ABSTRACT Title of Document: RECLAIMING BLACK BELEDI: RACE, WELLNESS, AND ONLINE COMMUNITY Maria Inez Velazquez, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Directed By: Professor Psyche Williams-Forson, American Studies In this dissertation, I analyze love, affect, and embodiment online. I specifically focus on belly dance because of its history as a kind of conscious and public laboring on the self. By situating belly dance as an imperial legacy of U.S. military engagement in the Middle East, I unveil its critical utility to bloggers’ discussion of wellness, self-care, and the affective consequences of living within imperialist and racist societies. I conclude by introducing the concept of a digital praxis of love, paying particular attention to digital black feminisms, wellness blogging, and dance. This project draws its exegesis from current scholarship on corporeal, physical feminisms, and digital feminisms in order to point towards a definition of praxis online as incorporating critical reflection, critical action, and everyday public life. This exploratory dissertation incorporates a variety of methodologies in order to investigate the movement of wellness, self-care, and critique as these concepts move through overlapping knowledge worlds, spaces, and sites of consumption. By doing so, this dissertation highlights the connections between conversations about wellness and conversations about politics. Analyzing these connections offers an important intervention in wellness studies, the digital humanities, and American studies by illustrating the role wellness (and its digital objects) plays in performing citizenship, group membership, and social justice activism. RECLAIMING BLACK BELEDI: RACE, WELLNESS, AND ONLINE COMMUNITY By Maria Inez Velazquez Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2015 Advisory Committee: Professor Psyche Williams-Forson, Chair Associate Professor Elsa Barkley-Brown Professor Augusta Lynn Bolles Assistant Professor Jason Farman Professor Katie King Associate Professor Sheri L. Parks © Copyright by Maria Inez Velazquez 2015 PREFACE: WELLNESS AS CITIZENSHIP The title of this dissertation, “Reclaiming Black Beledi,” reflects my belief that, belly dance in the United States is about citizenship and politics. So, I use beledi, an Arabic Egyptian word that refers to a group of people (the Balad tribe) that has evolved to mean “my people” or “my country.” A bint al baladi is a country kind of girl, earthy, kind, and real. She’s also a girl from the inner city. Raqs beladi (beledi as a dance style) emerged in the early 20th century, when many members of the Balad tribe immigrated to Cairo for work. In contrast to raqs sharki, which was more common in Cairo, raqs beledi focused on largesse: big movements, big hip circles, big arm gestures, big women, and big groups, all of which reflected a supposedly “rural” or authentic Egyptian soul. Think of beledi like the word “country” in the United States – it’s as much about the vibe as it is the actual person, thing, dance, or sound being described. What makes something beledi is also just a vibe; other belly dancers in the United States will sometimes say someone’s a beledi-style dancer because her dance movements feel earthy and grounded, or if her performance seems to reflect the “bigness” associated with beladi as an aesthetic. For example, Fifi Abdou, whose evolving style of dance, costume and music has defined her career, is sometimes described as a beledi-style dancer because of how approachable she seems. I use the phrase “reclaiming black baled” to highlight the fact that that belly dance and its social significance includes a political claim to wellness-as-citizenship ii as well as a genealogical claim to a larger black diaspora. To reclaim beledi is to seek ownership of a dance form that is the result of the movement of people, ideas, and costume styles. Plus, let’s face it: the difference in meaning between raqs sharki (dance of the orient) and raqs beledi (dance of the people) is a useful jumping point to the questions I use this project to investigate. The tensions between naming belly dance in the United States as raqs sharki, raqs baladi, Middle Eastern style dance, or Oriental dance help illustrate the importance of the questions this dissertation hopes to answer. In fact, these tensions and the debates they lead to generate hotly debated conversations online about who can or should be a belly dancer. In my dissertation, I use the digital objects associated with belly dance (online conversations, gifs, memes, and mp3s) to trace the movement of belly dance in post-9/11 conversations about wellness. When does blogging about wellness become writing about politics? Are belly dance and yoga invoked as an antidote to the psychological tolls of a racist and sexist society, and if so, how? To what extent can we see affect as undergirding social justice activism and digital praxis? What does this offer me (and others) as a scholar, blogger, and hobbyist dancer as a way to think