Visiting Assistant Professor Amanda Lee publishes article in Nineteenth- Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal titled “Péris and Devadasis in Paris: Orientalist Ballet as Poetic Translation.”

In the early- to mid- nineteenth-century, French artists and poets traveled through the Middle East and North Africa, witnessing performances by Egyptian dancers known as ghawazee or awâlim (singular almeh), while in Paris they encountered real live Indian devadasis, drawing fanciful connections between Indian dance and traditional middle eastern dances they witnessed abroad.These dancers, whether in France or in their country of origin, left their mark on the Western stage. Dancers and the poets who observed them created representations of an imagined India, Middle East, and North Africa that bolstered orientalist ideologies, while simultaneously undermining the binary necessary for maintaining them. By studying poets’ popular perception of the dance of the almeh, of devadasis’ corporeal “perfumed poetry,” as well as poet Théophile Gautier’s attempts to translate foreign texts and his own poetry into“orientalist ballets” on the Western stage, my article advances revisions of common notions of orientalism, and draws connections between dance and literature.