Abstract
If the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair serves as an exemplary site through which to trace U.S. engagement with the metanarrative of modernity, the figure of the belly dancer exemplifies the way in which the orientalist apparatus could be deployed as a strategy for negotiating the disorientations of modernity. By using the phrase “metanarrative of modernity,” I am referencing the critiques that explore the universalizing, Eurocentric a ssumptions that a re often smuggled i nto the notion of modernity.1 In particular, I am interested in exploring the way in which the metanarrative of modernity operates by disavowing the colonialist and imperialist power relations in which it is rooted, and in demonstrating how the sublimated aspects of this powerful metanarrative found expression through the cultural mythology of the belly dancer. In this sense, the figure of the belly dancer serves as a construction of alterity that reinforces the Enlightenment-based presumptions built into the metanarrative of modernity, rather than as an instantiation of alternative or vernacular modernities. In other words, images of belly dancers rendered in photographic a lbums of the Fair serve as mythological figures through which to trace contemporaneous U.S. engagements with the disorienting processes of modernization and expansionism.
The theme of the girl’s dance was love, but it was the hot, voluptuous passion of the East, not the cool, chaste sentiment of our land. Every motion of her body was towards the illustration of her drama, the languorous looks, the open lips, the waving hands, the swaying body, all told her passion…. Then, in a perfect paroxysm of undulations, in which hips, stomach and breast protruded and whirled, the girl rises on her toes and crouches in a series of wriggles towards the stage, like one in an epilepsy.
Joseph Smith, Illustrated American
The danse du ventre, as the movement is known, and which was executed by girls not only in the Egyptian Theatre, but also in the Persian, Turkish, and, with some modification, in the Moorish Theatres, on the Plaisance, is a suggestively lascivious contorting of the abdominal muscles, which is extremely ungraceful and almost shockingly disgusting. Curiosity prompted many to view the performance, but very few remained more than five minutes before this was fully satisfied.
James Buel, The Magic City
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Notes
See, among others, Berman, All That is Solid; Donham, Marxist Modern; Knauft, Critically Modern; Mitchell, Questions of Modernity; Rofel, Other Modernities. For a critique of Eurocentrism in particular, see Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism.
Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 267.
Lott, Love and Theft, 6.
Ibid.
Lott is building on Bhabha’s work on ambivalence in “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism”; and “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” also in The Location of Culture, 121–131.
Knauft, Critically Modern, 18.
Thomson, Freakery, 10.
Bud, The Magic City.
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 234.
Ibid., 235.
Smith, “Within the Midway Plaisance,” 66.
Bud, The Magic City.
Smith, “Within the Midway Plaisance,” 63.
Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 67.
Kasson, Amusing the Million, 18.
Ibid., 23.
Edwards, Noble Dreams, 78.
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 227–228.
“Street in Cairo,” 3–5.
Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 67.
Rydell, Trachtenberg, and Edwards are just some of those who have argued that the displays were arranged in terms of a racial hierarchy. However, this line of argument tends to conflate the strictly anthropological exhibits with the concessionary exhibits on Midway. Hinsley’s “The World as Marketplace,” helps to distinguish between the two.
Hinsley, “The World as Marketplace,” 348.
Ibid., 348–349.
Ibid., 349.
Carlton, Looking for Little Egypt, 3.
The terms for the folk dances from which the belly dance is derived vary from country to country, sometimes taking the general name of al-raqs al-baladi (roughly translated as an indigenous dance.) Presumably after colonial contact, the Arabic term for the dance metamorphosed into the outwardly referential term of al-rags al-sharqi (or dance of the East). The French term used at the 1889 Paris Exposition, danse du ventre, was clearly based on the particular hip and belly movements of the dance, which were so scintillating for French viewers. This same French phrase was imported to the Chicago World’s Fair and used interchangeably (at least in sources) with the English translation, “belly dancing.” While the term belly dancing has remained the dance’s main title for English speakers, French speakers have abandoned danse du ventre and instead refer to the dance as the danse orientale (see, e.g., Aradoon, Origins and Philosophy of Danse Orientale), which is most likely a translation of al-rags al-sharqi.
Carlton, Looking for Little Egypt, 24.
Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, 294.
Benjamin, Reflections, 152.
Ibid.
Hinsley, “The World as Marketplace,” 345.
Edwards, Noble Dreams, 37.
Ibid., 51.
Ibid., 192.
Ibid., 81.
Hinsley, “The World as Marketplace,” 356.
The Vanishing City.
Buel, The Magic City.
