Academic Censorship on Palestine Even Extends to Discussing Palestinian Dance
Joshua M. Hall | 14 June 2025 | Mondoweiss
In the spring of 2024, half a year after Israel’s escalation of its genocide of the Palestinian people, I received an invitation from an old colleague to submit an article for a special issue of The Journal of Somaesthetics. The issue’s theme, according to the call for papers, was “Eros and Thanatos,” including “how the art form serves as a vehicle for expressing the themes of mortality, loss, and transformation.” This immediately reminded me of Palestine, specifically a viral TikTok of Palestinian and Native American dancers in solidarity against settler colonization. So I composed a summary for an article inspired by this video and emailed it to the journal, which accepted it in writing on March 1, 2024.
The resulting essay, entitled “Death-Defying Indigenous Dance: “Palest-Indian” Solidary Love,” exploring that TikTok’s historical context, first considers dance scholar Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s The People Have Never Stopped Dancing, emphasizing how U.S. and Canadian laws both criminalized Native dance while also appropriating these dances and dancers for non-Indigenous audiences. Second, my essay pivots to Australian choreographer Nicholas Rowe’s Raising Dust: A Cultural History of Dance in Palestine, emphasizing the appropriation of a traditional shepherd dance (Dabke) into the Zionist project of fabricating an orientalist tradition to justify their colonization of Palestine. Third, my essay’s conclusion spotlights Palestine’s Birzeit University and the El-Funoun folkdance troupe as an ideal model of dancing defiance of genocide…