The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (review)

The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, edited by Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon, offers us a remarkably wide-ranging investigation into the lives of courtesans, from ancient to modern times. The collection's eighteen essays provide us with the research of distinguished as well as younger scholars coming from various disciplines (music history, ethnomusicology, Asian studies, art history, comparative literature, anthropology, history, classics, women's studies). The essays are more or less evenly shared among authors of both genders. Most if not all of the authors engage with feminist methodologies and prove quite convincing in each of their approaches, often yielding enlightening insights. An accompanying CD as well as several illuminating illustrations serve to enhance our aural and visual experience as we travel backward and forward to the various societies and the corresponding cultural spaces courtesans inhabited over the course of more than two millennia.

Many of the volume's essays present the courtesan as a "reincarnation" of the same figure in other cultures and settings. Indeed, a series of common denominators serve to link up the courtesan of ancient Greece and, say, the same figure in seventeenth–century China or during Japan's Edo period (1603–1868); for instance, this otherwise elusive female figure was, almost without exception, well educated, wealthy, and well versed in the arts (literature, music, dance, rhetoric, calligraphy, etc.). A number of other parallels rise to the surface when the volume is perused from cover to cover. Close to half of the volume's essays portray the courtesan as musician, singer, or musical composer in her own right. The courtesan cultures of the Italian Renaissance, modern India, and the late Ming dynasty of seventeenth-century China, for example, centered around poetry, music, and the performative potential of both of these forms of entertainment. One of the most striking parallels is that between the Chinese and the Italian courtesan, both of whom bear traces of the actress, a performer par excellence. Current-day Japan and Korea boast of their respective courtesans (geisha and gisaeng) as "guardians of authentic traditions" (16); the same may be said of their precolonial Indian counterpart.

While remaining sensitive to historical and cross-cultural differences, much of the research forces us to rethink the gendering of power, as the figure of the courtesan is shown as partaking in both high/low, sacred/secular cultural traditions. A remarkable manipulator of various art forms (rhetoric, music, dance, fashion, magic), the courtesan is seen as constantly, often seamlessly, blurring the lines between otherwise distinct cultural, social, and gender categories. Several of the volume's contributors thus set out to expose the intriguing nature of the Western and Eastern worlds' courtesan cultures with their endless ambiguities, paradoxes, and hitherto undetected though quite real connections to the daily life of the city, be it fourth-century BCE Athens, early modern Venice, the Lucknow society of second-century CE India, Edo (modern Tokyo), twentieth-century Korea, or postcolonial India. The collection offers a fascinating overview of what "courtesanship" meant to the broader sociopolitical makeup of a given society, how it was represented, defined, and controlled according to the standards of vastly different cultures and time periods. Ties between courtesans (or "professional female entertainers") and the sociopolitical as well as economic contexts within which they flourished were sometimes so tightly knit—as, for instance, the case of the gisaeng and the Korean court society that traditionally sponsored her—that the downfall of one could and did entail a significant transformation and, ultimately, the "disappearance" of the other (as cogently argued by Joshua D. Pilzer in the volume's sixteenth chapter). Notable changes were also in store for the tawa'if, the courtesan singer-dancer of the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century who was at the center of India's elite entertainment, as nicely demonstrated by ethnomusicologist Regula Burckhardt Qureshi in "Female Agency and Patrilineal Constraints: Situating Courtesans in Twentieth-Century India," which investigates female performers' migration from feudal to salon culture.

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