It is our great pleasure to share with you the schedule of the Second Symposium on Middle Eastern, North African and Central Asian Dances, Music and Performing Arts (MENACA 2024), to be held in-person on the campus of Pomona College in Claremont, California, from 3-6 October 2024: https://www.menaca2024.com/schedule/ At this link you will find full details of scheduling, speakers, and abstracts, as well as how to register to participate online. There is no registration fee to attend. The symposium is hosted by the Dance Department of Pomona College.
Our program this year offers scholarly papers, two keynote speakers, movement workshops, a film screening, and a dance concert providing a rich scholarly context in which dialogue and debate are encouraged.
This year we have the great honour to present two distinguished keynote speakers, Amir Hosein Pourjavady, master musician and ethnomusicologist specialised in Persian music, and dancer and researcher Suhaila Salimpour, a pioneer in Middle Eastern dance. We have also organized a roundtable on publishing and research in which scholars, editors and librarians will discuss the paths and pitfalls of publishing on the topic of MENACA performing arts, providing a useful perspective on this academic activity for prospective students and scholars.
The scholarly papers will be presented in four interdisciplinary panels offering participants an opportunity to connect with scholars who focus on current and past contexts of the dance, music and performing arts of the MENACA area.
• In the panel Dabke: Practice as Resistance dance scholars and researchers will introduce how this dance articulates a form of political resistance and how it has become a reference in the construction of identity for Palestinian diasporas in Latin America and other areas of the world.
• The panel Current Trends in Middle Eastern Dance and Music provides a common scope on bellydance and Middle Eastern music focusing on the following themes: the analysis of the production of diasporic urban landscapes in Toronto (Canada); the development of a research group of Brazilian MENACA dance historians that deploy social media to address historical constructs toward orientalism among other historically biased labels; the staging of melancholia in Egyptian Golden Era dance sequences, and the deployment of musical references in Najib Mahfuz’s novel “Cairo Trilogy”.
• The panel Envisioning Decolonialism presents four papers providing four different perspectives on decolonising practices. A first paper observes the strategies of a new generation of Tuareg performers that challenges the role of exile in decolonial imagination through historical poems and songs. A second presentation will tackle how the feminisation of Amazigh (Berber) pop songs favours the revitalisation of endangered Amazigh languages in Morocco. A third paper will debate the role of Stambalism (dance and music rite) in the re-signification of post-2011 Tunisian identity, and a fourth presentation will focus on the process of mental mapping and categories of construction within the Ukranian bellydance community facing both Russian invasion and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
• The rich dance and performing arts heritage of the vast region of Turkey and the Persianate world is represented in the fourth panel of the symposium. In this panel the first paper will analyse the symbolic role of dance in the processes of modernisation and nation building in Turkey at the turn of the 20th. century; a second presentation will focus on the development of staged Uzbek dance during the interwar period of the 20th century; the third paper discusses the role of female acrobats and equestrians from a visual-textual perspective in the pre-modern Persianate world (Safavid, Mughal, and Qajar contexts); the fourth paper focuses on the historical roots of Uzbek dances chronicling the emergence of dance schools and the inclusion of these as part of the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity program; the multicultural background of Khuzestan (Iran) dances, their movement patterns and their connection with festive occasions such as weddings, constitutes the theme of the last presentation of this panel.
There will be a dance concert after the theoretical and practical sessions on Saturday evening. Two dance workshops have been organized for Sunday morning to complement the scholarly papers presented above, seeking to expand the knowledge of the dances of this area. We shall also be screening the film “The Fez Documentary,” about the golden years of the Middle Eastern community in Los Angeles, which will be introduced by our guest of honour Roxanne Shalaby.
I would be grateful for your assistance to help spread the word about the symposium among colleagues, scholars, performers, etc.
Looking forward to welcoming you at Pomona, whether in-person or virtually. Please do not hesitate to be in touch with the organizing committee via [email protected]; we remain at your disposal for any inquiry you might have regarding the symposium.
Kind regards,
Robin Dougherty (Yale University Library)
Member, MENACA 2024 Organizing Committee
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Contact: [email protected]