Indigenous dance,cultural continuity,and resistance: A netnographic analysis of the Palestinian Dabke in the diaspora

Abstract

Contending with the structural erasure and appropriation of their land, culture, history, and traditions imposed by the settler state, Palestinians have adopted/adapted traditional cultural elements to further their nationalist aspirations and assert their rights as Palestine’s Indigenous people. In the diaspora, Palestinians practice and perform the dabke folkdance, as a tool of anti-colonial memory maintenance and knowledge transfer. In this context, the dabke has been (re)shaped to keep up with the invasive nature of settler colonialism, by evolving to protect indigeneity, resist imagined settler geographies, and represent an embodied landmark of Palestinian existence and history. In this paper, we examine the digital platforms of a diasporic dabke dance academy in Ontario, Canada, highlighting the innovations of using social media to broadcast the teachings and performance of dabke while promoting Palestinian cultural continuity against settler colonialism. We employ the theoretical framework of sumud, a specifically Palestinian mode of steadfast anti-colonial being/becoming to explain that the performance of dance, and the subsequent broadcasting via digital social media platforms is an innovative approach to counter settler colonialism. Cultural and community leaders such as dancers, teachers, and choreographers celebrate Palestinian resilience, resistance, and restoration, while mobilizing global solidarities through social media and dance.

Keywords

cultural continuity dance netnography settler colonialism social media storytelling

Introduction

Palestinians resist settler colonialism through political and cultural efforts. Edward Said’s (1981) “The Question of Palestine” introduces the defining characteristic of Palestinian history as its traumatic national encounter with Zionism in the 20th century. The Nakba (catastrophe) refers to the abrupt genocidal violence Palestinians experienced in 1948, being exiled, dispossessed of land and property, and systematically culturally erased (Dallasheh, 2020; Pappe, 1997; Regan, 2017; Said, 1981; Tabar & Desai, 2017; Yaling, 2021). From 1948 onwards, people indigenous to Palestine have had to redefine their collective identity, existence as a people, and maintenance of culture in relation to a settler colonial agenda. In reaction to the structural erasure and appropriation of Palestinian culture, history, and tradition imposed by the settler state, Palestinians adopted and adapted various traditional cultural elements to further their nationalist aspirations and assert their right as Palestine’s indigenous people (Rowe, 2010; Rowe, 2011). Specifically, the folkdance, dabke, has been (re)shaped to keep up with the invasive nature of settler colonialism, evolving to protect indigeneity, resist imagined settler geographies, and represent an embodied marker of Palestinian existence and history.

In the diaspora, Palestinians rely on arts-based cultural practices such as dance, music, poetry, and artwork to enact cultural continuities, assert their contested identities through artistic media, chronicle collective trauma, histories, and imagined futures, and remain connected to their personhood (Desai, 2016; Gandolfo, 2010). The Dabke, a widely popular folkloric dance practice, is used to maintain connection to Palestinian heritage, as it embraces storytelling through movement to transmit Palestinian knowledges and traditions intergenerationally and transnationally. Dance, as a versatile and dynamic forum, conforms seamlessly to the world of social media mainly because it is a physical, artistic, and spiritual practice that anyone can partake in, watch, and appreciate irrespective of age or geographical location (Clarke, 2013). The synergies between dance and creative technologies offer performers opportunities to connect with broader audiences and tell stories with influence through complementary outlets. Social media platforms have expanded the nature of Indigenous empowerment, communities, and social movements (Carlson & Berglund, 2021), allowing marginalized individuals to document and broadcast their personhood, and garner global support and exposure for causes important to them. By highlighting the relationship between dance, diaspora, and social media, this paper spotlights both the performance and the digital broadcasting of dance to understand how successive generations of Palestinians in the diaspora utilize both processes to (re)construct and salvage collective national identities targeted by settler colonial agendas.

Settler colonialism in Palestine

In the past century, Palestine has been oppressed by a calculated settler colonial project that was fundamentally driven by ideologies of ethnocracy, religious supremacy, and the operative logic of “eliminating the native” (Dana & Jarbawi, 2018). The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was made possible by the depredation of Palestinian peoples, destruction of culture, and dispossession of land (Adra, 2011; Bakan and Abu-Laban, 2010; Pappe, 1997; Said, 1981). The contested land which Palestinians have called home for hundreds of years, was subject to European claim in the early 20th century by virtue of a divine decree. This ambitious religious ideology, which gave Europeans the authority to reconstitute the land, required the violent mass removal of Palestinians, and the disruption of Palestinian cultural processes (Leshem, 2013; Ottaway, 2015; Regan, 2017; Said, 1981; Veracini, 2006). This act of European colonial power is one example of several across every continent, where similar settler colonial processes of eradication and justification have been based on othering a non-Western entity.

