Dancing at the Thresholds: Music, Trance, and Feeling in Algerian Dīwān of Sīdī Bilāl (Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa)

Dancing at the Thresholds tells the story of a racialized community in Algeria that literally trance dances at the thresholds of consciousness.It also tells the story about how these communities negotiate and "dance" at thresholds of the sacred and profane, at the perceived clashes of Islam and animism or of sub-Saharan versus North African lifeworlds. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork alongside archival sources, oral histories, and ritual analysis, author Tamara Dee Turner considers these dances through an affective, embodied lens to challenge mainstream assumptions of affect theory.The dance embodies centuries of traumatic histories haunting these communities: their ritual, diwan, coalesced over three centuries of the trans-Saharan slave trade.Embodying these tumultuous pasts, diwan rituals move painful feelings through the trancing body to the point of affective "ignition" and release.However, to accomplish this, ritual actors must cultivate specific atmospheres conducive