Portfolio

Following are selections of various writing work that I have performed. Click "more" to view a longer version.

Feature Articles

Fitness and Bellydance: Video and DVD Overview

Habibi, Vol. 21, No. 2

Oriental dance has been gaining popularity as a healthy and appealing form of exercise. It employs all parts of the body in “soft” movements requiring control and strength, and becomes aerobic when one layers, mixes—and dances. Looking at the options available to our readers, we found that most videos and DVDs fall into two categories: those that emphasize exercise and those that are instructional, using fitness as a foundation for dance, much like a musician practices scales. [ more ]

Rhythm Review

Habibi, Vol. 20, No. 3

Many rhythm CDs are currently on the market. Some are excellent teaching tools; others are good for performance; and some answer both needs. The tabla is a defining feature in many compositions. A versatile and essential component of Middle Eastern folk and modern music—and essential to dancers—it is used to play intricate supporting patterns or to introduce complex
nuances for melodic lines. Found in nightclubs, recording studios, and classical conservatories, it is fundamental to musical arrangements. This article is a review of some recent rhythm productions. (For information on specific productions, see the end of the review. As we have become accustomed, spellings on CD covers are inconsistent. The spelling used on the individual CDs is maintained, where applicable.) [ more ]

Interviews

Arab Cinema in New York: Perspectives from New York Film Festival's Richard Pena

Arabesque Magazine

Over the past couple of years, New Yorkers have had more opportunity to view samples of Arab cinema in New York theatres. Most of the credit for this availability must be given to the vision and efforts of Richard Pena, Program Director of the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, and the Walter Reade Theatre; and he is responsible for developing and curating the Centennial of Arab Cinema (Nov. 1 - Dec. 5, 1996). My first real introduction to the wealth of Arabic films came with this "Centennial," the largest and first major endeavor to present this genre of film culture in the United States. [ more ]

Reviews

CD Review: Rashed Juma: Arabesque

Habibi, Vol. 21, No. 1

It is rare to receive music to review that is extraordinary. Rashed Juma’s music is refreshingly
original and contemporary, and the execution, concert quality. Here is a rare voice where inspiration, ingenuity, and personal expressiveness converge. Juma’s debut album, Arabesque, is exquisite. The CD is not yet released, so detailed production information is not available. [ more ]

Book Review: Something in the Way She Moves: Dancing Women From Salome to Madonna By Wendy Buonaventura

Habibi, Vol. 20, No. 3

Something in the Way She Moves is a well-written exploration of dance through women’s eyes. A scholarly approach to dance of different cultures through history, the book includes a detailed index and bibliography. Wendy Buonaventura—author of Serpent of the Nile, dancer and choreographer—is interesting and “opinionated.” [more]

DVD Review: Hahbi'Ru: Tradition, Legend & Folklore

Habibi, Vol. 20, No. 3

This is a wonderful production of a live performance at a Renaissance fair. Directed, choreographed, and produced by John Compton with a company of twelve female dancers,
two male dancers, and musicians, Hahbi’Ru: Tradition, Legend, & Folklore presents a variety of dances from all over the Levant. The orchestra—percussion, wind instruments (ney and mizmar), and a rhababa—sound authentic and inspirationally improvised. [ more ]

CD Review: Youssou N’Dour: Egypt

Habibi, Vol. 21, No. 1

In Egypt, Youssou N’Dour, an internationally respected African musician, documents Sufi music from Senegal. The songs, composed and sung by N’Dour, contain religious references to the sages and saints of Senegal. Though expressing religious themes, the music stands on its own—beautifully conceived compositions with interesting and contemporarily oriented explorations of Egyptian and Senegalese sensibilities. The mixture is clean. One can easily distinguish the blended Egyptian Arabic sounds from the more African-sounding Senegalese arrangements. [ more ]

Academic Manuscripts

Convergence of High and Low Cultures: The Pursuit of Class

Herbert Gans (Popular Culture and High Culture) has written extensively and significantly about the values and standards which constitute the basis of a taste culture and a taste public. The major source of differentiation between taste cultures and publics is socioeconomic level or class: The range of taste cultures and public follows the range and hierarchy of classes in American society (Gans, 1999). We are aware, however, of the nouveau riche, the yuppies, and the wannabes who dress in suits and gowns to attend performances at Lincoln Center, not to enhance cultural knowledge or aesthetic experience, not for individual pleasure and personal, artistic/intellectual journeys, but to imitate behavior, in other words, “to act as” or to pursue an elite or upper class aesthetic, even if they are “officially” (financially, culturally) of that class. [ more ]