Othering is often operationalized through the apparatus of terminology and assertions of dominance. The “Orient” was an all-encompassing term coined by Europeans in the 19th century “to describe everything to the east of an imaginary line drawn somewhere between Greece and Turkey” (Said 1981: 3). In the “Orient” any land not under European control was perceived as empty property, void of civilized societies. This colonial project was supported by the popularization of eliminatory principles such as terra nullius, used to justify the occupation of land that colonizers declared as desolate in the context of Turtle Island (North America) (Yiftachel, 2018). In the Orient, a widely cited phrase associated with the movement to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine is “A land without a people, for a people without a land.” While scholarly opinion on the meaning of the phrase is divided, many critical scholars, famously Said (1981) and Khalidi (1997), interpreted the phrase as an expression of the Zionist vision of empty land. Another interpretation by Masalha (1997) explains the phrase as an expression of the intention of ethnic cleansing. Said (1981: 9) writes that because “the land of Palestine was controlled in the Western mind, not by its present realities and inhabitants, but by its glorious past, and possibly glorious future” (through Western rule), Palestine was seen as a place to be possessed anew and re-constructed. The logic used to justify settler colonialism, as Bruyneel (2016) describes in a parallel example regarding race and colonialism on Turtle Island, requires a trifecta of land dispossession, genocide, and cultural appropriation. The deliberate stripping of the “Orient’s” humanity from the early 20th century onwards, made the colonization, dispossession, and redistribution of lands of the “East” easier to accomplish.

The historical and modern-day pillaging of Palestine, as a land, a people, and a culture, is required to make way for the ethnocratic settler state of Israel. While making this argument, however, we follow Israeli historian Pappe (1997) and are careful to not conflate anti-Semitism (prejudice against Jewish people) and anti-Zionism (resistance to colonial establishment of a sovereign Jewish state on Palestinian land). Our intent is to effectively critique and study Palestinian diaspora cultures, resistance, and resurgence. We avoid this strategic conflation of anti-Semitism with critique of Israel’s colonial foundations, to avoid censoring the Palestinian plight. Instead, we point out that this long-standing issue is not a civil conflict between Muslims and Jews; rather, it is the product of European colonialism, which has prompted the creation of new homelands for settlers through the removal of indigenous people from their lands. By highlighting the significant historical events that contributed to modern-day structural violence against Palestinians and the erasure of Palestine, we help to create space to understand how Palestinian sumud, or steadfast, embodied anti-colonialism, is performed through dance in the diaspora and shared globally over social media.

The Dabke

At the core of resistance in the diaspora is the dabke, a group-based folkloric dance ritual that is widely performed by Levantine Arabs. Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, and Iraqis all perform the dabke during joyous occasions such as holidays, weddings, graduation ceremonies, and festivals, as well as patriotic and political events such as national holidays and protests. Today, variations of the dabke are performed across the Levant, with every country incorporating its national and historical cultural elements (e.g., folk music, lyrics, clothing, stepping patterns) into their dabke. In the context of Palestine, the dabke has transformed to protect and bind a national identity in resistance to colonial attempts at genocide and fragmentation of communities and has become a ceremonial call for Indigenous liberation against settler colonialism (Adra, 2011). The dance is more than a movement practice, artistic expression, or exercise, it is inherently anti-colonial.

The general components of the Palestinian dabke often include: (1) dabke music, a unique style of Arabic music that relies mainly on rhythmic melodies of the mizmār (wind instrument) and the darbuka/derbake (also known as goblet drum); (2) politicized land-based lyrics (although dabke music can also include lyrics about romance, family, friendship, milestones, etc.); (3) dancers (known as dabeekah) performing stepping patterns (such as stomping, marching, and jumping) both as a synchronized group and individually while moving in a line or a circle; and (4) occasionally, cultural or spiritual artifacts worn or waved by the dancers such as the Palestinian flag, rosary beads, or most commonly, the kufiyah/keffiyeh, a black and white checkered scarf worn by Palestinians and allies to demonstrate settler resistance and solidarity with Palestine. The dabke is understood to have started as an ancient agricultural rural practice that served the purpose of preparing the soil for planting and for building homes. The stepping patterns of the dabke, according to Rowe (2011), can be traced back to patterns of communal stomping, which agitated large plains of soil for planting, and compacted mud roofs and walls of rural homes. Dabke’s origins are rooted in land-based cultural rituals that denote home(-making), which means it is a significant practice of the diasporic Palestinian cultural resurgence.

