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A Contemporary Cairo Raqs Sharqi Ethnography a Dissertation UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Core Connections: A Contemporary Cairo Raqs Sharqi Ethnography A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Critical Dance Studies by Christine M. Şahin September 2018 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Chairperson Dr. Sherine Hafez Dr. Anthea Kraut Copyright by Christine M. Şahin 2018 The Dissertation of Christine M. Şahin is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Greatest thanks to God. Thank you for, and God bless, the beautiful dancing, stories, and people not only within these pages but throughout the vibrantly remarkable and resilient city of Cairo, Egypt. This dissertation has been a great collaborative effort, and there are many I wish to thank. Starting in Cairo, I owe deepest gratitude to the dancers, workers and staff, audiences, and management throughout the raqs sharqi dance industry. Additional gratitude goes to those that directly helped me as research collaborators in this project, and the transportation drivers (Mohamed and Ahmed, among many others) that made the links between my site-specific chapters so rich and insightful. Thank you Karim for being a key research partner and translator for this project, for your patience, kindness, support, and comradeship throughout my fieldwork. Thank you to Shahrzad, Vanessa, Sara Farouk Ahmed, Zara, Ramy, Khaled, Eman Zaki, Samia, Ali, Wael, Heba, and Nashwa for your generosity, assistance, and wealth of wisdom. Greatest gratitude to Sayyad Henkesh for keeping the history of music and dance on Mohamed Ali street alive and for your generosity in sharing your wealth of knowledge. Particular dancers and musicians I’d like to thank are Suzy, Julia, Amina, Randa Kamel, Camelia, Azizia and her husband Ahmed, Raqia Hassan, Farida Fahmy, Sahar Samara, Amie Sultan, Yossry el Hefni, Bossy, Mona, Donya, Aicha Babacar, Hussien Mansour, Luna, Kawakeb, Hamada, Tamra Henna, Tito Seif, Soraya, Shams, and Farah Nasri and her crew: Ahmed, Wael, Mahdy, and Salah. iv To my core dance teachers and mentors within the U.S./Cairo- Sahra C. Kent, Lynda Latifa Wilkinson, Artemis Mourat, Shahrzad, and Faten Salama, thank you for teaching me not only steps, musicality, and performance skills, but for instilling the critical importance of culturally contextualizing raqs sharqi and my performances and understandings of it. Thank you all for giving me the support and encouragement to trust in myself, love myself, and the learning toolkit to do this ethnography with integrity and sensitive nuance as a practitioner-scholar. Sahra and Latifa in particular, you’ve left such an imprint on my heart and in my own journey that I hope to honor with this project and future dance endeavors inside and outside of academia. My graduate career at UC Riverside was an intense intellectual adventure full of the struggles and satisfactions of critically nuancing my own thinking, understanding, and ways of moving through the world. To my dissertation chair, Jacqueline Shea Murphy, I send deepest and warmest love and thanks. From my first grad seminar ever in ‘cultural approaches to dance studies’ I knew our relationship would be one of greatest meaning and vulnerable strength in finding ways to make this world a bit better of a place through the potential, beauty, and knowledge of danced discourse. It was such a blessing and honor to work with you on crafting a multiply ‘moving’ ethnography. To Anthea Kraut, I simply hope I can teach and mentor with as much care, generosity, and dynamic critical vigor as you consistently offer through your pedagogy and personality. Your small subtle gestures of mini-deodorants, tissues, and kashi bars contradictorily reveal the endless depths of your big heart. (We all know you love a good contradiction!) To Sherine Hafez, your theoretical perspectives throughout my research, v and your heart-felt advice in all areas of my life, academic and otherwise, have been a wonderful blessing to this project and my well-being. Other professors that have significantly impacted my own thinking, pedagogy, and research include Jose Reynoso, Cristina Rosa, Imani Kai Johnson, Linda Tomko, and Jeff Sacks. Of course, even before graduate school there was the impactful support, advising, and ever-inspiring teaching and insights of my undergraduate anthropology professor Patricia Sloane-White. The community, support, and comradeship found within my UCR cohort deserves special recognition. Thank you for being such great friends and colleagues Casey Avaunt, Denise Machin, and Wei-Chi Wu. Other special thanks go to Katie Stahl-Kovell, J. Delecave, Xiomara Forbez, and Theresa Goldbach from UCR. Last but not least, the endless motivational learning and support from my students