Oral Traditions of Naqab Bedouin Women: Challenging Settler-Colonial Representations Through Embodied Performance

Abstract

The Naqab Bedouin have faced—historically and today—various Israeli settler-colonial practices and discourses aimed at erasing their status as natives of the land. Israeli representations of the Naqab Bedouin often stereotype them as roaming nomads without any links (and consequently rights) to the land or to other Palestinian communities. Naqab Bedouin women's oral and embodied traditions constitute an important challenge to such settler-colonial representations. Women's songs, oral poetry and performances contain important historical counter-narratives, and they also function as embodied systems of learning, teaching, storing, and, to a certain extent, transmitting this community's indigenous memories, knowledges and ways of being.