Methodology

In line with the research question of how Palestinians in the diaspora use and share dance as a decolonial practice, it became evident that social networking platforms play a crucial role. Kozinets (2002: 22) points out, because:

People are intimately involved not only in the social processes of media consumption, but also in its production and circulation . . . an understanding of social media communication should form a part of more general ethnographic look at how people use and make sense of media technologies.

Netnography is an ethnographic participant observation digital methodology that aims for “cultural understanding of social media through an integration of data analysis and hermeneutic interpretation operations” (Kozinets, 2002: 8). This study’s netnography is based on theories of diaspora, decolonial politics, and sumud, described in detail below. The employment of a netnography approach to study the utility and broadcasting of diaspora community dance on social media serves at least four main purposes. First, the exponential spread and global use of social media platforms has created user-generated content and virtual social spaces with specific constructs and norms that influence our social worlds (Munar, 2010; Thomas et al., 2020). Second, a netnography is an unobtrusive methodology because it involves the “non-influencing monitoring of the communication and interaction of community members to gain practical insights into their usage behaviour” (Pollok et al., 2014: 2) based on their publicly posted images, videos, words, and art. This is a respectful research tool for investigating sensitive topics or research involving marginalized communities that prioritizes the protection of identity and anonymity maintenance (Costello et al., 2017). Indeed, it is the anonymous nature of social networking experience that allows for enhanced sharing of ideas. Additionally, Kozinets (2015: 88) described netnography as holding a “voyeuristic quality,” because of its utility when studying stigmatic phenomena, which could otherwise be challenging to study face-to-face. This characteristic serves our purpose since it allows us as researchers to gain a better understanding of the socio-cultural significance of folkloric dabke dance relayed by Palestinian dance enthusiasts, away from censorship that might occur in real-time settings.

Third, like an ethnography where co-presence with the people observed is required (Haldrup & Larsen, 2010), a netnography applies co-presence to the virtual world. A netnography, as a constructive methodological approach, allows the researcher to act as an active participant in the community, studying the processes of user interactivity, the production of online biographies, the specific site settings and architecture, and the main characteristics of the available content (Costello et al., 2017; Kozinets, 2015, 2002). Fourth, unlike an ethnography which allows the researcher to only access the site and observe a phenomenon once, netnography can allow the researcher to return to the original form of communication studied, because it is recorded, stored, and displayed on virtual platforms (Costello et al., 2017). These advantages make netnography an ideal method for studying Palestinian culture, diaspora dance, and social media engagement.

We focused our netnographic analysis on one dabke dance academy operating in the Greater Toronto Area, Ontario, Canada. Specifically, studying the academy’s social media engagement on Instagram, a popular photo and video sharing social media website and application, supplemented by their 8-minute 2021 YouTube documentary. The academy is one of the leading dabke dance academies in Canada, offering dabke training classes for children, youth, and adults of all genders, coupled with community performances across seven major cities in Southern Ontario.

We analyzed the academy’s Instagram pages including 131 posts dedicated to the classes and upcoming performances hosted by the academy over a 3-month period (May–July 2022) during which the academy was preparing for a dance performance called Hekayatna (Our Story), hosted on the 24th of July 2022. During the 12-week period, 53 Instagram posts shared informational content about the significance and history of dabke and promotional content for the Hekayatna show. In addition to the posts, the academy’s social media also featured Instagram stories, ephemeral posts lasting only 24 hours. Within the 12-week period, 78 Instagram stories were posted, including promotions for the Hekayatna show, interactive historical trivia about Palestine, Palestine in current news, and clips from the academy’s documentary explaining the significance of teaching dabke in the diaspora. The YouTube documentary featured dancers and instructors from the academy talking about the significance of dabke dancing to their own personhood, their communities, the Palestinian diaspora, and the Palestinian liberation movement, grounded in sumud, the anti-colonial theoretical approach of the Indigenous people of Palestine.