Smith, “Within the Midway Plaisance,” 59.
Buel, The Magic City.
Edwards, Noble Dreams, 39.
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 228.
Ibid.
For more on the relationship between belly dance and striptease, see Allen, Horrible Prettiness.
Barthes, “Striptease,” in Mythologies, 84.
Ibid.
Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 3.
Ibid., 35.
Knauft, Critically Modern, 18. See note 5, this chapter.
Carlton, Looking for Little Egypt, 51.
Every source I have read claims that Mahzar is from Syria, but it is important to remember that Syria, or Greater Syria, spanned a much larger portion of the Levant at that time than it does today.
Buonaventura, Serpent of the Nile, 103.
Ibid.
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 225.
For more on these connections and the impact on the American belly dance movement, see Jarmakani, “Belly Dancing for Liberation.”
Buonaventura, Serpent of the Nile, 103.
Quoted in Buonaventura, Serpent of theNile, 102.
Carlton, Looking for Little Egypt, 56.
Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 230.
The cabaret style, and especially the cabaret costume, has been transplanted into the American context by way of characters such as (I Dream of) Jeannie. Her characteristic and memorable costume—ballooning “harem” pants and halter-bra, leaving the midriff bare—was borrowed not only from the cabaret style, but was also inspired by the Hollywood image of the female vamp. As precursor to the femme fatale, the female vamp image was one of a ravenous and heartless woman born in the “shadow of the pyramids” and who had an appetite for serpent’s blood (Buonaventura, Serpent of the Nile, 152). Again, the contradistinction between the safe and controlled (literally bottled up) sexuality of Jeannie and the dangerous and out-of-control sexuality of the female vamp highlights the types of oppositions that determined the simultaneous feelings of attraction and repulsion, which ultimately kept American spectators trained on images of Arab female sexuality.
Dox, “Thinking through Veils,” 154.
Aradoon, Origins and Philosophy, 10.
al-Rawi, Grandmother’s Secrets, 33.
Ibid., 35–36.
Dox, “Thinking through Veils,” 151.
Buonaventura, Serpent of the Nile, 126–128.
Ibid., 127.
Shay and Sellers-Young, Belly Dance, 7.
Ruyter, “La Meri,” 208.
Buonaventura, Serpent of the Nile, 126.
Shay and Sellers-Young, Belly Dance, 17.
Carlton, Looking for Little Egypt, 84. See also Shay and Sellers-Young, Belly Dance, 7.
For more on this, see Dox, “Spirit From the Body.”
Brown, Contesting Images, 116.
Ibid.
Ibid., 5.
Graham-Brown, Images of Women, 4.
For more on the relationship of photography to power, see Tagg, The Burden of Representation and Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs.
Benjamin, “Short History,” 20.
Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 223. See also Benjamin, “Short History,” 20.
Graham-Brown, Images of Women, 40.
Buel, The Magic City.
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 57.
Buel, The Magic City.
McClintock, Imperial Leather.
Rydell, All the World’s a Fair; Said, Orientalism; Haraway, Primate Visions; Lutz and Collins, Reading National Geographic; Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism.
Steet, Veils and Daggers, 35.
Ibid., 17. See also Lutz and Collins, Reading National Geographic, 26–27.
Quoted in Steet, Veils andDaggers, 57.
Buonaventura, Serpent of the Nile, 129.
Thomson, Freakery, 10.
Ibid., 2.
Çelik, Displaying the Orient.
Ibid., 3.
Çelik, “Speaking Back at the World’s Columbian Exposition,” 77.
Ibid., 84.
Çelik, “Speaking Back to Orientalist Discourse.”
Ibid., 28.
Brown, Contesting Images, 36–37.
Çelik, “Speaking Back to Orientalist Discourse,” 29.
Speaking Back at the World’s Columbian Exposition, 89–92.
Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 153.
This is the same logic that has been used, in part, by the U.S. government to justify the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan as well as direct military action in Iraq from 1991 to the present, an overlap to which I will return in chapter 4.
See James and Robertson, Genital Cutting, for more on the sensationalized treatment of female genital cutting, or “female genital mutilation” as it is frequently called, in western European and U.S. contexts.
Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 156.
Amin, The Liberation of Women, 21.
Ibid., 30.
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 49.
Ibid., 55.
Ibid., 59.
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© 2008 Amira Jarmakani
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Jarmakani, A. (2008). Dancing the Hootchy Kootchy: The Rhythms and Contortions of American Orientalism. In: Imagining Arab Womanhood. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612112_3
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