Tahawwul: Performing Palestinian Placelessness

This paper theorizes tahawwul—the Arabic term for gradual shift or transition—as a framework for understanding Palestinian political and performative resistance beyond the Western paradigm of revolutionary rupture. Rather than signaling a singular moment of change, tahawwul names an ongoing, uneven process in which multiple systems of governance, resistance, and survival coexist. Framed as a verb rather than a noun, tahawwul reflects a Palestinian subjectivity shaped by placelessness and fugitivity: a condition produced by dispossession, continuous movement, and the absence of sovereign belonging. Drawing on performance theory and Black studies, this paper examines how performance operates as both a site of agency and a mechanism of containment for the placeless. Engaging Peggy Phelan’s theorization of performance’s ephemerality alongside the work of Samira Kawash, Esmail Nashif, Saidiya Hartman, and Soyica Diggs Colbert, I argue that Palestinian performance emerges within a temporal logic marked by repetition, delay, and survival rather than linear progress. This framework foregrounds how everyday performances—particularly dabke—function within a fraught balance between resistance and co-optation. Through readings of Shayna Silverstein’s Fraught Balance and Omar Abdeljawad’s Bleeding Forms, the paper traces how the state instrumentalizes performance to produce legibility, discipline bodies, and fragment collective movements. Dabke, often mobilized as a symbol of national unity, becomes a contested terrain where gender, modernity, and state power intersect. Against the nation-state’s demand for transparency and fixed identity, Palestinian performance frequently embraces opacity and illegibility as strategies of endurance. Ultimately, this paper argues that performance under conditions of tahawwul cannot be understood as inherently liberatory or purely co-opted. Instead, it constitutes a shifting field of struggle in which power, resistance, and agency are continually renegotiated through embodied practices of survival.