https://orcid.org/0009-0009-7041-5029
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Sara Marcus, From the Streets of Cairo to St. Louis, Louis: Musical Print Culture and the Intermedial Travels of the Danse du Ventre, American Literary History, Volume 37, Issue 1, Spring 2025, Pages 31–68, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajaf001
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Abstract
This essay discusses the danse du ventre—a Middle Eastern dance that proved controversial at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago—to explore how the social effects of a repertoire of corporeal motions, repeated across a range of venues and through a variety of media, can be amplified by remediation. First, I read contemporaneous accounts of the dance and efforts by Anthony Comstock and other “anti-vice” crusaders to censor its performances, showing how attempts to suppress the dance increased the audience for it and occasionally derailed the regulatory bodies that were mustered to stifle it. Then I track the dance’s treatment in popular songs and piano pieces of the era, including “The Streets of Cairo” and “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis,” examining sheet music as a print-culture medium distinctly capable of evading censors’ authority at the turn of the twentieth century. In light of scholars’ recent assertions that literature can invite reading practices that resemble listening, I argue that attending to sheet music—where character-building, scene-setting, and narrative are approached not just through language and its sonically charged dimensions but also through musical elements and interactions between music and the written word—can enable us to be more precise about what we mean when we talk about aural reading practices.
