There has always been an attraction of the Middle East for the Western World. Its an odd relationship with an aesthetic all its own.But it is based on an intentional and violent distortion of Arab society that is pervasive throughout the media.There is a widespread reluctance to set aside the stereotype of Orientalism. Hollywood can’t seem to come up with a favorable trope beyond the lower reaches of the pecking order. The Arab cliches hit a blind spot most are willing to accept and be complicit with. Part of this blindness, is an unwillingness to understand people who have a fierce determination to live life stripped down to bedrock and who challenge the rawest forces of nature on their own terms. It is easy to romanticize an idealized view of primitive life but behind this is often a great resistance to change and a far reaching disillusionment with the human race.
Thesiger. ---Once, in 1946, Wilfred Thesiger lay starving on a sand dune in Arabia’s Empty Quarter for three days, waiting for his Bedu companions to bring back food, and tortured by hallucinations of cars and lorries that could carry him to safety. “No,” he wrote later, “I would rather be here starving as I was than sitting in a chair, replete with food, listening to the wireless and dependent on cars to take me through Arabia.”---Read More:http://wigwamblog.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/sir-wilfred-thesiger/
There is a fear that the Western technological civilization that has evolved destroys or corrupts every culture which comes into contact with it. Cultures and civilizations that have gone on for thousands of years can disappear under the market forces of homogenization. At issue is the notion that the individual in the urban environment, enslaved to technology is on a suicidal course. Its a bit deplorable that we all appear sold on the virtues and benefits of our own Western civilization and are busy exporting it to the Arab lands, opening the door to mass consumption and weaning people off a natural adaptation to their environment. These societies have evolved their own set of rules , their own culture and the West cannot stop convincing them that its tailor made for them. This forcing into our pattern and codes, this huge export drive is hardly a slam-dunk when it comes to suitability….
It was Edward Said who coined the term “Orientalism”.Theophile Gautier,an influential critic wrote in 1869: “the caravan continues its route. One only hopes that it does not leave too many corpses of camels on its way.” Is there a “right” way to represent the non-European Other, or is the Western gaze irretrievably reductive? What can be said about the gaps, ambiguities, lucid “moments”which may be glimpsed in the work of certain artists of the colonial era beyond the obvious romanticism? They saw something there, but we weren’t listening.
---Two stories: Tintin and the black gold, and Tintin and the red sea sharks, have not been made into Arabic.. And now I know why. Both books contain the character of a "Gulf" emir and his tricks-loving son Abdullah. In one of the stories the Emir gets overthrown and seizes control again. His character is not an evil one though. Looking back in the Tintin and the crabs with the golden claws, were the main events take place in Morocco or Algeria, that story contained evil arab characters, but no emirs. And this book was published. So what conclusion can we get??? shouldn't have an "Arabic symbol" represented in kids books?? even if they were not evil?? or is it because it is perceived as bad?? But regardless of the reason... even Tintin would get tabooed and censored?? What a shame---Read More:http://beesso.blogspot.com/2006/04/even-tintin.html image:http://onebigconstructionsite.blogspot.com/2006/07/land-of-black-gold.html
Rick Salutin:France and the U.K. took the lead, the U.S. followed. But those two were once the great imperial gorgons of the Mideast and it hasn’t been forgotten there. After finally departing in the mid-20th century, they colluded (with Israel) to invade independent Egypt in 1956 when it nationalized the Suez Canal. Now they’ve taken a cautious UN resolution about saving civilians and within hours interpreted the hell out of it to justify bombing ground troops and even assassination, as if they couldn’t wait to get back in the imperial saddle and assert their old prerogatives. Echoes of Suez will reverberate, amplified by strong oil interests they each have in Libya today, undermining whatever humanitarian good might have come from the original UN mission.Read More:http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/960375–the-west-s-weakness-for-orientalism-never-dies
Rudolph Valentino. The Son of Sheik. 1926. ---Said’s Orientalism, for example, fits in well with the political foundations of peace studies after the Vietnam War. This is particularly true for Said’s claim thatWestern approaches to ‘the East’ and non-European peoples and cultures were demeaning and stripped individuals and society of substance. Said also helped to reify the existing biases through the ideological prism asserting that relations between states (and ‘liberation movements’) were not among equals, but rather conducted entirely on the basis of perceived power differences between the West and amorphous and alien ‘others’. --- Read More:http://spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=3057 image:http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3197671424/tt0017416
What do some in the formerly colonized East see in an output which has been so categorically deconstructed as the aesthetic arm of imperialism? The “Oriental world,” in short, “emerged” out of the “unchallenged centrality” of a “sovereign Western consciousness” . Significantly, these “truths” were developed “according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments and projections” .Edward Said wondered whether Orientalism should be equated with the “general group of ideas overriding the mass of material . . . shot through with doctrines of European superiority, various kinds of racism, imperialism and the like” or the “much more varied work of almost uncountable individual writers, whom one would take up as individual instances of authors dealing with the Orient” . These are “two alternatives, general and particular, are really two perspectives on the same material” ( Said)