while TA’ing at UCR have been integral in shaping my thinking and teaching. Finally, I’d like to acknowledge my family and friends in shaping who I am as a person, but also for the love and support offered throughout my graduate career and particularly the researching and writing of this dissertation. Endless thanks and love to Amy, Glenn, Renee, Laura, Sasha, Candis, and Tucker. To my mom, Amy Canady, thank you for instilling and nurturing my sense of Faith, it’s been the seeds and roots of this project and everything I’ve endeavored within my life – I can’t imagine my life without this sense of purpose and connection to make the world more beautiful through love, compassion, and understanding. Your support and love throughout this project have been an unwavering foundation of strength and persistence. To my ‘little man’ Tucker, perhaps it’s odd to acknowledge your dog, but you’ve given me so much love and support, your vi presence in my life is a wonderful blessing. To my big sister Laura, I owe a lot to you as well, you have been endlessly helpful in being not only my 24-hr ‘word worm’ but also for your proof-reading and comradery. To my dad, Glenn Canady, and in loving memory of Kathleen (Kate) Hoekstra, thanks for fostering my love for travel, coffee, knowledge, and non-traditional nerdiness – they’ve combined quite well in making this dissertation come to life. I also want to thank all of my raqs sharqi dance students, past and present, for inspiring me and supporting me. Two long-term friendships of the ultimate dance nerdiness and sincerest love deserve special attention; thank you to Roberto Mejia and Anne ‘Anuni’ Vermeyden. In addition to relishing in the deepest depths of dance nerd- talk over many shishas, teas, and lattes, I profoundly appreciate your friendships and presences as willing co-adventurers on various aspects of my dance scholar and dance- practitioner journeys. vii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to the dancers of Cairo. Listening to the rich complexity of contemporary Cairo through your danced and verbal story-telling has been an immeasurable blessing, honor, and privilege. Thank you for sharing your stories. Thank you for courageously stepping onto those stages and sharing your dance, and the incalculable strength and heart it takes to do so. May you continue to move yourself and others into deeper ways of feeling, being, knowing, and doing. Alf Shukar. viii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Core Connections: A Contemporary Cairo Raqs Sharqi Ethnography by Christine M. Şahin Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Critical Dance Studies University of California, Riverside, September 2018 Dr. Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Chairperson My dissertation, Core Connections: A Contemporary Cairo Raqs Sharqi Ethnography investigates local, intra-MENA, and global circulations of raqs sharqi centered within Cairo, Egypt. I use dance ethnography to explore ways raqs sharqi contexts and bodies relate to tumultuous contemporary Middle Eastern politics. While most belly dance scholarship remains highly western-centric, addressing the practice in terms of its use by and value to western practitioners, and only tangentially treating the topic of how the dance circulates within Middle Eastern sites and through Middle Eastern bodies, I centralize the Cairene dancing body as a means of knowledge production and dissemination while fleshing out nuanced portraits of the lives, stories, and political insights of Middle Eastern dance and non-dance bodies. This is particularly necessary, I argue, considering Cairo’s position as a key center within the Middle East today, with nations looking to Cairo for not only the latest trends in music and dance but also as a key negotiator since the aftermath of the series of Middle Eastern political uprisings, known as the ‘Arab Spring,’ particularly Egypt’s ix January 25th, 2011 revolution. I thus position my research in Cairo as a core site for analyzing the political, gender, and economic transformations the country has been experiencing. My project queries and argues for the unique insights, tactics, and corporeal knowledge a ground-level, multi-sited, and dance-centric analysis offers to such pressing politics. My ethnographic research methodology consists primarily of participant- observation fieldwork at an array of class-stratified performance venues, with a focus on choreographic analysis within these field sites. Additionally, I conduct interviews with professional dancers and others involved with the dance industry at large. The project sites include Nile cruise ships, five-star hotels studding the Nile, and the cabarets with all male spectators clustered along historic Pyramid Street. In addition to interweaving Dance
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