Dancing Fear and Desire

Stavros Stavrou Karayanni

Description

Throughout centuries of European colonial domination, the bodies of Middle Eastern dancers, male and female, move sumptuously and seductively across the pages of Western travel journals, evoking desire and derision, admiration and disdain, allure and revulsion. This profound ambivalence forms the axis of an investigation into Middle Eastern dance—an investigation that extends to contemporary belly dance.

Stavros Stavrou Karayanni, through historical investigation, theoretical analysis, and personal reflection, explores how Middle Eastern dance actively engages race, sex, and national identity. Close readings of colonial travel narratives, an examination of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, and analyses of treatises about Greek dance, reveal the intricate ways in which this controversial dance has been shaped by Eurocentric models that define and control identity performance.

Sujets

• Sexuality
• Performing arts
• Cultural Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 03 août 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9781554587193
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Dancing Fear Desire

Race, Sexuality, and Imperial Politics in Middle Eastern Dance
Cultural Studies Series
Cultural Studies is the multi- and interdisciplinary study of culture, defined anthropologically as a way of life, performatively as symbolic practice, and ideologically as the collective product of media and cultural industries, i.e., pop culture. Although Cultural Studies is a relative newcomer to the humanities and social sciences, in less than half a century it has taken interdisciplinary scholarship to a new level of sophistication, reinvigorating the liberal arts curriculum with new theories, new topics, and new forms of intellectual partnership.
The Cultural Studies series includes topics such as construction of identities; regionalism/nationalism cultural citizenship; migration; popular culture; consumer cultures; media and film; the body; postcolonial criticism; cultural policy; sexualities; cultural theory; youth culture; class relations; and gender.
The new Cultural Studies series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press invites submission of manuscripts concerned with critical discussions on power relations concerning gender, class, sexual preference, ethnicity, and other macro and micro sites of political struggle.
For further information, please contact the Series Editor:
Jodey Castricano Department of English Wilfrid Laurier University Press 75 University Avenue West Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3C5
Dancing Fear Desire
Race, Sexuality, and Imperial Politics in Middle Eastern Dance
Stavros Stavrou Karayanni
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation s Ontario Book Initiative.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Karayanni, Stavros Stavrou, 1965-
Dancing fear and desire: race, sexuality, and imperial politics in
Middle Eastern dance / Stavros Stavrou Karayanni.
(Cultural studies series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-88920-454-3
1. Belly dance - Middle East. 2. Belly dance - Greece. 3. Belly dance - Political aspects. 4. Belly dance - Social aspects. 5. Gender identity in dance. 6. Homosexuality and dance. 7. Male dancers. I. Title. II. Series: Cultural studies series (Waterloo, Ont.)
GV1798.5.K37 2004 793.3 C2004-905761-8
2004 Stavros Stavrou Karayanni
Cover and text design by PJ. Woodland. Cover photograph of Cihangir G m st rkmen by Daniela Incoronato.
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher s attention will be corrected in future printings.

Printed in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Order from: Wilfrid Laurier University Press Wilfrid Laurier University Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5 www.wlupress.wlu.ca

