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Native Motion and Imperial Emotion: Male Performers of the “Orient” and the Politics of the Imperial Gaze

Stavros Stavrou Karayanni

in When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders

Stavros Stavrou Karayanni challenges the Orientalist notion that belly dance was historically a female performance genre through an investigation of the 19th‐century male dancers of Cairo. Analysis ... More

Stavros Stavrou Karayanni challenges the Orientalist notion that belly dance was historically a female performance genre through an investigation of the 19th‐century male dancers of Cairo. Analysis reveals the breathless hypocrisy of travelers who had an “imperial gaze” (Gustave Flaubert, Vivant Denon, Gerard de Nerval) and who lingered over the performances of highly popular male belly dance performances in 19th‐century Egypt, at the same time pronouncing them obscene and indecent. Karayanni recuperates the art of these dancing bodies, which had been erased from history by scandalized colonial writers and postcolonial subalterns. Also considered are historical male dancers, as well as their contemporary counterparts whose choreographies continue to negotiate gender, sexuality, and imperial standards of masculinity.Less

Ibrahim Farrah: Dancer, Teacher, Choreographer, Publisher

Barbara Sellers‐Young

in When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders

Barbara Sellers‐Young details the life and career of Ibrahim Farrah, a Lebanese American who was one of the seminal figures in the performance, teaching, and popularizing of cabaret belly dance in ... More

Barbara Sellers‐Young details the life and career of Ibrahim Farrah, a Lebanese American who was one of the seminal figures in the performance, teaching, and popularizing of cabaret belly dance in the United States. As a male dancer in a genre widely regarded as performed exclusively by women, Farrah, through his performances and writings, embodied the tensions inherent in the cultural and gender issues surrounding belly dance in both the Arab American community, from which he first learned Oriental dance, and in wider American society after belly dance had become an important leisure activity for more than a million women in the 1980s. Many of those women followed the news and history of the genre in Farrah's groundbreaking journal, Arabesque.Less

The Remaining Yellow Angreks

Georgius Everhardus Rumphius

in Rumphius' Orchids: Orchid Texts from The Ambonese Herbal

This chapter discusses the features and development of Angraecum octavum sive Furvum. The roots of Angraecum octavum sive Furvum are more spread out than Angraecum sextum Moschatum sive odoratum, and ... More

This chapter discusses the features and development of Angraecum octavum sive Furvum. The roots of Angraecum octavum sive Furvum are more spread out than Angraecum sextum Moschatum sive odoratum, and hang loosely from the trees. The flower-bearing stem shoots up as well as to the side, and the latter sends some roots or fibers down, which also attach themselves to the bark of the tree. The central or main stem is also bellied, in such a way that it is always thinner between its place of origin and the belly, which is the case with all the Angreks that have bellied stems. The flowers appear on an expansive cluster, on rather longish dirty-white stems, fashioned from five leaflets, opened wide, curved like half-moons.Less

Explorations of spiritual embodiment in belly dance

Angela M. Moe

in Women and Religion: Contemporary and Future Challenges in the Global Era

This chapter examines how US belly dancers view the practice as a spiritual endeavour, particularly in light of the negative perceptions surrounding it. It discusses findings from a decade-long ... More

This chapter examines how US belly dancers view the practice as a spiritual endeavour, particularly in light of the negative perceptions surrounding it. It discusses findings from a decade-long ethnographic study (2003–13) involving several data-collection methods: observations; journal entries; online statements; and qualitative interviews, a mixed methods design needed due to the lack of research on this topic and the complexity involved in understanding it. Research suggests that belly dance holds much potential as an embodied spiritual practice, particularly when premised on holistic health (integration of body, mind and spirit). As such, the chapter contributes to the critical examination of women's spirituality within contemporary contexts.Less

Dance, Divas, Queens, and Kings: Dance and Culture in Jamaican Dancehall

Sonjah Stanley Niaah (ed.)

in Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures

Sonjah Stanley Niaah enters the creative world of dancehall queens and kings as they invent and pass on new moves and dances in a milieu that transforms people from their workaday lives. She cites ... More