Sumud – anticolonial theory, method, and praxis

The pro-Palestinian position is often criminalized in the global sphere, and anti-settler colonial resistance in Palestine is understood to be unlawful (Said, 1981), yet Palestinians have their own decolonial epistemology that is transmitted intergenerationally through embodied cultural practices that teach Palestinian history and identity (Desai, 2016). Sumud, meaning steadfastness or resolute anti-colonial perseverance, is a specifically Palestinian theorizing, articulation, and embodiment of anti-settler colonial resistance and decolonization. The theoretical framework of sumud signifies a revolutionary becoming. As Meari (2014: 555) details: “It is ‘revolutionary’ in the sense of refusing to recognize and surrender to the power structures of colonialism, and a ‘becoming’ in the sense that it is a processional formation that is never finished or fixed.” As a national Palestinian decolonial philosophy, sumud has come to define the Palestinian liberation movement through a wide range of significations, sensibilities, affections, attachments, aspirations, and practices enacted with a resolute, steadfast determination to stay connected to one’s land, literally and figuratively. Sumud is an existential and embodied practice of everyday resistance (Meari, 2014; Rijke and Teeffelen, 2014; Schwabe, 2019). The significance of sumud lies in its non-specific features. It is not a singular definable practice or performance, but a form of existence, and becoming that opens up a possibility for an alternative regime of being and an ethical-relational form of subjectivity. Everyday acts reinforce the idea that to exist is to resist; therefore, sumud is a way of life. Sumud, thus, embodies the possibility of escaping hegemonic configurations of colonial liberal politics (Meari, 2014), embodied in the mundane every day (Rijke & Teeffelen, 2014), including through arts-based practices including visual arts, poetry, sewing, literature, dance, and music (Desai, 2016). Sumud is passed from parents to children, teachers to students, and choreographers to dancers.

In addition to sumud being a tool to strengthen symbolic national unity and re-center Palestinian resilience strategies, it is also a conceptual window to communicate Palestinian humanity to non-Palestinians (Shehadeh, 1982; Rijke & Teeffelen, 2014). As such, sumud is a performed, articulated, and embodied settler colonial resistance strategy related to standing one’s ground and staying committed to Palestinian rights. Dance reinforces sumud since many arts-based global Indigenous practices of resistance are rooted in land-based, collective performances. For example, in the context of recreation on Turtle Island, Simpson wrote:

The physical act of gathering a group of people together within our territories reinforces the web of relationships that stitch our communities together. . . the “performance,” whether a song, a dance, or a spoken word story, becomes then an individual and collective experience, with the goal of lifting the burden of colonialism by visioning new realities. (Simpson, 2011: 34)

Every person and every space – even online – have the potential to become revolutionary. We employed sumud to theorize how the dabke performance, and the digital broadcasting of the (stories about) dabke dancing are examples of steadfast resistance which requires indigenous people to resist settler erasure through creative approaches.

Findings

The findings are categorized into three themes which explain: (1) the significance of dance as joyful resistance for Palestinians in the diaspora; (2) dabke as embodied healing through movement and music, and (3) the role of institutionalized dance in promoting Indigenous credibility. Throughout we demonstrate the utility of social media as a tool of cultural continuity through dance. Through these findings we demonstrate the various tools that diasporic Palestinians use to authenticate their presence and connect to the homeland. They institutionalize dance, engage social media, and dance as means of embodied storytelling, to build “glocal” (related to global and local) solidarities with successive generations of diasporic Palestinians and allies.

Dabke as Joy and Memory

For Palestinians living outside their homeland in the diaspora context, teaching and performing the dabke is a reminder of community, struggle, and history. Through practices of cultural resistance such as dabke music, movements, and costuming, all tied to the idea of sumud, diasporic Palestinians remain engaged with the Palestinian struggle via access to the Palestinian imagined community. This is important because while sumud is considered a specifically Palestinian theorizing and practice of resistance that results from a long struggle for land and existence, the physical presence of Palestinians on Palestinian soil is not the totality of Palestinian resistance (Schwabe, 2019). The transmission of memory, both in Palestine and in the Palestinian diaspora, is significant as an anti-colonial strategy. Those who are not proximal to land can be immersed in oral history and cultural memory practices passed down through generations to shape the exiled Palestinian’s political consciousness, sense of self, cultural production, and resistance (Ladkani, 2001; Schulz, 2003). As such, the practice of cultural resistance that requires Palestinians to remain steadfast and embody sumud is a means to play their roles in preserving and advocating for Palestinian identity, culture, and liberation. Therefore, specifically in the diaspora context, teaching and performing the Palestinian dabke acts as a reminder of community, struggle, and history.

