This dissertation examines the Arab concept of ṭarab through the words and lived experiences of Arab Americans. It combines music analysis with ethnographic fieldwork to show how ṭarab—understood as both a heightened state of affective engagement (often translated into English as “musical ecstasy”) and an urban style of twentieth-century “art music”—shapes narratives of self-making across the diaspora, serving especially as a vehicle for nostalgia and social solidarity. Drawing on methods and concepts from music studies, social anthropology, affect theory, and gesture studies, I argue that Arab music’s melodic (maqāmāt) and rhythmic (īqāʿāt) modal systems function as sites of kinesthetic potential that, in turn, enable Arab Americans to articulate belonging and/or resistance through participatory expressive gestures associated with ṭarab and its broader socio-cultural milieu.​

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Over the course of three chapter, I make two central interventions in studying the relationship between ṭarab and the expressively moving body in the Arab diaspora. Chapter 1 explores what I call “rhythmic-temporal disruptions” (RTDs)—a particularly ubiquitous musical phenomenon that involves altering listeners’ temporal experience through frequent (and often sudden) shifts in rhythmic mode (īqāʿ) and tempo. I argue that rhythmic-temporal disruptions function as an embodied practice steeped in kinesthetic memory, rendering nostalgia a particularly accessible emotion for those among the diaspora. Chapter 2 turns to the melodic domain of Arab music, the maqāmāt, where I mount an argument for conceptualizing the maqām system as a network of potential “pathways” among related tetrachords (ajnās). I show how these networks function as spaces of both sonic and gestural potential, and how diasporic listeners engage them to express cultural belonging through shared bodily movement. Chapter 3 then synthesizes the two approaches developed in previous chapters to provide an analytical case study of a ṭarab performance drawn from my fieldwork in Dearborn, Michigan.