From the Streets of Cairo to St. Louis, Louis: Musical Print Culture and the Intermedial Travels of the Danse du Ventre.

This article examines the danse du ventre, a Middle Eastern dance introduced to American audiences at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, focusing on its controversial reception and cultural circulation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It details how moral reformers, including Anthony Comstock and anti-vice societies, attempted to suppress the dance, which paradoxically increased its visibility and led to its proliferation across various venues and media. The study highlights the role of popular songs such as "The Streets of Cairo" (1895) and "Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis" (1904), along with sheet music as a print-culture medium, in remediating and amplifying the dance’s social effects by evading censorship and reaching wider audiences. Through these remediations, the danse du ventre transitioned from a stigmatized spectacle to a widely recognized cultural phenomenon, illustrating how corporeal performances can resist regulatory efforts and reshape social norms within contexts marked by colonialism, gender politics, and media transformation.