peer-reviewed article / 1992

Raks El Sharki: Transculturation of a Performance Form

Barbara Sellers-Young

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Description

This article is a foundational statement of Sellers-Young's approach to belly dance as a transnational and mediated form. She argues that American "belly dancing" is not simply Raks el Sharki transplanted from North Africa and the Middle East. It is a new cultural formation produced through Orientalist fantasy, world's fair spectacle, burlesque, Middle Eastern restaurant culture, second-wave feminism, body culture, and improvised pedagogy.

The essay is notable for refusing easy judgment. Sellers-Young recognizes that American women found in the dance a powerful route toward sensual agency, improvisation, and bodily confidence. At the same time, she insists that this liberation was entangled with Western fantasies of the available "Oriental" woman. The result is a nuanced account of transculturation: movement travels through images, institutions, markets, teachers, bodies, and desires, becoming neither pure tradition nor simple falsification.

Metadata

Typepeer-reviewed article
Year1992
Era Early 1990s: Transculturation, Feminism, and Orientalist Mediation i

Early 1990s: Transculturation, Feminism, and Orientalist Mediation

The early belly dance writings mark a shift from local ritual to transnational circulation. Sellers-Young argues that American “belly dance” is not simply raqs sharqi transplanted intact, but a transcultured form shaped by Orientalism, commercial entertainment, Arab American restaurants, women’s liberation, body culture, and new pedagogies. Her analysis becomes increasingly double-edged: belly dance may empower American women by giving bodily access to sensuality and self-expression, yet that empowerment often depends on an imagined Arab female body produced by Western fantasy.

This period introduces a lasting concern with authenticity as unstable. A supposedly traditional form may already be hybrid, staged, mediated, or commercially transformed. The question becomes not “is it authentic?” but “who is authorized to make it mean, under what historical conditions, and with what bodily effects?”

Continuity: dance remains social evidence.

Break: the object of analysis moves from ritual structure to mediated global image.

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AuthorBarbara Sellers-Young
JournalJournal of Popular Culture
Pages141-152
DOI10.1111/j.0022-3840.1992.2602141.x
ISSN0022-3840; 1540-5931
Roleprimary author

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Analysis

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Barbara Sellers-Young’s 1992 essay on Raks el Sharki stands at an important juncture in her scholarship: early enough to retain the anthropological and historical clarity of her first ethnographic work, yet already unmistakably oriented toward the questions that would define her later career—how movement travels, how technique is remade by new bodies and institutions, how women use dance to negotiate identity, and how embodiment is never innocent of fantasy, commerce, or power. The article is ostensibly about American belly dance, but its real subject is larger and more consequential: what happens when a performance form crosses into a culture that desires it before it...

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