Monday, May 4, 2009

Analysis # 7: Orientalism




The above cartoon - racists entitle "Chop Suey" - was released August 24, 1930 and is an example of how the West defines the East. The cartoon embraces several stereotypes about the Asian culture that are presented as fact. In the cartoon the Chinese characters are sinister looking cat-like/mouse-like creatures who slanted eyes, walk, dress, and language is highly exaggerated. There traditional braid worn by Chinese men (queue)and syncopated version of Chinese music is used to poke fun at the Asian culture as a whole and establish their "Otherness".

Said says that historically the West has viewed the Orient as, "irrational, depraved, childlike, different; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, normal" (8). The Chinese characters hit each other over the head with mallets and kick which reinforces the stereotype that they are childlike and irrational. When the two rat-like creatures go to a Chinese laundry they get high on opium which is supposed to reflect their depraved nature to sell illegal drugs. "In brief, because of Oriental ism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action [...] It as tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self" (Said 1).

The Chinese characters all work at a laundry service that implies that they are only "fit" to wash other people's clothes. The an unusual change of events a "white" woman is introduced into the cartoon. Her facial features are more pleasing to the eye and she does not look as evil and sinister as the other cat/mouse creatures. She takes her clothes to the laundry. To illustrate the total depravity of the Chinese; the "white" woman is assaulted by and iron cat-like claw and evil faces appear around her. The stereotype implies that the Chinese are sexually immoral, vicious, and dangers to the purer female sex.

The woman is saved by a noble and brave "white" man who tips his hat politely at the woman. His appearence is also less threatening and exaggerated. He chases the Chinese cats up the chimney and they retreat into a dragon -another stereotype.
The heroric "white" man ends up with the girl, and the two happily drive down the road together.

Cartoons such as "Chop Suey" created images about the Orient and Asian culture that caused many white Americans to view them as the Other.

Works Cited

Siad, Edward. "Orientalism".Rivkin, Julie. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Blackwell publishing; United Kingdom, 2004.

youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Eczf92kKB4

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Finale Essay: Oreintalism




Throughout history the ideal of the Orient as strange mysterious place has not only fascinated adults, it as also captivated hundreds and thousands of children in Europe, The United Kingdom, Canada, American, and other countries belonging to “the west”. British writers such as Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book and Frances Brunett, author A Little Princess & The Secret Garden; taught children through their literature how to see the east. In Kipling’s book and small boy named Mowgli is lost in the jungle and brought up by wolves. Mowgli’s adventures include talking to animals and discovering lost treasure buried in a tomb by a Great Maharajah. Children reading The Jungle Book during the turn of the century as well as today embraced the highly fictional stereotypes about India without discernment. In Brunett’s stories – especially in A Little Princess – children learn themes that rang from the superiority of Britain over Indian to the inferiority of the native people who live there; and characters frequently refer to Indians as pigs!

Such images of the Orient in children’s literature have shaped the way each generation perceives eastern countries. With the rise of the movie and television media, marketers have been able to sell their images of the east to children all over the world. In Edward Said’s article Orientalism he calls into question the way the west defines the east. According to Said, “The Orient –dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (1).
Today cartoons such as Disney’s Aladdin have continued the well-worn tradition of portraying the Orient as a strange mysterious place full of wonder and magic. In the 1993 cartoon Aladdin the scene opens up with a short (primitive) looking man riding a camel and singing a song:

Oh, I come from a land
From a far away place where the caravan camels roam
Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face
It’s barbaric but, hey, it’s home.

When the wind's from the east
And the sun's from the west
And the sand in the glass is right
Come on down
Stop on by
Hop a carpet and fly
To another Arabian night.

Arabian nights
Like Arabian days
More often than not
Are hotter than hot
In a lot of good ways.


In Christian Blauvelt’s “Aladdin, Al-Qaeda, and Arabs in U.S. film and TV” he says, “film has used as a narrative convention that Arabs occupy a mystical land of harsh deserts, tropical oases, genies, magic carpets, thieving bandits, decadent sultans, conniving sheiks, and sensual harem girls. Today, such scripting survives in popular children’s films like Disney’s Aladdin” (2). Perhaps the most striking – if not most racist – line in the song Arabian Nights comes at the end of the first stanza is it’s barbaric, but hey its home! By referring to Arabia as barbaric it implies that the people living there are uncivilized and not as enlightened as people in the west. After all, who wants to live in a country where they cut off your ears if they don’t like your face? By Otherizing the east, “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self (Said 1).

The ideal of the Orient as an unruly place full of people who can’t govern themselves justified the reason for Britain and other European countries to dominate countries like African, India, and China. Cartoons of Indians and Arabs often demonized their facial features; making their noses comically large, their beards in a satanic-like point, and stature dwarfishly short. The merchant in the opening scene has features that make him appear to be less human. His accent is also more dramatic than in real life, and his “otherness” is reaffirmed by it. Blauvelt says, “Arabs, and Muslims in general, have been culturally coded as “others,” a dislocated social position which many politicians and media producers have used to position Arabs as phantom enemies, as scapegoats for latent U.S. xenophobic tendencies. In this regard, Hollywood filmmakers have often used Arabs in narratives in very much the same way as Nazi propagandists portrayed Jews in the 1930s and 40s” (2).