Imagination Inflation and Suggestibility  in Children’s Testimony: “There is a Santa Claus”

With an increasing awareness of child sexual abuse, children have often been called to testify as either victim and/or witness. The courts and science have failed to reach a conclusion on the reliability of children’s testimony. All witness testimony is complicated by the variable elements of memory, suggestibility, and obedience to authority which renders determining the facts of a case for acquittal or indictment, outside of physical evidence or criminal confession, complex. For children, testimony is further complicated by age; their less developed memory faculties; the emotional and psychological trauma elicited by abuse and the courtroom situation; and by their more intense proclivity to cooperate with trusted, adult authority figures. These components tend to make them more susceptible to suggestion and possibly jeopardize a fair trial. [ more ]

Social Change: Marx and Durkheim

For Marx, all social intercourse is reduced to economic or material origins. In addition to ascribing most human activities to economic pursuits, he proposes a solution for societal ills (class divisions) through a perfect model, communism, the only social system that can revolutionize the  intolerable political organization of society. Marx is reductivist,  political (though he decries political power as the official expression of antagonism in civil society, p. 219), and advocates revolution as the only means for real change. Durkheim is ecumenical, a sociologist, and purports the natural evolution of society. Marx is critical of the current scheme of human life and imposes his own schemata as ultimate solution, a dogma which ironically suggests both orthodoxy (religiosity) and idealism. Durkheim, on the other hand, is neither critical nor has an agenda. [ more ]

Stepford Moms: The Cultural Compromise of Yuppie Mothers

Yuppie motherhood, comprised of the children of baby boomers and mothers of Generation X,  is both a new phenomena and a regression to a Victorian model of mothering: New, as it connotes the contemporary generation of mothers classified as “yuppies”, and reactionary –  mothering in retrograde – as a return to the Victorian era of responsible mothering when true womanhood was judged by purity, piousness, domesticity, and submissiveness. In an era when feminism is assumed as a behavioral norm, appropriated into social consciousness, or emblematic of popular mind-sets, commerce, and fashion, does this form of mothering represent a failure of feminism rather than its evolutionary progression, as yuppie dogma might presume?  [ more ]

To Veil or Not to Veil: A Review of Revealing Reveiling: Islamist Gender Ideology in Contemporary Egypt (Sherifa Zuhur)

Today many Muslim women in Egypt, particularly the younger generation, have chosen to “reveil” which means typically donning the head scarf known as higab. Just over a decade ago it was less common to see veiled women on the streets of Cairo, a custom that their forebears struggled to overthrow at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Revealing Reveiling, Sherifa Zuhur  terms this  renaissance of covering as emblematic of the new or modern Islamic woman, which seems at first a contradiction of terms. Is it truly a modern movement in which women are forging their Islamic identities in a position of feminist strength/choice, or is it a  return to past, archetypal images?  Is choosing to veil a considered  philosophical stance of political, religious, and cultural identification, akin to a new kind of Islamic feminism or revolution, or is it instead a less conscious predisposition and adherence to a new fundamentalist authority and fervor? It is a complicated issue. [ more ]

Whoracracy: Vaginal Politics

The image of the Prostitute in American neo-mythology and history, as depicted in our cultural symbols and Hollywood renditions, has embodied such diverse representations as the criminally profane, the “fallen” debauched, the romantic illicit, the satanic seductress, and the salacious sacred – oxymoronic adjectives juxtaposed, coexisting oppositions, that altogether correctly imply a doublespeak about whoredom. Why does prostitution generate such unremitting confusion and contribute to historically unanswerable moral questions and belligerent legal debate? Because it’s about sex –  where private and public worlds collide. Sex – improvisational, visceral, impulsive, unpredictable, and lustful on the personal level, while harnessed, controlled, and institutionalized or marginalized on the public scale. [ more ]