Dabke teachers and performers in the diaspora are tasked with the upkeep of traditions and memories of a free Palestine, while also serving as amplifiers of the voices of Palestinians fighting on their land. This testament is echoed by the academy teachers, choreographers, and dancers interviewed in the documentary, who shared that the role of dabke is to engage successive Palestinian generations in the journey of return, using creative storytelling methods (Ladkani, 2001). The pedagogy includes passing down knowledge of the dabke dance to younger generations, which emphasizes the politics of memory, and what Sturken (2008) refers to as memory practices – activities that engage with, (re)produce, and invest meaning into memories. The digital assets shared by the academy reveal that for members, dabke serves as a nationalized emblem of identity, cultural self-determination, and a reminder of an undisputed sacred attachment to the land of Palestine. The storytelling through movement, music, costuming, and choreography inextricably links the dance to history.

One adult dancer stated:

We are missing home; we all wish we could be there. But through this gathering [the dabke performance] we embody sumud, we show our belonging, by telling people about our folklore through dance. We tell them our stories and how much they mean to us. Even as dancers, we get to learn so much history about the significance of many folkloric stories, by just dancing. You remember your heritage and culture. (Zaytouna Academy of Cultural Arts, 2021: 2:10)

This dancer focused on two important elements, the learning imparted on audiences through the performance, and the learning every student embraced “by just dancing.” This is an example of the steadfast resoluteness of sumud that becomes embodied with dance training. An adolescent dancer shared:

My parents enrolled me in the academy to help introduce Palestinian culture to us. From a young age, they worked hard to instill Palestinian heritage in me, whether it’s music, shows, language, poetry, stories about our land. You know, kids are like sponges, if you teach them the details of their heritage, they will remember it and share it with others, to keep it alive. (Zaytouna Academy of Cultural Arts, 2021: 5:08)

Teaching dabke, dancing dabke, sharing the performances with community members, and invoking community joy and cultural celebration through dance, involves and represents a multi-faceted embodiment of sumud. This form of non-violent and joyful resistance threatens the settler structure’s strategies and politics of devastation, erasure, appropriation, and theft of joy – all which are required for successful physical and psychological colonialism.

Resistance practices centered around openly celebrating dignity, identity, and life have been described as essential methods of dealing with structures of dominance (Allen, 2008; Scott, 1985; Rijke and Teeffelen, 2014). Continuity and perseverance require “not letting the occupation kill joy of life and appreciating beauty [as they] are tools in resisting Israeli oppression” (Rijke and Teeffelen, 2014: 92). Dancing brings joy to the dancers, and the community audience members watching the performances, which is important because joy is key in reclaiming Palestinian personhood and agency, preventing the settler state in successfully subordinating Palestinians. One choreographer in the documentary commented: “The Palestinian dabke represents a story of a people with a long history of suffering and perseverance. Through performing the dabke, our young generation embodies sumud” (Zaytouna Academy of Cultural Arts, 2021: 2:50). This quote is in line with the work of Rijke and Teeffelen (2014) which explains the role of everyday diasporic sumud, stating that “to keep a Palestinian identity within the diaspora, is expressive of sumud” (p. 91) because it is “a way of moving forward to a future in which Palestinians live in freedom, justice, mutual care, and joy” (Rijke and Teeffelen, 2014: 94). Dance in the diaspora mobilizes collective memories across newer generations and emphasizes the role of overcoming hardship as part of sumud.

In addition to the embodied storytelling described above, the academy engages in another form of storytelling critical for the dance academy is digital (through the internet). Through digital storytelling, the dance academy can garner social support for its cultural cause, which is in line with Castells’s (2015) claims that posit social media as a new platform for social movements. Unlike traditional forms of protest, which require groups to meet on a regular basis to agree on goals and renew shared identities, Castells (2015) argues that online platforms’ exposure and algorithmic speed, can “switch on” connections between previously unrelated groups. This results in leaderless, rhizomatic and non-hierarchical, open-ended organizations that increase the possibility of mobilizing support and cultivating reforms. Social media platforms create “spaces of flows,” which can be understood as autonomous informational spaces that generate “alternative logics to challenge the programming of longstanding network logics” (Hill et al., 2018: 690). For marginalized and overlooked communities, social media can amplify their collective voices through non-dominant communication networks. The communication that occurs through digital platforms “transcends traditional time–space boundaries, where spontaneous connections occur between people who share ideas rather than geographical space” (Hill et al., 2018: 690). The dance academy thus uses the digital space – YouTube, Instagram – to generate and distribute local content, and relay messages of diasporic hope and healing that bypasses bureaucratic and traditional censored channels. The dance academy’s digital dissemination of Palestinian heritage allows Palestinians in the diaspora to access Palestine and connects them to an imagined Palestinian community in the digital realm. This is especially important because access to culture, language, and one’s homeland is a privilege, when colonial restrictions limit the colonized’s capacity to engage in their own spaces and practices. Thus, teaching and broadcasting the dabke in the digital space, is what Kamil (2020) refers to as a postspatial reimagination of a decolonial futurity, which enables colonized groups to bypass colonial structures of (in)access, to revel in the joys of engaging in their seized cultural production.

