The Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South (#IAS_NUQ) hosted two virtual book talks as part of its spring 2024 program, featuring Shayna M. Silverstein, assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and North African Studies program at Northwestern University, and Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik, assistant professor of History at Cornell University.
Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria - Shayna M. Silverstein
During the first #IAS_NUQ Virtual Book Talk of spring 2024, Silverstein shared insights from her debut book, Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria (Wesleyan University Press, 2024).
Drawing on nearly two decades of immersive, multisituated, and digital ethnography, as well as textual and archival analysis, Silverstein's book positions issues of body, performance, and culture at the heart of Syria's political contestations and social tensions. Central to her analysis is the exploration of Dabke, a popular dance music tradition, and its affective sonic and kinesthetic dynamics within a heterogeneous society governed by sectarianism and authoritarianism.
Silverstein highlighted how Dabke practice, while sustaining social life and solidifying group bonds, also reproduces societal divisions inherent to Syrian authoritarianism through the embodied politics of performance. She traced the history of Dabke from its roots as a social dance to its transformation into a national folkloric dance that projected specific visions of cultural citizenship within the Syrian nation-state and the Assadist regime.
Drawing from fieldwork conducted in pre-war Syria, Silverstein described performance as a "listening body" and examined how musicians craft a digital sonic aesthetic attuned to listeners' desires for loud and distorted forms of live sound. By analyzing the role of Dabke during this tumultuous period in Syria, she illuminated the affective capacity of performance to both forge and fragment social bonds.
Maghreb Noir: The Militant-Artists of North Africa and the Struggle for a Pan-African, Postcolonial Future - Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik
During the second #IAS_NUQ Virtual Book Talk of spring 2024, Tolan-Szkilnik presented her debut book, Maghreb Noir: The Militant Artists of North Africa and the Struggle for a Pan-African, Postcolonial Future (Stanford University Press, 2023).
In her discussion, Tolan-Szkilnik delved into the lesser-explored narrative of Pan-Africanism in the postcolonial Maghreb, specifically focusing on Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, which she refers to as the "smaller Maghreb." In contrast to conventional accounts of Pan-Africanism centered around Black anglophone men in cities like New York, London, and Paris, Tolan-Szkilnik situates her research within the postcolonial era in North Africa, emphasizing the political rather than racial dimensions of Blackness in the region.
For Tolan-Szkilnik, Blackness in the Maghreb was not merely a racial identity but a political concept, which underwent redefinition and transformation into a multilingual and multiracial cultural project in the latter half of the 20th century. Maghreb Noir broadens the scope of Black internationalism by introducing new hubs of Black thought, including Black Tunis, Black Rabat, and Black Algiers, which she terms the "Maghreb Noir."
To recover the predominantly overlooked histories of the militant-artists of the "Maghreb Noir," whom Tolan-Szkilnik labeled as the "Magreb Generation," she adopted an innovative approach, moving away from traditional top-down political history and, instead, curating her own archive. This entailed sourcing primary materials from 25 archives across 6 countries and conducting 33 oral history interviews with members of the Maghreb generation and their descendants, spanning multiple languages, including Arabic, French, English, and Portuguese.
Overall, Tolan-Szkilnik posits the Pan-African Festival of Algiers in 1969 as a pivotal event for comprehending the cultural and political dynamics of the Maghreb Noir. Through meticulous research and interdisciplinary analysis, her work illuminates a previously marginalized facet of postcolonial history, providing fresh insights into the intricate intersections of race, gender, and identity in the Maghreb region.
