books

Belly Dance Fact & Fiction: References

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OPA Showcase Lecture/seminar, Victoria BC – presented by Lynette Harper Ph.D. November 2013

References – Books (*specific articles cited)

Belly dance around the world: New communities, performance and identity. 2013. Caitlin E. McDonald & Barbara Sellers-Young, editors. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company.

* What is Baladi about al-Raqs al-Baladi? On the survival of belly dance in Egypt, Noha Roushdy.

* Performing identity/diasporic encounters, Lynette Harper

* 1970s Belly dance and the “How-To” phenomenon: Feminism, fitness and Orientalism, Virginia Keft-Kennedy

* Local performance/global connection: American Tribal Style and its imagined community, Teresa Cutler-Broyles

* Quintessentially English belly dance: In search of an English tradition, Siouxsie Cooper

Belly dance: Orientalism, transnationalism & harem fantasy. 2005. Anthony Shay & Barbara Sellers-Young, editors. Costa Mesa CA: Mazda Publishers.

* Introduction, Anthony Shay & Barbara Sellers-Young

* Belly dance: An urban folk genre, Najwa Adra

* Body, image, identity: American Tribal Belly dance, Barbara Sellers-Young

* Spirit from the body: Belly dance as a spiritual practice, Donnalee Dox

Belly Dance Reader. 2012. Editors of the Gilded Serpent. Fairfax CA: Gilded Serpent.

* Belly dance & contemporary dance studies, Barbara Sellers-Young

* Orientalism: Zumarrad’s completely non-scholarly quick and dirty guide, Brigid Kelly

* “Harem Girls,” dance in historical harems, early 1700’s – early 1900’s, the perpetual masquerade, Andrea Deagon

Dancing fear & desire: Race, sexuality, & imperial politics in Middle Eastern Dance. 2004. Stavros Stavrou Karayanni. Waterloo ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press.

Gypsies and the problem of identities. 2002. Adrian Marsh & Elin Strand, editors. Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, Transactions vol.17.

* Introduction,  Elin Strand & Adrian Marsh

* On Romany origins and identity – questions for discussion, Ian Hancock

* The current situation of the Dom in Jordan, Allen Williams

Looking for Little Egypt. 1994. Donna Carlton. Bloomington IN: IDD Books

Orientalism (25th Anniversary Edition). 1994. Edward Said. New York: Vintage Books.

Scheherezade goes West: Different cultures, different harems. 2001. Fatema Mernissi. New York: Washington Square Press.

Serpent of the Nile: Women and dance in the Arab world.  1989. New York: Interlink books.

Visibly Muslim: Fashion, politics, faith. 2010. Emma Tarlo. Oxford: Berg.

We are the Romani people. 2002. Ian Hancock. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press.

You asked Aunt Rocky: Answers & advice about Raqs Sharqi & Raqs Shaabi. 2011. Morocco (C.Varga Dinicu). Virginia Beach VA: RDI Publications.

References cited – journal & internet articles

Dancing around Orientalism. 2006. Donnalee Dox. TDR/The Drama Review, Vol.50 no.4 (Winter 2006), pp.52-71.

Feminism and belly dance. Andrea Deagon. http://people.uncw.edu/deagona/raqs/feminism.htm (downloaded 18 Nov.2013)

In search of the origins of the dance. Andrea Deagon. http://people.uncw.edu/deagona/raqs/origins.htm (downloaded 18 Nov.2013)

Naked belly dance in Egypt? Part 1: Are they really belly dancing? 2009. Andrea Deagon. The Gilded Serpent, http://www.gildedserpent.com/cms/2009/10/19/deagonnakedbdpart1/ (downloaded 18 Nov.2013)

Oriental dance: Myth and reality, the harem slaves. 2002.  Jalilah Lorraine Chamas. The Gilded Serpent, http://www.gildedserpent.com/articles20/jalilahharamslaves.htm (downloaded 18 Nov.2013)

 

More books for dancers

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Four essentials for a dancer’s bookshelf, published in the last two years:  Belly dance around the world: New communities, performance and identity – The belly dance reader – Global moves – and You asked Aunt Rocky: Answers & advice about Raqs Sharqi & Raqs Shaabi.  Each book offers powerful ideas, analysis, and inspirations – and they’re available through Amazon!  I plan to update this post with a review of each book in the next few months!   Lynette, October 2013

Belly dance around the worldBelly dance around the world: New communities, performance and identity

Edited by Caitlin E. McDonald & Barbara Sellers-Young. Here’s the blurb from the back cover:

Dancer/scholars from around the world have contributed essays on belly dance to this book. They all carefully consider the transformation of an improvised folk form from North Africa and the Middle East into a popular global dance practice. The essays explore the differences between the solo improvisational forms of North Africa and the Middle East, often referred to as raqs sharki, which are part of family celebrations, and the numerous globalized versions of this dance form, belly dance, derived from the movement vocabulary of North Africa and the Middle East but with a variety of performance styles distinct from its site of origin. Local versions of belly dance have grown and changed along with the role that dance plays in the community. The global evolution of belly dance is an inspiring example of the interplay of imagination, the internet and the social forces of local communities.