Dabke as embodied healing through movement and music

Dabke offers an embodied storytelling tool for both Palestinians and allies who can witness the movements, see the costuming, read the descriptions, and listen to the lyrics to understand the essentiality of the relationship between Palestinians and their land. Dancing is an imperative component in healing the colonized body. As a form of storytelling, it helps individuals move through painful memories and current experiences with colonialism, embrace collective trauma, and cultivate communal connections, as McGuire-Adams (2021, p. 40) describes “remembering and connecting with our Indigenous stories is a recognized way to address and heal from embodied settler colonialism.” Similarly, Minor (2013: 322) points to the role of storytelling in disrupting settler colonialism and Indigenous restoration, defining storytelling as a “medicinal practice tied to the strength of the earth and helps Indigenous peoples combat the omnipotent horrors of colonialism, and therefore serves as an anti-colonial and liberatory device.” It is important to highlight that dancing is not just a joyful storytelling practice; it is a resistance practice that many scholars have recognized can play a role in physical healing (Goodill, 2005) psychological recovery (Bernstein, 2019), and intergenerational trauma recovery (Stanek, 2015). Dancing is body-based self-discovery and transformative creative expression that can be used as a practice of decolonial healing.

Dabke music often relays messages of return specifically for Palestinians in the diaspora, urging them to not forget what their land offered, and reminding them how the land yearns for them. An example of such, is the famous Palestinian dabke song¹ titled “Ya Zareef Al-tool,” which is written as a monologue, offering an embodied perspective directly from the land “me” to the Palestinians in exile “them” about yearning, connection, and frailty. In the 2021 documentary, short clips from previous community performances show a female choreographer standing on stage in between performances, engaging with the audience and explaining the history and meaning behind the dabke song “Ya Zareef Al-tool,” shortly after, the dancers perform dabke to that song. In doing so, the dance academy utilizes the various phases of the performance to demonstrate to a wider audience the salient connection between song, dance, bodily storytelling, and verbal storytelling. The song (1) communicates its sadness and yearning for “them”; (2) urges them to not forget “me” when away; (3) advises that “I” am what is best for “them”; and (4) informs “them” of its illness and frailty because the settlers cannot care for “me.” The lyrics of this song, following similar lyrical patterns of dabke diaspora music, emphasize the sacred relationship between the land, and those not physically on the land. The performance of the dabke in the diaspora when viewed through the lens of sumud, suggests that while the physical separation of Palestinians from the land is a traumatic reality for many, the embrace of the Palestinian identity is not tied to physical land access. Instead, Palestinians in the diaspora maintain their connections to their land and heritage through a steadfast commitment to learning, performing, and sharing dabke which can heal trauma. The choreography and embodied dancing movements along with the music and costuming shown through Instagram posts and a documentary transform collective trauma into a celebration of an ongoing relationship to land.

Additionally, teaching dabke to newer generations in the diaspora emphasizes another characteristic of sumud – investment in the future. Palestinians are tasking newer generations of Palestinians in upholding and remembering cultural practices (dancing, folklore, embroidery), as part of their commitment to healing and maintaining hope for future prosperity, despite settler devastation. Dance can reinforce sumud as many arts-based global indigenous practices of resistance are rooted in land-based, collective, healing performances:

The physical act of gathering a group of people together within our territories reinforces the web of relationships that stitch our communities together. . .The “performance,” whether a song, a dance, or a spoken word story, becomes then an individual and collective experience, with the goal of lifting the burden of colonialism by visioning new realities. (Simpson, 2011: 34)

Sumud is not only about being in a place, but also a journey and process (Toine van Teeffelen, 2011) that affects Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike. Through the dabke, Palestinians in the diaspora embody sumud through advocacy and engaging non-Palestinians in understanding the history of Palestine, as one dancer in the documentary said, it is “a story to tell everyone. It is not just for Palestinians to remember their story; it is for them to tell everyone” (Zaytouna Academy of Cultural Arts, 2021: 6:11).

