Description:

Lunch will be served at this event.

Dabke, one of Syria’s most beloved dance music traditions, is at the center of the country’s war and the social tensions that preceded conflict. Drawing on almost two decades of ethnographic, archival, and digital research, Shayna Silverstein shows how dabke dance music embodies the fraught dynamics of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationhood in an authoritarian state. Her book situates dabke politically, economically, and historically in a broader account of expressive culture in Syria’s recent (and ongoing) turmoil. 

Shayna Silverstein is an assistant professor in the Department of Performance Studies and faculty member of the Middle Eastern and North African Studies program at Northwestern University. Her teaching and scholarship broadly examines the politics and aesthetics of sound, movement, and performance in contemporary SWANA/Middle Eastern cultural production.