Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S (review)

Those of us who grew up in the Arab world never associated social dancing with ancient spirituality, female empowerment, embracing our curves, or toning our pelvic muscles for childbirth. How then did the mere act of tying a scarf around one’s hips to emphasize movement “evolve” into American cabaret-style burlesque, as well as the 1970s feminist “goddess revival”? And how does the American mainstream reconcile the image of the sexualized, erotic belly dancer with that of the helpless, submissive, veiled woman or harem slave?

In this elegantly written, extremely well researched book, Jarmakani examines the connection between the two seemingly opposite images, showing how, despite their apparent contradictions, both function as a visual vocabulary for American “structures of feeling” rooted in the notions of power and progress. Jarmakani then engages in a detailed semiotic analysis of the images of the hypercommodified belly dancer and the über-oppressed veiled woman, to reveal the political impetus behind their creation and wide circulation. She tracks the images of Arab womanhood from the turn of the twentieth century to the present political moment (post 9/11 and post war on Iraq), exploring the ideological context behind the successful commodification of the erotic belly dancer, the commercial use of images of sexually available Arab womanhood in early twentieth-century tobacco advertisements, and the contemporary representations of Arab women whose veils are no longer seductively transparent, but rather representative of ultimate oppression. She argues that, while the images themselves have changed over the years, their purpose is consistent, as each has served as an imaginative figure through which mainstream American culture came to grips with shifting power relations between the U.S. and the Middle East.

Jarmakani begins her analysis with the image of the Arab belly dancer who made her first public appearance in the U.S. at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Also known as the Columbian Exposition in celebration of 400 years since the arrival of Columbus, the fair itself was heralded as a monument to American progress and sought to unify the American people who were deeply divided at the time over socioeconomic and race issues aggravated by industrialization and increased immigration. An American cultural mythology was consciously fashioned by the fair’s organizers, who presented the West as “progress” (as well as “progressive”), thanks to the technological advances of an industrialized nation, while the East stood (still) as a primitive foil. The fairgrounds were physically divided between the “White City,” which displayed all manner of progress and modernity, and the Midway Plaisance, which served as the entertainment venue. It was there that “Little Egypt,” a Syrian dancer brought over by the organizers to embody and perform the cultural activities of the Arab world, became a hit. She attracted crowds of fairgoers who flocked to watch her, and found her “shockingly disgusting” yet seemingly irresistible as she loosened all the restrictions of the cool and chaste femininity of the Victorian era. As Little Egypt and various other belly dancers (all performing under the same moniker) proved such a hot commodity, “the belly dance soon became a standard feature of the burgeoning amusement business, and played a major role in the development of burlesque and striptease” (83).

Jarmakani then moves on to an equally convincing (and fascinating) analysis of the depiction of Arab and Middle Eastern womanhood in the early twentieth century. She argues that the differences between American and French Orientalist renderings of the odalisque reveal the different political relationships between the two Western countries and the Middle East. Likewise, the Ottoman Empire never presented the same threat to the U.S. as it had to Western Europe during the nineteenth century. While France needed to represent the “Terrible Turk” as a brutal and despotic ruler, the U.S., which had other rivals to fight, could show him as a...