Music, Dance, and Literature
Introduction Video
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Description
How do music, dance, performance, and literature carry a people’s identity across borders, generations, and decades of displacement? This collection brings together a wide range of sources that explore how Palestinian express identity, cultural memory, and resistance through music, dance, performance, and literature.
It spans from ethnomusicological, anthropological, and literary analysis stemming from cultural performance and diaspora studies that highlight how creative practices become sites of cultural continuity and political struggle across geographies and generations. The sources includedoffer a multidimensional view of Palestinian culture, one that collectively shows how artistic expression functions as a living archive of Palestinian experience.
The bulk of this collection’s sources are journal articles studying identity formation across different media forms and in different historical moments. For example, Zeana Hamdonah & Janelle Joseph’s ethnographic study of dabke in the Canadian diaspora shows how dance becomes a digitally amplified practice of Indigenous continuity that enable Palestinians to circulate cultural knowledge and enact sumud across distance. Similarly, “Palestinian Music and the Potential for the Nation Branding of Palestine” by Zaid Bouziane, Souad Rahhar, and Abeer Al Najjar examines how musicians contribute to shaving a national brand and identity. Through a mix of qualitative analysis of media representations and cultural production in different contexts, the authors argue that Palestinian creative practices place an essential role in articulating national identity, which is then mediated through sound, movement, and digital circulation.
Although most sources represented in the collection are textual (book chapters and journal articles), the collection also includes magazine interviews, musical recordings, a thesis dissertation, and a compilation of folktales. This allows readers to encounter Palestinian cultural production through multiple sensory, methodological, and disciplinary lenses. These alternative formats bring out the theme of embodied expression as political resistance. The compilation of musical recordings Palestine Lives!: Songs from the Struggle of the People of Palestine documents the cultural, historical, and political significance of Palestinian revolutionary songs produced during the mid-20th-century struggle against British colonial rule, Zionist militias, and later Israeli state violence. Furthermore, in TITLE, Polly Wither she investigates how music and rave culture in Palestine subvert dominant frameworks and structures and create alternative spaces of freedom. Through the combination of songs, historical narrative, and cultural commentary, these texts, along with audio recordings, situate music and performance as a central medium of Palestinian resistance.
Many of the sources also explore how cultural memory is preserved, transformed, and transmitted across diasporic spaces. For example, Louis Brehony’s study of Reem Kelani shows how childhood habits like “za’tar, zeit, Fairuz” become anchors of identity in Kuwait. On the other hand, Ana‑Laura Rodriguez‑Quiñones highlights contemporary dance in the West Bank situates artistic practice within transnational networks, showing how dancers negotiate belonging across borders. Furthermore, interviews such as Nader Jalal’s emphasize the preservation of pre‑1948 musical heritage, and digital humanities projects like Refqa Abu‑Remaileh’s map fragmented literary histories. These capture how everyday rituals, artistic expression, and archival work sustain connections to Palestinian culture even as displacement reshapes their form.