Sonjah Stanley Niaah enters the creative world of dancehall queens and kings as they invent and pass on new moves and dances in a milieu that transforms people from their workaday lives. She cites wellsprings of Jamaican culture that provide a reservoir of movement for dancehall dances, cultural manifestations such as costuming, and an intensity of involvement akin to possession. Stanley Niaah offers the thoughts of dancehall stars like Bogle and Stacey about their roles, notes aspects of the subculture, including changing gender roles, and describes some of the dances. She charts an extensive chronology of dance moves, including yanga, shay-shay, cool an’ deadly, poco man jam, bogle, butterfly, urkel, jerry springer, log on, drive by, signal di plane, shelly belly, shankle dip, chaka chaka, spongebob, gangsta rock, dutty wine, beyonce wine, and gully creeper.Less

The Feminine and the Elemental in Greek Myth, Medicine and Early Philosophy

Adriel M. Trott

in Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation

This chapter offers historical background and context of ancient Greek conceptions of the female, the feminine, and matter, including the elemental in Greek myth, medical texts and the Pre-Socratic ... More

This chapter offers historical background and context of ancient Greek conceptions of the female, the feminine, and matter, including the elemental in Greek myth, medical texts and the Pre-Socratic philosophers. The chapter examines the role of female divinities in reproduction and the gods said to be born of Zeus and thus without a female goddess or mortal woman in Greek myth to show the anxiety in Greek myth over female fecundity coupled with the recognition that reproduction without women was impossible. Depictions of Pandora as the beginning of a separate race of women point to Greek understandings of woman as a belly in both productive and consumptive ways. The chapter further considers how Pre-Socratics thematize the elemental to think about the association of moisture with the female in medical treatises and Aristotle. The last part examines the Hippocratics views of elemental forces in the body and their effect on women for whom their excess can become a problem as well as the focus on the belly as the source of power in the body.Less

The Cannibal Poets

Shadi Bartsch

in Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural

Persius plays off the Ars Poetica of Horace, his predecessor in satire, by changing Horace’s condemnation of the badly integrated poetic corpus into a literal description of bad poetry as mutilated ... More

Persius plays off the Ars Poetica of Horace, his predecessor in satire, by changing Horace’s condemnation of the badly integrated poetic corpus into a literal description of bad poetry as mutilated bodies. Further metaphorical sleight of hand allows him to suggest that reading or reciting bad poetry (these mutilated bodies) is akin to a form of cannibalism, especially if one is “eating” the literary tradition only to “vomit it up” in a derivative form. Persius manipulates the central metaphor of digestion here to link medical injunctions against culinary missteps to the idea that listening to unhealthy forms of verse might be equally bad for one’s health. The meatiness and omophagia that are made to characterize certain poetic forms recall the meat-eating feasts of epic, a genre Persius abjures; likewise, the notion of the poet as a hungry belly is made to problematize all poetic efforts that seek profit the praise of an audience. The etymology of the word “satura” may have been “a plate of rich food,” but Persius goes against the grain in claiming that his own writing is precisely the opposite of such gastropoetic excess.Less

My Bird Problem

Jonathan Franzen

in When Birds Are Near: Dispatches from Contemporary Writers

This chapter describes the author's experience while birding in South Texas. There is no better American place for birds in February than South Texas. In three days, the author had seen fetchingly ... More

This chapter describes the author's experience while birding in South Texas. There is no better American place for birds in February than South Texas. In three days, the author had seen fetchingly disheveled anis flopping around on top of shrubs, Jurassic-looking anhingas sun-drying their wings, squadrons of white pelicans gliding downriver on nine-foot wingspans, a couple of caracaras eating a road-killed king snake, an elegant trogon and a crimson-collared grosbeak, and two exotic robins all lurking on a postage-stamp Audubon Society tract in Weslaco. The only frustration was the author's number one trip target bird, the black-bellied whistling-duck. A tree nester, strangely long-legged, with a candy-pink bill and a bold white eye ring, the whistling-duck was one of those birds in the field guide which the author could not quite believe existed.Less

Eastern Femininities for Modern Women, 1893–1930

Susan Nance

in How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream 1791–1935

This chapter examines the influence of Eastern dancing, also known as the danse du ventre or belly dance, on American women. Many women flocked to these shows, and a prominent minority were inspired ... More

This chapter examines the influence of Eastern dancing, also known as the danse du ventre or belly dance, on American women. Many women flocked to these shows, and a prominent minority were inspired to imitate and develop Eastern dances and costumes into homegrown, suggestive, and profitable “cootch” and strip tease acts. These women were consumers-turned-performers, who in turn made their way through the entertainment business to burlesque houses, traveling carnivals, and amusement parks. At the same time, thousands of other American women would adopt what they saw in those women's and foreign women's performances to articulate their own identities through consumption of products and practices styled “Oriental.”Less