Relying on the effective facets of social media, the dance academy uses Instagram to drive traffic, and engage Palestinians in the Greater Toronto Area, thus building excitement and an audience for live shows. For example, leading up to the July 24th performance, the academy hosted Instagram trivia, live information sessions, and giveaways to encourage people to attend the show and support the academy. They also showed behind-the-scenes footage, performance date countdowns and costume photos. They built anticipation through interview clips with the performers, choreographers, and audience members, and they spotlighted community partners. Thus, the academy’s Instagram platform served as a digital extension of the Palestinian diaspora, becoming a place where Palestinians gathered to momentarily indulge in cultural production (through a story click, a live session, a post read, or simply just looking at the academy’s visuals).

Consequently, the academy’s social media reinforces Rowe’s (2011) and Desai’s (2016) findings that the dabke invokes sumud for the dispersed Palestinian people by promoting the Free Palestinian Movement, and creating a national, unifying narrative. This study shows that the online sharing of these messages, locally and globally, allows for literal and symbolic connections to the land, development of a political consciousness, and community building across the diaspora.

Dancing credibility and cultural continuity

The Zionist settler colonial structure succeeds through the repression, destruction, and/or appropriation of Palestinian land, material culture, memory, heritage, and cultural production. The aim is to wipe evidence of indigeneity prior to colonialization, by erasing Palestinian existence and narrations of history from collective memory (Desai, 2016; Tabar and Desai, 2017). Settler sovereignty relies on manufacturing falsified memories among settlers, while erasing memories of previous societies, to sustain itself:

In this settler narrative there is little room for an indigenous presence. . . [Palestinians] were treated as part of the natural environment, relegated to passive objects to be freely acted upon. Importantly, this discursive and physical erasure of Arab presence was not only a consequence of particular historical contingencies, but the very condition for the creation of a stable Zionist historical identity and a coherent sense of collective purpose. (Leshem, 2013: 525)

Edward Said (2003: 187) reminds readers of the importance of “telling the [Palestinian] story in as many ways as possible, as insistently as possible, and in as compelling a way as possible, to keep attention to it, because there is always a fear that it might just disappear.” Since memory is a central object of settler destruction, preservation of memory through cultural artifacts and practices becomes an essential site of resistance. The sites in which these cultural lamentations are performed act as reflexive instruments to communicate collective traumas, community resilience, and authentic culture (Rowe, 2010; Rowe, 2011). The Palestinian decolonial project is grounded in the protection of jeopardized histories and identities through retelling of Palestinian narratives, through oral transmission and archival documents, and through embodied enactments that work to disprove dominant falsified settler histories – in Palestine and in the Palestinian diaspora.

Considering the invasive nature of settler erasure, the collective social memory of a group may not be sufficient to withstand intergenerational transmission. As such, oppressed groups can resort to institutionalizing their cultural productions to authenticate their presence. Zucker (1977) explained that social knowledge once institutionalized, exists as facts, thereby ensuring cultural persistence. According to Zucker (1977) the greater the degree of institutionalization, the greater the generational uniformity, maintenance, and resistance to change of cultural understandings. The same rationale applies to the institutionalization of folkloric practices of groups subject to settler eradication.

The dance academy’s Instagram page features an “about us” story highlight, which explains the reasoning behind the creation and registration of such a business in the diaspora. It states that the dance academy was “motivated by a passion for cultural expression, and heritage preservation” so that Palestinian-Canadians can enact cultural continuities in their new environment(s), in their respective disciplines. In a clip from the academy’s documentary, a program director elaborated:

The goal of our performances and the academy’s mission is to authenticate our presence, so that when the audience member watches a performance, they come to understand that this culture was not created overnight [with a snap of a finger], The intricacy of every step, every story, every lyric proves these people have existed for hundreds of years. (Zaytouna Academy of Cultural Arts, 2021: 4:23)

Through institutionalizing dabke, this dance academy is securing its cultural legitimacy by authenticating claims to a dance and, concomitantly, a culture, a land, and a political cause.

Dominant histories are partial, written by the victors (Sa’di, 2005), and used to erase indigeneity. Therefore, critical attention to the operation of coloniality in knowledge production is necessary. Many anticolonial scholars such as Tuck and Yang (2012), Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2009), and Anzaldua (1987) argue that colonialism is upheld through the knowledges constructed about Indigenous peoples, and their representations through a Western gaze which authorize representations of the Other. The academy aims, in contrast, to self-author Palestinian representations through dance. In the documentary, a choreographer of the academy said:

With every dance segment we have choreographed and prepared, we curated a way to tell the Palestinian story through the body. This way, both the dancers and the audience receive and remember the message we are sending through dance. Every movement tells a decade of stories, we are particular in how we develop our routines, so that we can tell the long history of a people through a 1-hour performance. (Zaytouna Academy of Cultural Arts, 2021: 6:41)