The result of movies like Aladdin is that children as well as adults do not perceive the east and its people as it really is, but how they imagine it is. This imagined perception over time becomes a part of their reality that is hard to erase. Not surprising Edward Said says that, “Many travelers find themselves saying of an experience in a new country that it wasn’t what they expected, meaning that it wasn’t what a book said it would be. And of course many writer of travel books or guidebooks compose them in order to say that a country is like this, or better, that it is colorful, expensive, interesting, and so forth. The idea in either case is that people, places and experiences can always be described by a book, so much so that the book (or text) acquires a greater authority, and use, even that actuality it describes” (4). According to Said overtime the images and ideas that readers come across about the Orient in literature become well established beliefs within the dominated society. Those who dominate language are free to make the lenses through which the greater portion of society sees the Other. The cartoon in the lenses (literally) through which children are taught to see the Other. Stories about the Other are retold and retold until they become the authority. “There is a rather complex dialectic of reinforcement by which the experiences of the readers in reality are determined by what they have read, and this in turn influences writers to takes up subjects defined in advance by readers’ experience” (Said 5).

The merchant in the open scene proceeds to re-tell a mystical story about a magic lamp, and reinforces the stereotype that Arabic countries are full of magic and mystery. In the song the merchant sings, he makes reference to a magic carpet and the eerie nights that are hotter than hot, in a lot of good ways. “Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the west […] The Orient is transformed from the very far distant and often threatening Otherness into figures that are relatively familiar” (Said 3). Again, the image of the Other is often more powerful than what is actually said about the Other. Throughout History degrading images of other ethnic groups have been used as a tool to reinforce stereotypes that dehumanize the entire group as a whole.

Ironically, it is typically the men within an ethic group who become the source of stereotypes. Blauvelt says, “Aladdin, in fact, continues the stale Orientalist fantasy, portraying all Arab men as either street thugs, pickpockets, emasculated palace guards, beggars, sultans, or sorcerers. A male character early in the film even declares to his master upon stealing a jewel, I had to slit a few throats, but I got it. The men are short and stocky with thick lips, missing teeth, heavy, menacing brows, and hooked noses, while the hero Aladdin and heroine Jasmine look like suburban, white, U.S. teenagers. Arabs are shown as gratuitously cruel, with characters making several references to beheading. One Arab merchant even tries to cut off Jasmine’s hand when she doesn’t have money to pay for an apple she gave to a hungry boy” (5).

Images of Arabs as the other half-human, half-evolved, half-intelligent beings often reinforce the necessity of the “dominated” countries to suppress “inferior” countries. The massage viewers learn from such degrading mages is the people portrayed is stereotypical cartoons is that they are weird, strange, and backwards; and therefore need a stronger more intellectual force or system of power to govern them. Said argues that, “To have knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for “us” to deny autonomy to “it” –the Oriental country –since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it.” (8). In order to oppress a nation ore people one must create a lie, myth, are fairytale about the people that justifies their need to be control ruled and oppressed. “But essential relationship, on political culture, and even religious grounds, was seen –in the West, which is what concerns us here –to be one between a stronger and a weaker partner […] The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, different, thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, normal” (9).

The West no only dehumanizes the people of the East in also invents mythical stories about the country that make in more enchanting, fairytale-like, and fantastic. In Aladdin a magic golden beetle leads to a mysterious place in the desert where the treasure of a great Maharajah is buried. Myths about buried treasure hidden in places like Indian, Egypt, and the Middle East have fueled Hollywood movies like Indian Jones and The Jungle Book. “These media stereotypes have a malleability that allows for their manipulation by politicians and policy makers to construct a narrative justifying U.S. imperialism. In these ideological narratives, Arab culture doesn’t matter; what matters is spreading “freedom” and “democracy,” which become nothing more than useful keywords justifying Western hegemony and U.S. cultural exportation and domination. Jean-Luc Godard once replied, when asked why U.S. films are the most popular in the world, [he said] because Americans tell the best stories. They can invade a country and immediately construct a narrative justifying it” (Blauvelt 8).

Said’s argues that, “that men have always divided the world up into regions having either real or imagined distinction from each other” (8). Today myths about the Middle East do not involve romanticized ideas about hidden treasure, flying carpets, magic lamps, genies, and talking animals. Today myths about the East are becoming less fantastic and grimmer than before. The East is now portrayed in the media and on the news as a place where enemies of the West are building bombs of mass destruction, and threatening to terrorize the world. After 9/11 Middle Eastern men became vilified and demonized as suicide bombers, and old stereotypes about men with black beards and turbans became the symbol of all that America feared and hated. “Hollywood cinema has played into near-mythological stereotypes about Arabs, which imply that the Middle East is a land of cultural otherness, full of people who cannot be understood in Western terms and thus should not be thought of as human” (Blauvelt 3).

Like many stereotypes, beliefs about the East are changing (perhaps for the worse). No longer do children see the East as a place of wonder and enchant, but a place f evil and destruction. Tragically the Orient, such as North Korea, is still Otherized by America as a threat against democracy, and what the Orient is and who the people are is still shrouded in mystery and myth. Perhaps one day we will be able to lift tha veil and see the truth that lies underneath.

Works Cited

Said, Edward. "Orientalism".Rivkin, Julie. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Blackwell publishing; United Kingdom, 2004.

Blauvelt,Christian. Aladdin, Al-Qaeda, and Arabs in U.S. film and TV
http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/reelBadArabs/index.html

youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuhG-m4MC8k