ABSTRACT
This essay investigates the concept of a “ReNaissance of the Orient” (derived from Raymond Schwab’s “La Renaissance orientale”) and the complexity of the relationship between Occident and Orient. Flaubert’s tale “Hérodias” is taken as an example of a literary construct of a vision of the Orient which is refracted in numerous ways. The image of the Orient is made up of eclectic elements of historical, religious, literary, and iconographic source materials. The reading of the Flaubert text focuses on the poetic construction and exoticization of the “Other” with recourse to Edward Said’s thesis of the hegemonic colonial politics of power amid the complexities of what he calls “orientalism.” In Flaubert’s text these regimes are transferred to the topography of the female body. The focus of this poetic reconstruction is Salome’s dance. This chapter analyses the subtle scenographic and choreographic dramaturgy in which this dance is depicted as a medium of seduction, political power, and artistic eclecticism. Salome’s dance displays interwoven patterns taken from various dancing styles and cultures. It is composed as a hybrid, a dance palimpsest made up of circus acrobatics and Temple Dance, belly-dancing and ballet, Sufi circles and poses borrowed from Western dance designers. Thus, the dance formulates a topography of that contradictory concept of the “Orient,” whose renascence helped shape Europe’s view of itself at the end of the 19th century. Salome’s dance in Flaubert’s fictional text contains Roman, African, Egyptian, Arab, and Jewish elements and may be regarded as an example of the movements and borrowings of cultural, religious, and political identity and their (dis-)entanglements.