Choreographers are not accidental storytellers. They transmit history and culture through their decisions about the emplacement and selection of dancers, set designs, and music. Folk dance movements, through routine and repetition, turn into “bodily automatisms,” according to Kaschl (2003), which endure time and generational rethinking, and settle into the “social memory” of community through shared unreflective and spontaneous execution. A dancer’s testimony about the collective “knowing the dance” clarifies that as Connerton (1989) noted, bodily practices such as folk dancing make up a powerful means of collective identification. The simple and repetitive nature of folkdance steps and movement patterns can be easily learned, incorporated through repetition and performed in a routinized, automated manner (Kaschl, 2003). As such, Connerton (1989: 102) writes that every group “will entrust to bodily automatisms the values and categories which they are most anxious to conserve. They will know how well the past can be kept in mind by a habitual memory sedimented in the body.” Folkdances, such as dabke, are both stagnant and evolving; conserved through the bodily automatisms of the group, folkdances are wealthy resources of building ethnic credibility and collective cultural identification, while also evolving to maintain innovative resistive technologies against settler colonial erasure. A dancer in the documentary said:

When I dance, it does not feel like it is just dance, it is something more, I feel it. I get to represent my people and country, I get to show everyone that I am standing tall, I am dancing to songs written many years ago. We are here, we have always been here, that is why we know these dances. (Zaytouna Academy of Cultural Arts, 2021: 2:10)

Beyond the symbolic resistance that dabke represents, the dynamic physical movements of the dancing colonized body, which is understood to be restricted by the occupiers, offers a resistive fluidity to the embodied control and restrictions imposed by occupiers, which contributes to the overall decolonial space.

The performance of the dabke acts not only as a method of resurgence through communicating, retelling, and preserving Palestinian history, but also as a method of restoration through healing, nourishing, and re-animating hope for, and bodies of, indigenous peoples. Engaging in bodily movement and physical activity through dance allows the dancers to reclaim control over their own physicality, in addition to, reclaiming their connections to their cultural productions. This process, as McGuire-Adams (2021) explains, can disrupt embodied settler colonialism, because bodily movement and physical strength reject the expected eventual succumbence of the colonized body. As such, moving your body through physical activity or dancing, does not only challenge colonial expectations surrounding the health and prosperity of colonized communities, but it also allows the colonized to reclaim control over their physicality and maintain ancestral connections, “for our ancestors, physical strength was an everyday part of life; they had to be physically strong to live on the land. We were taken off the land as a result of settler-colonial processes and, for the most part, now live sedentary lifestyles that do not require land-based living, which has contributed a great deal to the demise of our physicality. Thus, a key part of our decolonization process is to foster our physical strength” (McGuire-Adams, 2021: 48).

Memory and healing are intrinsically tied in the context of indigenous subjecthood, as the remembrance of heritage, culture, and history, including the Nakba past, maintains ancestral links and heals the fragmented and vilified Palestinian identity through purposeful revival and performance that acts as a mediator of hope and liberation. The dabke reinforces in an embodied manner the hope for a free Palestine, which serves to soothe the trauma of those directly exiled, and younger generations who know their homeland primarily through stories and performances.

Conclusion

The creation of folkloric dance academies serves a distinct purpose in the diaspora. Dance academies become a communal resource for a group bonded by ethnicity, history, or an appreciation of tradition. The dabke also reinforces, in an embodied manner, the hope for a free Palestine, which serves to soothe the trauma of those directly exiled, and younger generations in the diaspora who know their ancestral homeland primarily through stories, performances, and social media. The music and movements are deployed in celebration of sumud, cultural maintenance under direct settler oppression. They are tied to life, joy, remembrance, and celebrating the cultural identity which the settler state desperately attempts to eradicate. It is a performance of resistive existence, which redeems national dignity and, in turn, becomes a symbol of national continuity (Desai, 2016; Rowe, 2011). Memory and intergenerational cultural transmission are theorized as epistemological sites that shape Palestinian subjecthood and resistance (Desai, 2016) both for those in physical proximity to Palestine and, those in spiritual proximity while in exile and in the diaspora. This study extends Desai’s (2016) work on music and dance within diaspora politics by drawing attention to the use of social media and dance in sumud. To know themselves, their national identity, and their unique relationship to land, away from their homeland and amidst Zionist erasure, those in exile and in the diaspora, requires the ongoing transmission of cultural productions such as the dabke. Thus, dance and ceremony, and their sharing through social media act as a balm for healing the community.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Zeana Hamdonah

Janelle Joseph

Notes

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