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
1 / Introducing Colonial and Postcolonial Dialectics on the Subject of Dance
2 / Dismissal Veiling Desire: Kuchuk Hanem and Imperial Masculinity
3 / The Dance of Extravagant Pleasures: Male Performers of the Orient and the Politics of the Imperial Gaze
4 / Dancing Decadence: Semiotics of Dance and the Phantasm of Salome
5 / I have seen this dance on old Greek vases : Hellenism and the Worlding of Greek Dance
6 / What Dancer from Which Dance? Concluding Reflections
Epilogue
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgements
I have been extremely fortunate and blessed to have a very special family of friends who have offered me support, collaboration, and assistance. This project would not have materialized without them. I thank Smaro Kamboureli who in March 1998 promised me that such a topic would be interesting and urged me to undertake this research. I am indebted to her encouragement, advice, and support throughout this project. I am also grateful to Aruna Srivastava, whose guidance and generosity kept me going; and to Ashok Mathur for good humour and advice. Thanks also to David Bateman, Susan Bennett, Anne Flynn, Brent Craig, Khang Nguyen, Sharron Proulx, Hiromi Goto, and Cristina Glaeser.
I am also indebted to people whom I proudly call my international dance family whose members range from people I know well and have been friends with to people I have only met virtually until now. All of them, however, have been wonderfully supportive of this project as well as of my presence in the belly dance community. Shareen el-Safy and Ron Iverson have promoted my work in Habibi. Artemis Mourat provided images; Kristina Robyn in Sydney, Australia, offered dancing, hospitality, and warm friendship; Elena Marie Villa provided material support; Yasmina Ramzy and Jalilah have been wonderful and giving dance instructors, dance lovers, and dance scholars; and Julian Awwad shared electric shimmies and stimulating discussions on belly dance.
I am grateful to Alkis Raftis, president of the Conseil International de la Danse ( CID ), for supporting my work. He works with an Athenian troupe of wonderful people who have been generous towards me, especially Anastasia Romveli. I am particularly indebted to Anthony Shay for his numerous and valuable contributions to Dance Studies and for indispensable advice, support, and feedback. And I thank Cihangir G m sturkmen for sharing his fabulous work, especially the photo on the cover of this book.
Jacqueline Larson at Wilfrid Laurier Press guided me through the various critical stages of this book. She has believed in this work with a confidence that breathed fresh life into it. Finally, I thank my family, and especially Anthi Sideropoulou, for not refusing any help I requested, and my mother Anthoulla for her gorgeous singing, artistic sensibility, and selfless sacrifices and struggles that she continues to endure-without complaint-for all her children.
I dedicate this work to two women of great accomplishment and also great influence in my life: my grandmother Ourania who taught me how to read and listen to stories. And to Mariza Koch who through her artistry taught me to love and appreciate art. In her voice I was born into a new awareness of my body and sensibility.

Grateful acknowledgements for permission to reprint from The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: Volume 1, 1830-1857 , selected, edited, and translated by Francis Steegmuller, 110-11 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright 1979, 1980 by Francis Steegmuller). Also from Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians by Edward W. Lane (1908) by permission of Everyman s Library.
Part of chapter 2 was originally published, in a substantially altered form, in Habibi 19.1 (January 2002): 18-21. Also, an early and short version of chapter 5 appeared in Dance as Intangible Heritage , edited by Alkis Raftis (Athens: Tropos Zois, 2002), 75-84. Finally, I included brief excerpts from chapter 1 and the epilogue in the article Cyprus after History co-authored with Spurgeon Thompson and Myria Vassiliadou for Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 6.2 (June 2004): 282-99.
Preface
The genesis of this project has had a long incubation that spans several years of emotional and intellectual involvement with issues of belonging, nationality, and the performance of gender and sexuality. Spiralling through these political issues and performances was the body of belly dance, intransigent and seductive, moving in all the formidability of the contradictory reconstructions that it has undergone in its twentieth-century troubled history-derided and adored, abandoned and retrieved, abused and exalted. I have known it and loved it and wanted it for as long as I can remember, yet for various reasons related to the prejudices attached to a man belly dancing but also connected to issues of ethnic and racial identity, I made it to a dance workshop in Calgary only at the age of thirty-three. So this is a book about unfulfilled passions and yearning, but also about belated epiphanies that weave themselves into a textual choreography.
I wanted to produce work that could accommodate my specific concerns with various forms of oppression and with the appropriation of expression while addressing and exploring mediums of resistance. Western academic discourse has, fortunately, permitted the creation of a space that can accommodate the voice of a queer person from an ex-colony-a person whose colonization continues in myriad ways at home and who has come to a profound investment in movement as a marker of identity and expression. Sadly, my own country s postcolonial social and cultural politics exclude me completely from their concerns and exile me, deliberately and methodically, into disenfranchised spaces where, if citizenship denotes a privilege of belonging, then this privilege remains an undelivered gift. Hence the dual and parallel trajectory that the book follows: it experiments with critical autobiography but it also relies on the deployment of critical theory in its investigation. In the pages that follow, therefore, I bring to the forefront-and at times privilege-texts that are wildly Preface fart, i heterogeneous: memories of events and persons, historical circumstances, travel narratives, letters and correspondence