Body Politicized: The Belly of Sayyida Amina

Scott Kugle

in Sufis & Saints' Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power in Islam

This chapter examines not just the architectural presence of dead bodies but also a range of other manifestations: the particular public power of saintly female bodies in the nineteenth century. It ... More

This chapter examines not just the architectural presence of dead bodies but also a range of other manifestations: the particular public power of saintly female bodies in the nineteenth century. It explores the belly of women, which it notes is an ambiguous region, defined not by a particular organ but by a cultural concatenation of images. The chapter clarifies that the belly of women is the location of the womb and other organs of reproduction, but through a common cultural logic the womb is also connected to organs of nutrition. It focuses on the belly to gain insights into the life and legacy of a woman saint, Sayyida Āmina bint Ahmad Ibn al-Qādī, who lived in sixteenth-century Fes, in a neighborhood not far from the tomb of Mawlay Idris. The chapter asks how female saints negotiated the patriarchal order of Islamic public space and perhaps reveal something of the limits of that order.Less

The Early Roosevelt Years

Ronald D. Cohen

in Depression Folk: Grassroots Music and Left-Wing Politics in 1930s America

The depression’s early years gave way to an upsurge of confidence and an artistic renaissance. This was bolstered by the coming era of the common man, when vernacular culture, including music, gained ... More

The depression’s early years gave way to an upsurge of confidence and an artistic renaissance. This was bolstered by the coming era of the common man, when vernacular culture, including music, gained a renewed vigor spurred by the increasing popularity of the Communist and Socialist Parties, as well as the expanding labor unions. John and Alan Lomax were particularly active in collecting and promoting folk music.Less

Fannin Street

Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell

in Shreveport Sounds in Black and White

This chapter reprints an excerpt from a biography of Lead Belly, one of the twentieth century’s most influential and widely recognized black folk artists. The piece reconstructs Lead Belly’s ... More

This chapter reprints an excerpt from a biography of Lead Belly, one of the twentieth century’s most influential and widely recognized black folk artists. The piece reconstructs Lead Belly’s coming-of-age in the rural Ark-La-Tex close to Shreveport, drawing on the memories of childhood friends and acquaintances.Less

Potbelly, paunch and innards: variations on the abdomen in Marivaux’s L’Homère travesti and Le Télémaque travesti

Clémence Aznavour

in Bellies, bowels and entrails in the eighteenth century

In Marivaux’s plays and fictional memoirs, the somatic vocabulary is quite limited and mostly refers to the ‘face’, the ‘eyes’ and the ‘hands’ of the characters. The ‘belly’ is rarely mentioned, ... More

In Marivaux’s plays and fictional memoirs, the somatic vocabulary is quite limited and mostly refers to the ‘face’, the ‘eyes’ and the ‘hands’ of the characters. The ‘belly’ is rarely mentioned, except in order to describe the gluttony of servants and peasants. ‘Paunch’, ‘potbelly’ and ‘innards’, on the other hand, punctuate two parodic works Marivaux wrote at the beginning of his career: L’Homère travesti and Le Télémaque travesti. This chapter analyses this exceptional vocabulary and highlights its link with the burlesque register, and the specific context of the Homeric Warfare in which L’Homère traveti and Le Télémaque travesti played their part. Throughout the burlesque register, Marivaux creates new epic targets and focuses on physiological disturbances in order to call into questions the heroism of antiquity and the alleged perfection of the heroic body. This register also allows him to examine the link between appetite and sexual desire: if the equivalence between food and women’s body will remain in Marivaux’s following works, the ‘belly’ will never appear again as the material location of desire.Less

Iconography of the belly: eighteenth-century satirical prints

Barbara Stentz

in Bellies, bowels and entrails in the eighteenth century

This chapter analyses metaphorical and formal aspects of satirical representations of bodily functions related to digestion and evacuation (indigestions, winds, belches, enemas, etc.) and their ... More

