Ululating from the Underground

Analyzes the creative activism of women and youth in Syria from 2011 to 2024.

Ululating from the Underground examines the gendered, artistic, and cultural creations of Syrian women from the 2011 uprisings, through the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, and until the summer of 2025. Identifying these women as syrenas, Banah el Ghadbanah uses the metaphor of siren songs to understand how the utterances and "creative noise" of Syrian women have been overlooked, ignored, or misunderstood by global leaders and mainstream English-language media. She analyzes the protests, poetics, pedagogies, and performances that Syrian women and youth developed under siege, contextualizing them within a framework of Shamiya feminism, an earth-based network of Levantine feminized resistance. Weaving together media and historical analyses, research into the virtual archive of the Syrian Revolution, interviews with and oral histories of Syrian women activists, ethnographic notes, and autoethnographic creative self-inscriptions, el Ghadbanah argues that the protests of syrena subjects enact somatic, insurgent moments of freedom in the face of imperialist, authoritarian, and extremist violence. The book is an intervention into ethnic studies, gender studies, Middle East studies, and Syria studies, highlighting a wide range of Syrian creative work for a variety of audiences.