Eastern Dancers and the Western Gaze: The Queer Spectacle of Oriental Dance in Decadent Poetry

Eastern dance traditions have historically been shaped by the continuum of socio-political forces, including colonial encounters, and the aftermath of the Empire. An embodied repository of cultural histories, Orientalized dancer communities delineate genealogies of socio-cultural oppression, and queer resistance against dominant forces of erasure. The Oriental dancer in particular, has figured prominently in long-nineteenth century decadent literatures of the Empire, regularly fetishized as an exotic spectacle, inherently imbricated in queer traditions incomprehensible to the West. In postcolonial literature, the bodies of these Oriental dancers often become the ontological space upon which resistance against the intersecting racial and political discourses of Orientalism, colonialism, and anti-colonialist nationalism is enacted. This study interrogates the triangulated discourses of decadence, Orientalism, and anti-colonial nationalism by critically analyzing the nationalist replications and postcolonial resistance to decadent Orientalist representations of the “Oriental” dancer in British and Indian decadent poetry. Through the transnational and transhistorical study of three poems, namely, Athur O’Shaughnessy’s “Salomé,” Sarojini Naidu’s “Indian Dancers,” and Kamala Das’s “The Dance of the Eunuchs,” this study explores the persistent reverberations of the nineteenth-century decadent movement in the postcolonial era. Across these three poems, I would trace the complicities and departures of fin-de-siècle decadence from the colonial discourse, to study how it can be subversively transformed into a language of resistance to the violence visited upon the subaltern dancers’ textual and sexual bodies.