This chapter analyses metaphorical and formal aspects of satirical representations of bodily functions related to digestion and evacuation (indigestions, winds, belches, enemas, etc.) and their political overtones in graphic satire. Beyond the burlesque tradition, a large belly that attracts the eye can be evocative of the social and political tensions of the time. A traditional sign of opulence, power and wealth, the oversized belly signals the opposition and unbalanced relations between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless. In England, caricatures often portrayed greedy, potbellied physicians, while in France the revolutionary caricaturists used the belly as the symbol of the degeneration and of the moral and physical slackening of some of their adversaries. This iconography from the early times of the revolution shows a reversal after a while, as protruding bellies became unacceptable and depreciated and had to be corrected by radical treatments.Less

Popular Practice: The Belly and the “Bad Mind”

Stefan Ecks

in Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India

This chapter discusses popular notions of health, with a focus on perceptions of how different drugs are digested and on the humoral balance between the “hot” belly and the “cool” mind. The first ... More

This chapter discusses popular notions of health, with a focus on perceptions of how different drugs are digested and on the humoral balance between the “hot” belly and the “cool” mind. The first principle of Bengali body concepts is that the belly is the somatic center of good health. For Bengalis, health depends on the proper alignment between the belly and the mind. In this alignment, the belly is a “hot” source of energy that needs to be controlled by the “cool” sovereignty of the mind. The opposition between “cool” mind and “hot” belly is based on a humoral worldview. Indian Ayurvedic humoralism is based not on four but on three humors (tridosha) called vata, pitta, and kapha. Pitta tends to be hot and kapha to be cold, while vata is in-between.Less

This Little Piggy Made a Market: The Rise and Fall of Pork Bellies

Kara Newman

in The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets

This chapter examines the rise and fall of pork bellies as commodities traded on the futures markets. As a financial instrument, pork bellies were iconic. For many, the image of greedy traders as ... More

This chapter examines the rise and fall of pork bellies as commodities traded on the futures markets. As a financial instrument, pork bellies were iconic. For many, the image of greedy traders as pigs at the trough was equally iconic. Until pork belly became a headliner on restaurant menus, few knew exactly what a pork belly was. Pork bellies created a viable market at a precarious time for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and they lasted for a half-century, until the market closed in July 2011. This chapter first explains what a pork belly is before discussing how trading of hogs and pork parts began. It then considers how novel manufacturing techniques—pioneered in Cincinnati—transformed the meatpacking industry, and how Chicago supplanted Cincinnati as Porkopolis. It also looks at the Chicago stockyards and particularly the “disassembly line” that rose up to slaughter and process hogs, pork belly trading during the Civil War era, the disapperance of bacon from supermarkets, pork belly's revival on American diets, and how technology drove pork bellies out of commodity exchanges.Less

Reading Stein’s Genders: Transmasculine Signification in the 1910s and 1920s

Chris Coffman

in Gertrude Stein's Transmasculinity

This is the second of two chapters that examine ways Stein’s increasingly experimental writings during the first three decades of the twentieth century gradually work through dominant early ... More

This is the second of two chapters that examine ways Stein’s increasingly experimental writings during the first three decades of the twentieth century gradually work through dominant early twentieth-century genders, loosening up rigid constructs of masculinity she encountered in Otto Weininger’s misogynist Sex and Character. Chapter Three argues that her innovative writings from the 1910’s and 1920’s—such as the long poems “Lifting Belly” and “Patriarchal Poetry” (1927)—use Toklas’s feminine positioning to establish Stein’s masculinity. Whereas Stein’s earlier fiction presented more subtle challenges to Weininger, Stein’s experimental poems from the 1910’s and 1920’s explicitly and jubilantly use linguistic innovation to articulate a flexible and feminist transmasculinity.Less

The Stain of Spain in Some of Stein

in Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

When Gertrude Stein wrote ‘What is Spain’ in ‘Lifting Belly’, she stated ‘declarative question’ and developed a new grammatical trope that poses a question and states a fact at the same time. Stein ... More

When Gertrude Stein wrote ‘What is Spain’ in ‘Lifting Belly’, she stated ‘declarative question’ and developed a new grammatical trope that poses a question and states a fact at the same time. Stein started writing ‘Lifting Belly’ in Mallorca in 1915, and completed it in 1917. ‘Lifting Belly’ was a text about a specific kind of sexual relationship, in a specific time and place, in contexts of national war and domestic peace. ‘What is Spain’ stated the physical mystery that ‘In the midst of writing there is merriment’. Spain in ‘Lifting Belly’ built a plan of allusion that represents an unmerged simultaneity of erotic, political and aesthetic meaning. Like ‘Lifting Belly’, St. Teresa and Avila made new ways of remaking love and war.Less