Itshalit wit hatit: Dabke and Palestinian world-making under deracination

“We stomp our feet in the dabke to show the world that this is our land, that people and villages can be killed and erased, but our heritage is something they can’t reach because it is here [motioning to his heart]….When we stamp our feet we are saying that no matter how far we have been scattered, Palestine will always remain under our stamping feet.” [1]

The Palestinian folk-dance is stubbornly physical, communal, and cannot be unhinged from land and history. An iconic Palestinian symbol of joy, dabke embodies synchronicity such that even though it is performed to bring people closer to Palestine, it also brings them closer to each other. Dabeekah (dabke dancers) describe feeling inshirāḥ: a sense of somatic relief and exhilaration even amidst hamm, or hardship.

The interplay between body, place, and symbols in shatat dabke nurtures what Carol Fadda-Conrey calls a “translocal consciousness” [2]: a subjectivity anchored in Palestine but locally shaped by the lands where Palestinians live and the political demands of the present moment. With every stomp, dabeekah carry an embodied relationship to land that contours sociality and peoplehood.

Bringing together performance, movement, and public scholarship, this talk considers dabke as both cultural practice and embodied pedagogy. El-Sherif reflects on what it has meant to dance dabke before and after the genocide in Gaza post-October 2023. It asks: how does embodied cultural practice sustain collective life in the shatat when Palestine itself is under assault? Attending to dabeekah’s own theorizing reveals dabke as a form of Palestinian world-making on Palestinian terms, sustaining continuity under ongoing conditions of violence and deracination.

The 45-minute talk will be followed by a short performance by members of the Zaytouna Academy.

No experience necessary. Free and open to all.
Snacks and refreshments will be provided.

[1] ‘Abd al-Aziz Abu Hadba, quoted in David A. McDonald, My Voice is My Weapon: Music, Nationalism, and the Poetics of Palestinian Resistance (Duke University Press, 2013), 20.

[2] Carol Fadda-Conrey, Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

Lucy El-Sherif is an Assistant Professor in Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. Her work examines how cultural practices shape forms of social and political existence under conditions of displacement, racialization and constrained political life.

She asks what it means to dance a relationship to one stolen land, Palestine, while living on another stolen land, Haudenosaunee territory. Her book manuscript, Dabke on Turtle Island, examines how Arab racialization is lived and negotiated through embodied cultural practice, tracing how dance sustains peoplehood, belonging, and collective life across Palestinian and Arab communities in Canada.

Her work has appeared in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Curriculum Inquiry; Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association; Re-Orient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies; and public outlets including Yellowhead Institute and The Conversation Canada.

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The Blackwood Gallery is located in the Kaneff Centre on the ground floor. The building is on the south side of campus near Inner Circle Road, adjacent to the campus’ main public transit stop and Student Centre. It features open spaces, round sloped corners, and windows to facilitate visual communication and navigation. Accessible multiuser gendered washrooms are located on the ground and lower levels. The building is AODA-compliant, with wide doorways and powered doors.

This event will include some movement across the campus. Accessible elevators, powered doors, and curb cuts are in place throughout.

An event series on experimental education, movement, and creative pedagogy

Co-curated by Fraser McCallum and Jacqui Usiskin

Rooted in is an invitation to enact alternative modes of learning amid educational austerity that erodes access, experimentation, and critical inquiry. Running alongside the lightbox exhibition, a four-part program series heeds this call throughout the summer. Led by guest contributors whose research spans performance, anthropology, critical disability studies, and social justice education, this program animates reflexive, embodied, and community-sustaining pedagogies. Sessions will foreground culture-rooted practices and plural forms of knowledge-making, engaging choreography, accessibility, illustration, storytelling, dance, and photography as tools for shared learning and artmaking. As in Benohoud’s Classroom, learning will unfolding through collective inquiry, dialogue, and play.

Visit our website for full program descriptions and contributor biographies.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Blackwood Gallery, 3359 Mississauga Road, Mississauga, Canada

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