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Evanston Public Library and Northwestern University’s Middle East and North African Studies (MENA) department present the latest in our continuing series of lectures on the region.
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, Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria, 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.
Copies of Professor Silverstein's book will be available for purchase at this event.
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The City of Evanston is committed to promoting a Citywide culture of accessibility and inclusivity. To request an accommodation for a program, service, or activity, please call 847-866-2919 to make an ADA service request or fill out a request form online.