Middle Eastern Dance

Anthony Shay is professor of dance and cultural studies at Pomona College, USA,  and has served as author, editor and co-editor of 14 books and edited volumes, and over seventy articles for a wide variety of scholarly journals. His most recent book is Folk Dance and the Construction of National Identities (Palgrave Macmillan 2023), and he served as Editor and contributor to Dance in the Persianate World (2023). In 2024, he was made honorary fellow of the Iranian Studies Association.

• Introduction: Dance in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.- Part 1: The Arab World.- Chapter 01: Belly Dance: Somatic Ways of Improvising Happiness.- Chapter 02: Dancing Bodies, Religion, and Gender in Egypt.- Chapter 03: Song in Najib Mahfuz’ Palace Walk: Recreating and Appreciating the Diegetic “Soundtrack” of a Modern Egyptian Novel.- Chapter 04: Bourdieu’s Thinking Tools Applied to Bellydance Research.- Chapter 05: Representations and paradoxes in the practice of belly dance in Egypt and Brazil.- Part 2: The Turkish World.- Chapter 06: Anatolian Folklore and the Construction of a New Turkish Identity.- Chapter 07: Halay: From Ritualistic Circle Dance to Political Act in Turkey.- Chapter 08: Motion and Transcendence in Euro-Turkic Context: the Alevi Semah.- Chapter 09: Standing in the Dâr: Shrinking the Body Towards the Vertical Axis in Alevi Rituals.- Part 3: The Iranian World.- Chapter 10: What Can Dance and Other Non-Dance Patterned Movement Systems Tell Us about Iranian Society?.- Chapter 11: The Quotidien and Cinematic Lives of Iranian Cabaret Dancers in Twentieth-Century Iran.- Chapter 12: Iranian Dancers Perform Despite Restrictions: Navigating a Sociopolitical Obstacle Course.- Chapter 13: Examining Dance as a Third Space in the Iranian Diaspora.- Chapter 14: Contemporizing Iranian Dance: The Importance of Using Pedagogy Rooted in Traditional Iranian Dance Aesthetics to Explore Current Themes.