Yes, that’s me and Rahma on the cover!  I have contributed a chapter  “Performing identity/Diasporic encounters”, based on interviews with Arab women dancers.

Belly dance reader

 

 

An outstanding anthology of articles put together by Gilded Serpent, under the leadership of editor Lynette Harris.

 

 

Aunt Rocky

 

Astonishing – Morocco has assembled a lifetime of philosophy, research, ideas, and advice about dance inside the covers of this book!

 

 

 

global moves

 

I’m looking forward to reading this book by Caitlin McDonald, ” a study of how dancers throughout the world use Egypt as a reference point for situating themselves within the global belly dance community and how Egypt gets romanticized and fantasized in global narratives about belly dance.”

Ethnographies worth reading

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Guests of the Sheik: Ethnography of an Iraqi village

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, Random House, re-issue 1995

Though Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s book was first published in 1969,  her writing provides useful insights into daily life, for Arab women in  a particular place (rural Iraq) and time period. “A delightful, well-written, and vastly informative ethnographic study, this is an account of Fernea’s two-year stay in a tiny rural village in Iraq, where she assumed the dress and sheltered life of a harem woman.” (Random House website)

Reading “Guests of the Sheik” left me in tears. My father was born and raised in southern Iraq right around the time that Elizabeth Warnock Fernea moves there. I grew up on stories from that period and I appreciated getting the women’s story from this book, it felt like a complement of the stories I heard in childhood. As I read “Guests of the Sheik” I frequently wondered how I would react if I was in Elizabeth Warnock Fernea shoes. Would I feel at home in that environment? Would I feel as a tourist? I don’t know, but I do hope that one day when I do visit Iraq that I will feel as much love for the land and its people as Elizabeth Warnock Fernea did. (Amazon website review)

Books for dancers

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READ THIS BOOK!!!!

Belly dance: Orientalism Transnationalism and Harem Fantasy

edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young

 

For over a century, solo improvised dance, especially belly dance, has had enormous popularity, and by the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the feminist movement, over a million women in the United States, and many more thousands in Western Europe became devotees of this choreographic form. This volume traces several strands of this phenomenon. Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young provide an overview of solo improvised dance in the Middle East and in the West. 

Several essays address the dance tradition in the Middle East: Najwa Adra describes and analyzes the performance of solo improvised dance in domestic circles in the Arab world, Anthony Shay analyzes the issue of how Islam and individuals among the Moslem clergy perceive and react to dance, Stavros Stavrou deconstructs the famous encounter between Gustave Flaubert and the Egyptian dancer Kuchek Hanum in terms of colonialism, Roberta Dougherty analyzes the popular images of the belly dancer in the Egyptian cinema, Shay addresses the question of male dancers and their performances, and Linda Swanson adds a whimsical interpretation of the famous twentieth century Egyptian belly dancer Tahia Carioca. 

The dance was frequently seen in the West by millions of visitors to world fairs and exhibitions that were popular in the 19th century and Sol Bloom, the entrepreneur of the Chicago World Fair of 1893 coined the term “belly dance.” From that period, belly dance became a popular entertainment in the United States. American women found the dance to be a liberating vehicle and a means of adopting new and exotic persona. They developed several new genres of the dance. Barbara Sellers-Young describes and analyzes tribal belly dance, a genre that was invented in San Francisco, Anne Rasmussen provides an overview of the music used in Arab nightclubs in the United States and a description of the musicians and the club milieu, Donnalee Dox analyzes the spiritual belly dance movement, Andrea Deagon addresses the enduring trope of oriental dance: Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils through performances both from the turn of the century and contemporary versions, Nancy Lee Ruyter gives a historical perspective of La Meri’s, one of the earlier interpreters of belly dance, Jennifer Fisher looks at the orientalist implications of the Arabian dance from the Nutcracker, often inspired by oriental dancing and seen by millions of audience members across America. An epilogue by the editors provides an overview of the topic and integrates the scholarly material for the reader. [publisher’s notes)

Check out details and order a copy from Mazda Publishers.