“We Are People Who Create and Enjoy”: Dabkeh and the Joyful Decolonial Politics of 47Soul and Ayloul

Liza Munk, University of California Santa Barbara

Abstract for the 13th Symposium of the ICTM Mediterranean Music Studies Group:
Music, Power, and Space: A Mediterranean Perspective

One pattern in current scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa is the tendency to focus on crisis – crises of war, of refugees, of climate. While valuing the responsibility to bear witness to suffering, I argue that this pattern perpetuates settler colonial narratives of indigenous erasure. In other words, emphasizing societal deconstruction erases those who are alive and finding ways to thrive. Drawing on settler colonial studies and indigenous studies, I ask, what can we learn by listening to the musical worlds that indigenous communities are building around us, even as so much is falling apart? My dissertation research takes up this question by considering the flows of alternative Arabic music in and out of Amman, Jordan. While Jordan has been largely absent from English-language music scholarship, my work begins to fill this gap by following Amman’s alternative scene. Alternative Arabic music refers to genres like rock, rap, punk, and metal that started in the West and have been reimagined globally. For this paper, I examine songs by members of 47Soul, a band founded in Amman and brought together by a shared Palestinian heritage. Tracks like “Gamar” (Moon) from their album Balfron Promise (2018) and “Beirut to Cairo” (2014) by band member Z the People, featuring Hana Malhas, play with temporality and genre, holding together suffering and imagination. As we bear witness, I propose another responsibility: to listen to the soundings of Palestinian futures.