from memory, as I have witnessed and participated in numerous hedaya performances. I will also explore the ways in which hedaya has become prone to documentation and change because of technology.