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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
When Homi Bhabha discusses the problematics of signification and coding in intercultural interpretation, he questions the relationship between practices and the experience of culture. By questioning the power of codes and signifiers to fix cultural identity, Bhabha allows that the stable object of culture might be caught ‘in the disturbed artifice of its signification’, that is, ‘at the edge of experience’. This suggests to theatre and performance studies that the culturally inscribed body need not be viewed as a stable repository of displaced and deferred codes. The body may be intercepted in situations, or at moments, when signification dissolves and is reconfigured.
1. I wish to thank Cassandra Shore of the Cassandra School in Minneapolis, Minnesota for her expertise in the performance history of belly dancing, as well as her expertise in the studio.
2. Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 126Google Scholar. See also Scheduler, Richard, ‘Intercultural Themes’, Performing Aits Journal, 11.3/12.1, 1989, pp. 151–62Google Scholar, and Turner, Victor, ‘Body, Brain, and Culture’, Performing Arts Journal, 10.2 (1986), pp. 26–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For distinctions between interpretative and experiential techniques in anthropology, see Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, especially Chapter 1, ‘On Ethnographic Authority’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
3. David Yanko and Gulgun Kay im, with generosity and enthusiasm, contributed photographs of their wedding for this publication. This article is dedicated to the memory of Mr Hayati Kayim.
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11. The mashrabiya is the carved screen which separated the women in the harem, but could also be seen through like the veil.
12. Shaarawi, Huda, Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist 1879–1924, edited and translated by Badran, Margot (New York: The Feminist Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Bouhdiba, A., Sexuality in Islam (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).Google Scholar
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16. In 1834, all dancers (ghawazee) were banished from Cairo in efforts to modernize Egypt under western influence. See Tucker, Judith E., Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Chapter 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17. Buonaventura, Wendy, The Serpent of the Nile: Women and Dance in the Arab World (New York: Interlink Books, 1994), p. 152Google Scholar; Mishkin, Julie Russo and Schill, Marta, The Compleat Belly Dancer: For Everyone Who Wants to be Healthy and Slim and Have Fun Getting There (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1973), p. 17Google Scholar. For an historical discourse on the position of women in Muslim society, including the codes of dress and costume, see Mentissi, Fatima, The Forgotten Queens of Islam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).Google Scholar
18. For a Lacanian analysis of the veil using film images, see Doane, Mary Ann, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar, especially Chapter 3, ‘Veiling Over Desire: Close-Ups of the Woman’, pp. 44–75.
19. Benthall, Jonathan, The Body as a Medium of Expression (New York: Dutton, 1975), p. 71.Google Scholar
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21. See Alloula, Marek, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for discussions of the appropriation of the image of the Oriental woman as sensual and of the body as well as the stagings of that sensuality.
22. For pictorial documentation of Egyptian dancing in Egypt but for Western patrons, see Roberts, David, ‘Egypt's Old Kingdom’, National Geographic, (01 1995), p. 38Google Scholar, (photograph by Kenneth Garrett).
23. Buonaventura, , pp. 149, 157Google Scholar. For another example of East staging East for Western gaze, see Slyomovics, Susan, ‘Cross-Cultural Dress and Tourist Performance in Egypt’, Performing Arts Journal, 11.3–12.1 (1989), pp. 139–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
24. Alloula, Malek, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) p. xv.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25. Said, , Orientalism, p. 243.Google Scholar
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28. Quotes are taken from discussions with dancers over a period of two years. Gratefully acknowledged are Christina Ouma (‘Shadia’), Peg Blader (‘Maja’), Kathy McCurdy (‘Naima’), Nezrine Kayoum, Gulgun Kayim, Cassandra Shore and students of the Cassandra School in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
29. Turner, Victor, ‘Body, Brain and Culture’, Performing Arts Journal, 10.2 (1986), p. 29.Google Scholar
30. Cassandra Shore, The Cassandra School, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Personal interview, 7 July 1995.
31. Much of this philosophy of dancing and performance can be traced to the mid-1970s. See, for example, Mishkin, Julie Russo and Schill, Marta, The Compleat Belly Dancer: For Everyone Who Wants to be Healthy and Slim and Have Fun Getting There (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1973)Google Scholar which includes instructions to ‘be demure, be haughty … be inviting’ (p. 135), as well as the statement: ‘a woman having a good time within her body, sharing her delight in motor expression, cannot be exploited’ (p. 17). See also two films which depict belly dancing as an historical art form and consider the contradictions between the personal or spiritual dimension of the dance and the dancer's professional life, The Ancient Art of Belly Dancing (The Belly Dance Co-op, Phoenix, Arizona, 1977) and Gameel Gamal: Oh, Beautiful Dancer (Phoenix Films, 1976).
32. For descriptions of Turkish wedding practices, including dancing, see among others Melek-Hanum, , Thirty Years in the Harem: The Autobiography of Melek-Hanum, Wife of H. H. Kibrizli-Mehemet-Pasha, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1872), pp. 86–90Google Scholar; Garnett, Lucy M. J., Home Life in Turkey (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1909), pp. 237–48Google Scholar. For Egypt, see Shaarawi, Huda, Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist 1879–1924, edited and translated by Badran, Margot (New York: The Feminist Press 1986), pp. 54–8.Google Scholar
33. Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 242.Google Scholar
34. Tadashi, Suzuki, ‘Culture is the Body’, Performing Arts Journal, 8.2 (1984), pp. 28–35 (29).Google Scholar
