Beating the Daf and Darbuka: Testing the Boundaries of Ethnicity, Evoking a National Imaginary, and Dancing a Contemporary Iraqi Identity

Abstract

In the heat of a spontaneous dance party at an international summer camp, an ethnically and religiously diverse group of young Iraqis stretched their national imaginary through an exuberant, embodied engagement. In a moment when the strict universality discourses of their camp programs did not seem to apply, the adolescents—Sunni and Shia, Kurdish and Arab—explored the potential synapses and interrelationships of their ethnic identities on their own terms.