Dancing the Hootchy Kootchy: The Rhythms and Contortions of American Orientalism

Abstract

If the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair serves as an exemplary site through which to trace U.S. engagement with the metanarrative of modernity, the figure of the belly dancer exemplifies the way in which the orientalist apparatus could be deployed as a strategy for negotiating the disorientations of modernity. By using the phrase “metanarrative of modernity,” I am referencing the critiques that explore the universalizing, Eurocentric a ssumptions that a re often smuggled i nto the notion of modernity.1 In particular, I am interested in exploring the way in which the metanarrative of modernity operates by disavowing the colonialist and imperialist power relations in which it is rooted, and in demonstrating how the sublimated aspects of this powerful metanarrative found expression through the cultural mythology of the belly dancer. In this sense, the figure of the belly dancer serves as a construction of alterity that reinforces the Enlightenment-based presumptions built into the metanarrative of modernity, rather than as an instantiation of alternative or vernacular modernities. In other words, images of belly dancers rendered in photographic a lbums of the Fair serve as mythological figures through which to trace contemporaneous U.S. engagements with the disorienting processes of modernization and expansionism.