This edited collection is compiled from the first MENACA (Middle East, North African, and Central Asian) Dance and Music Symposium (Pomona College, March 13-16, 2023), and includes a wide variety of readings on Middle Eastern Dance and Music. The writers range from pioneers in the field of Middle Eastern dance and dance studies, from Barbara Sellers-Young, Karin van Nieuwkerk, and Anthony Shay to a range of newer voices. These authors come from dance, performance studies, theatre, and anthropology backgrounds and provide the reader with insights seen through a variety of lenses such as orientalism, colonialism and post-colonialism, nationalism, and Bourdieu’s notion of capital to better understand the phenomenon of Middle Eastern dance and music in its many iterations. The collection gives equal coverage to the three major ethno-linguistic areas of the region: The Arab World, The Turkish World and the Iranian/Persianate World.
Introduction: Dance in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.-
Part 1: The Arab World.
Chapter 01: Belly Dance: Somatic Ways of Improvising
Happiness.
Chapter 02: Dancing Bodies, Religion, and Gender in Egypt.-
Chapter 03: Song in Najib Mahfuz Palace Walk: Recreating and Appreciating
the Diegetic Soundtrack of a Modern Egyptian Novel.
Chapter 04: Bourdieus
Thinking Tools Applied to Bellydance Research.
Chapter 05: Representations
and paradoxes in the practice of belly dance in Egypt and Brazil.- Part 2:
The Turkish World.
Chapter 06: Anatolian Folklore and the Construction of a
New Turkish Identity.
Chapter 07: Halay: From Ritualistic Circle Dance to
Political Act in Turkey.
Chapter 08: Motion and Transcendence in Euro-Turkic
Context: the Alevi Semah.
Chapter 09: Standing in the Dâr: Shrinking the
Body Towards the Vertical Axis in Alevi Rituals.- Part 3: The Iranian World.-
Chapter 10: What Can Dance and Other Non-Dance Patterned Movement Systems
Tell Us about Iranian Society?.
Chapter 11: The Quotidien and Cinematic
Lives of Iranian Cabaret Dancers in Twentieth-Century Iran.
Chapter 12:
Iranian Dancers Perform Despite Restrictions: Navigating a Sociopolitical
Obstacle Course.
Chapter 13: Examining Dance as a Third Space in the Iranian
Diaspora.
Chapter 14: Contemporizing Iranian Dance: The Importance of Using
Pedagogy Rooted in Traditional Iranian Dance Aesthetics to Explore Current
Themes.
Anthony Shay is professor of dance and cultural studies at Pomona College, USA, and has served as author, editor and co-editor of 14 books and edited volumes, and over seventy articles for a wide variety of scholarly journals. His most recent book is Folk Dance and the Construction of National Identities (Palgrave Macmillan 2023), and he served as Editor and contributor to Dance in the Persianate World (2023). In 2024, he was made honorary fellow of the Iranian Studies Association.
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