critically about the role wellness and self-care takes in these projects? Because this is an exploratory dissertation, my questions remained constant even as my methods evolved in response to technological innovation in blogging platforms and image sharing. In order to investigate these questions, I incorporate autoethnography as well as image tracking in my research. To track images I used Tineye, ImgOps, and (when if possible) the EXIF Exchangeable Image File (EXIF) hidden in the image to find the iii earliest source possible.1 I also used the Wayback Machine2 to resurrect links to blogs, forum posts, or webpages that might no longer exist to reflect the conversation as it happened in “real time.” I also I incorporated McGrane’s “Zen TV”3 reflection to “pay attention to paying attention.” Finally, I offer the concept of a digital praxis of love. This concept incorporates the idea of praxis as a mingling reflection and action directed towards infrastructural or social change, as well as digital to reflect the branching of the technological, material, and imaginative worlds of the online activist. Love emphasizes the role of affect in propelling these projects forward. What I found attractive about this idea is that it provides an analytical framework for the labor fans and bloggers do for free, an analysis that moves beyond the curator/creator framework offered by the PEW Research Center’s work on Internet use. I look at gifsets and image manipulations in order to trouble the easy divide between curator/creator, to highlight an evolving conversation on race and wellness. These virtual and material labors of love – blogging projects, metasites collecting historical research, and Tumblrs blurring the line between the personal and the political – often participate in larger social justice movements centered around body positivity, wellness, and well-being. 1 Tiny Eye, https://www.tineye.com; ImgOps, http://imgops.com. EXIF data includes metadata, such the date and time a picture was taken, any camera settings used, descriptions, GPS information, and copyright information. While this metadata can be useful, the process of saving, editing, and uploading an image file can result in parts of that data getting removed from the file itself. Also, some sites, most notably Facebook, remove EXIF data when the user uploads an image, in order to preserve the user’s privacy. My use of EXIF data primarily relies on looking at XMP, which is editing information generated by Adobe, Quicktime, iPhoto, and other image editing software, as well as any remnants of the file’s original name. Because this metadata can be edited or incomplete, I augment this information by using ImgOps to run multiple searches for places where that image has appeared and for the image’s first appearance. By doing this, I can get a sense of where the image was, is, and has been. 2 Wayback Machine Internet Archive, http://waybackmachine.org 3Bernard McGrane, “Zen Sociology: The Un-TV Experiment.” Teaching Sociology 21:1 (1993): 85-89. doi: 10.2307/1318855. iv DEDICATION To those using dance to heal themselves and the world. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson, who goes above and beyond for her advisees. It has been an honor and privilege to work with Dr. Williams-Forson and with the members of my dissertation committee. Throughout my academic career, through rewrites, emergency feedback sessions, and coursework, these faculty members have demonstrated a true commitment to both my work and my graduate career. I also want to thank Dr. Becky Thompson, who has gone above and beyond in providing support to someone who was technically a former student of hers. My NBGSA-assigned mentor, Dr. Brittney Cooper, has also always made herself available for “real talk” chat sessions on completing the dissertation. Mary Corbin Sies, Christina Hanhhardt, and Jeffrey McCune also saw this project in its very earliest form; I thank them for their encouragement, their mentorship, and their suggestions for further research. The Center for Biographical Research at University of Hawaii-Manoa as well as the Department of American Studies at UHM also supported my work by providing me with an office space and an opportunity to workshop an earlier draft of my introduction. The MITH program at University of Maryland-College Park also supported this work through mentorship and funding. The Ron Brown Scholar Program, Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship community, and the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers have also all fostered my research and actively encouraged me to prioritize my writing. I also would like to thank my CRGE sister scholars, Tamyka Morant, Sylvette vi LaTouche, Ana Perez, Maren Cummings, and Lynette Boswell. I am also grateful for the love and friendship of my colleagues in the American’s Studies program; I thank Shanna Smith, Darius Bost, Christopher Perez, Kenyatta Graves, and Douglas Ishii for their confidence in my work and their challenges to my theoretical framework.