Middle Eastern Dance

This edited collection is compiled from the first MENACA (Middle East, North African, and Central Asian) Dance and Music Symposium (Pomona College, March 13-16, 2023), and includes a wide variety of readings on Middle Eastern Dance and Music. The writers range from pioneers in the field of Middle Eastern dance and dance studies, from Barbara Sellers-Young, Karin van Nieuwkerk, and Anthony Shay to a range of newer voices. These authors come from dance, performance studies, theatre, and anthropology backgrounds and provide the reader with insights seen through a variety of lenses such as orientalism, colonialism and post-colonialism, nationalism, and Bourdieu’s notion of capital to better understand the phenomenon of Middle Eastern dance and music in its many iterations. The collection gives equal coverage to the three major ethno-linguistic areas of the region: The Arab World, The Turkish World and the Iranian/Persianate World.


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.