Salutin:Personally, I don’t find our hypocrisy in the Libyan case nearly as galling as this tone deafness. Sure it would make as much sense to aid protesters in Bahrain, Yemen, Gaza or Zimbabwe. But hypocrisy is normal in foreign policy. The tone deafness, though, has become bloodily counterproductive. If we want to break the cycle of abuse and retaliation, it may be time to learn some history, abandon stereotypes and bury Orientalism — which doesn’t want to die. Read More:http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/960375--the-west-s-weakness-for-orientalism-never-dies image:http://www.newsviewspedia.eu/gaddafi-vows-long-war-in-libya.html
Salutin:What about the “no-fly zone” itself. Do you remember the last? It was in Iraq in the 1990s and got packaged with sanctions that led to death for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi kids, which U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright called a “price” that was “worth it” to squeeze former U.S. favourite Saddam Hussein. Any slips now that harm Libyan civilians will evoke all that. “It will be like Iraq again,” said a consultant there, afraid to state his name, but not his fears.Arabs are not deaf to our tone deafness; they’re acutely attuned to it. This includes Libyan leader Gadhafi, who railed against this new “crusade,” evoking medieval images of European invasion. Gadhafi said the attack would fail, like those of Hitler (in North
ca during World War II), Mussolini (Italian fascism brutalized Libya) and even Napoleon. The guy may be wacky but he’s not historically illiterate, nor is his audience. Read More:http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/960375–the-west-s-weakness-for-orientalism-never-dies
Jean Leon Gerome. The Slave Market. ---Abdel-Malek charged that the collapse of colonialism exposed the fallacy of Orientalists: they construed the Orient in terms of ahistorical, metaphysical essentialism, mostly experiencing it from religious and historical texts, and in so doing they transformed the Orient into an alienated object of knowledge and domination.---Read More:http://www.exhibitresearch.com/kevin/anthro/orient.html
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Orientalism provided the ideal excuse to paint nudes, but since Moslem women would not sit for the artists, they were usually hired models posed in the studio, with suitable eastern accessories. The rising class of industrialists, throwing aside the pruderies of the capital, found it cheaper and safer to buy works by living artists. These erotic pictures gave them an official excuse to enjoy scenes of odalisques and dancers, chained slaves, public baths and harems, with overtones of rape, brutality and sensuality. Read More:http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/orientalist/thornton1.html image:http://randomknowledge.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/odalisque/
However, what Said is interested in is the Orient as a “regular constellation of ideas” . Acknowledging that “ideas, cultures and histories cannot seriously be understood without . . . their configurations of power being studied” , Said underscores that the discursive construction of the East is possible because the relationship between Occident and Orient is an asymmetrical one, a “relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony” . The “discourse about the Orient” (for example, how Flaubert “spoke for and represented” his Egyptian courtesan and, in the process, “produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman” ) was enabled because of a “pattern of relative strength between East and West” Read More:http://www.rlwclarke.net/courses/LITS3304/2010-2011/13Said,Orientalism.pdf
Gustave Boulanger. The Slave Market."Most nineteenth century artists and writers visited the Cairo slave markets. Maxime du Camp wrote that "when the dahabeeahs return from their long and painful journeys on the Upper Nile, they install their human merchandise in those great okels which extend in Cairo along the ruined mosque of the Caliph Hakem; people go there to purchase a slave as they do here to the market to buy a turbot." William Muller, although saying that the scene was of a "revolting nature," felt more delight in this place than in any other part of Cairo . . . The slave-market was one of my favourite haunts . . . one enters this building which is situated in a quarter the most dark, dirty and obscure of any at Cairo by a sort of lane ... in the centre of this court, the slaves are exposed for sale and in general to the number of thirty to forty, nearly all young, many quite infants. The scene is of a revolting nature; yet I did not see as I expected the dejection and sorrow as I was led to imagine . . . when anyone desires to purchase, I not infrequently saw the master remove the entire covering of a female---Read More:http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/orientalist/thornton1.html image:http://schools-wikipedia.org/wp/h/History_of_slavery.htm
ADDENDUM:
Said’s point is that Orientalism is not merely some “airy European fantasy about the Orient” . It is, rather, a “system of knowledge about the Orient” , a created body of theory and practice in which . . . there has been a considerable material investment. Continued investment made Orientalism . . . an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness, just as that same investment multiplied . . . the statements proliferating out from Orientalism into the general culture. Said underscores Orientalism’s “close ties to the enabling socio-economic and political institutions” .Read More:http://www.rlwclarke.net/courses/LITS3304/2010-2011/13Said,Orientalism.pdf
Edwin Long. The Palace Guard 1874. ---Said stresses that the discursive construction of the Oriental serves a vital purpose: it subtends the exclusionary process upon which European identity is predicated, that is, the "idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures" Read More:http://www.rlwclarke.net/courses/LITS3304/2010-2011/13Said,Orientalism.pdf image:http://elogedelart.canalblog.com/tag/Th%C3%A9odore%20Chass%C3%A9riau
Read More:http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/enough-said-3743
Read More:http://www.exhibitresearch.com/kevin/anthro/orient.html
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