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

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.