Looking for Little Egypt by Donna Carlton
Reviewed by Anala Rabari
I have to say when I first found this book in the store I was very excited. The one comment that was made to me over and over when I started belly dance was "Oh, are you going to be the next Little Egypt?" After the hundredth million time that I heard this I decided I really needed to get to the bottom of who this Little Egypt was. I mean I had heard the name even before I started bellydancing, but I had never really learned who she was or more importantly who she was suppose to be. And because of this I never really had an answer for all those people asking me if I was going to be the next Little Egypt. I wasn't even sure if it would be a good thing to be the next Little Egypt. I'm happy to say that after reading this book I now feel a little more confident in a reply to all these questions about Little Egypt.
This book is broken into 7 chapters, including a bibliography, illustration credits, and index. The two things I loved about this book are 1) that Carlton obviously set about to write a book that was thoroughly researched and she used a lot of primary and secondary sources and included those in her bibliography so the reader can consult them if they choose to do so themselves and 2) is that even though she set about to write the results of her academic study she didn't write it in an academic, stuffy way. Carlton has a very relaxed easy going way of writing almost as if she is just talking to a friend over coffee about her research.
The purpose of Carlton's book was to discover the real woman behind the legend that is Little Egypt. Thus it also tends to be a history of bellydance in the Western World. She starts with the 1893 Chicago's World Fair and exams all the possible ethnic groups that presented dancing girls and the community's reaction to what they perceived as immoral movements. She then follows the spread of bellydance and some of it's variants, like the hoochy coochy, to amusement parks, carnival and circus sideshows, burlesque houses, vaudeville stages, and even the opera. And Carlton examines the lives of several specific dancers as possible Little Egypts.
Throughout the book wonderful visual aids ranging from historical artwork, historical photographs, maps of the Chicago's World Fair grounds, historical ads, political cartoons, and photos of modern dancers are used. I particularly liked the fair maps and photos as they really added to the author's words and made me feel as if I were actually on the Midway in Chicago.
Although there were a few places that I felt the author came up short, such as not even addressing how the term belly dance came to be used, on the whole I feel that this book is a must read for Western dancers to learn the historic roots of the dance in their regions. It is also a good read for anyone who has ever been asked "Oh, you're a bellydancer? You mean like that Little Egypt?"