From Visual Culture to Visual Imperialism: The Oriental Harem and the New Scheherazades

Esmaeil Zeiny

Abstract


Drawings, paintings, photographs, moving images and the emergence of Visual Culture as a discipline can confirm the growing centrality of the visuality in our everyday life. This visuality shapes people’s attitude and understanding and once constantly reproduced, constructs a fixed set of meaning for certain issues, perspectives, cultures, and groups of people. Therein lies the danger when visuality commits the misrepresentation, which is part of the process of ‘Othering’ and the backbone of visual imperialism. The Western representation of the East and its women has been one of these misrepresentations through which East is conceived as exotic, erotic, inferior and slave. By drawing upon Hall’s definition of representation (1997), this paper explores the historical representation of Eastern women through the Oriental harem paintings and photography, and reveals how the misconception of the harem Odalisques was conceived. It examines how this stereotypical representation resurfaced in the post-9/11 contexts through life narratives written by Muslim women known as the new Scheherazade. Unlike the Scheherazade of the Oriental harem who was reduced to a submissive sexy odalisque, these Scheherazade are brave and articulate. I argue that this is a post-9/11 strategy to offset all the negative depictions of Muslim women. These brave Scheherazades have been provided with the platform to relate the plights of living in Islamic societies as a woman, and therefore their texts are, in Whitlock’s term (2007), ‘soft weapons’ in manufacturing consent for the presence of empire in the East by corroborating the Orientalist representation of Muslim women. 

 

Keywords: Visual culture; Oriental harem; Scheherazades; women; representation  


Full Text:

PDF

References


Adams, L. (2008). Beyond the Burka. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/books/review/Adams-t.html

Ali, A. H. (2007). Infidel. Free Press Publication.

Alloula, M. (1986). The Colonial Harem. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Alsultany, E. (2013). Arabs and Muslims in the Media after 9/11: Representational startegies for a “Postrace” Era. American Quaretrly. Vol. 65(1), 161-169. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/aq.2013.0008

Arnold, M. (1932). Culture and Anarchy: Landmarks in the History of Education. Cambridge University Press.

Bailey, J. R. (2007). (Re) Envisioning Self and Other: Subverting Visual Orientalism Throughout the Creation of Postcolonial Pedagogy. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Dissertation.

Bhabha, H. K.(1994). The Location of Culture. London : Routledge.

Bloom, K. (2004). Orientalism in French 19th Century Art. Retrieved from http://dissertations.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1087&context=ashonors

Bohrer, F. (2003). Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge University Press.

Bush, G. W. (2001). Remarks at the Signing Ceremony for Afghan Women and Children Relief Act of 2001. The National Women's Museum in the Arts, Washington, DC.December 12. Retrieved from the US Department of State, Archive: https://2001-2009.state.gov/p/sca/rls/rm/6816.htm.

Cromer, E. B. (1908). Modern Egypt. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Dabashi, H. (2011). Brown Skin, White Mask. New York: Pluto Press.

Ehrenpreis, D. (2014). Reclaiming the Harem. Lalla Essayadi and the Orientalist Tradition in European Paintings. In Brooks. S.T (Ed.). The Photography of Lalla Essayadi: Critiquing and Contextualizing.

Fort. S. I. (1996). Femme Fatale or Caring Mother? in Henry Krawitz (Ed.), Picturing the Middle East: A Hundred Years of European Orientalism. New York: Dahesh Museum.

Foster, H. (1988). Vision and Visuality. Seattle, WA: Bay Press.

Fotouhi, S. & Zeiny. E. (2016). The proposal for an edited volume. The Seen and Unseen: The Visual Culture of Imperilaism. Unpublished.

Gauch, S. (2007). Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam. Minnesota University Press.

Gutenberg Project. (2006). The Letters of the Honorable Lady Mary Wortley Montague. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17520/17520.txt

Hall, S. (1997). The Spectacle of the other, in S.Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London; Sage Publication Ltd.

Irving, K. J. (1984). Cross-cultural Awareness and the English-as-a-Second-Language Classroom. Theory Into Practice. Vol. 23, 138-143.

Jay, M. (1994). Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jopp. A. A. (2010). Romantic Orientalism: The Harem. Retrieved from http://bestamericanart.blogspot.com.au/2010/11/romantic-orientalism-harem.html

Kabbani, R. (1986/1994). Imperial Fictions. Europe’s Myths of Orient. Pandora.

Kaplan, Paul, H. D. (2010). Italy, 1490-1700. In D. Bindman & H. L. Gates Jr (Eds.), The Image of the Black in Western Art (Vol. 3, pp. 93-190). Cambride: MA.

Kromm, J. & Bakewell, S. B. (2009). A History of Visual Culture: Western Civilization from the 18th to the 21st Century. Berge Publishers.

Kuehnast, K. (1992). Visual Imperialism and the Export of Prejudice. An Exploration of Ethnographic Film, in Crafword, P. & Turton, D. (Eds.), Film As Ethnography. (pp. 183-196). Manchester: Manchester University Press, Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology.

Lister, M. & Wells, L. (2001) Seeing Beyond Belief: Cultural Studies as an Approach to Analyzing the Visual. In T. van Leeuwen & C. Jewitt (Eds.), Handbook of Visual Analysis (pp. 61-91). London: Sage.

Ma, L. (2012). The Real and Imaginary Harem: Assessing Delacroix’s Women of Algiers as an Imperialist Apparatus. Penn History Review. Vol. 19(1).

Meagher, J. (2004). Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Art. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mirzoeff, N. (1998). What is Visual Culture? In N. Mirzoeff (Ed.), The Visual Culture Reader (pp. 3-13). London: Routledge.

Mabro, J. (1991). Veiled Half-truths: Western Travellers’ Perceptions of Middle Eastern Women. IB Tauris, New York.

Mitchell, P. G. (2012). Art as propaganda: Nineteen century Orientalism. California State University. Thesis.

Nafisi, A. (2003). Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York. Random House

Posner, M. I., Synder, C. R. & Davidson, B. J. (1980). Attention and the Detection of Signals. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Vol. 109, 160-174.

Raby, J. (1991). Picturing the Levant. In Levenson, J.A (Ed.), Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration. Yale University Press, New Heaven and London.

Satrapi, M. (2003). Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon Books Sturken, M. & Cartwright, L. (2001). Practices of looking: An introduction to visual culture. Oxford University Press.

Whitlock, G. (2007). Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago, University of Chicago press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226895277.001.0001

Yeazell, R. B. (2000). Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Zeiny, E. & Yusof, M. N. (2016). The Said and the Not-Said: The New Grammar of Visual Imperialism. GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies. Vol. 16(1), 125-141.

Zeiny Jelodar. E. & Noraini Md. Yusof. (2014). Black and White Memories:Re-inscription of Visual Orientalism in Embroideries. 3L: The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies. Vol. 20(3), 63-78.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/3L-2017-2302-06

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


 

 

 

eISSN : 2550-2247

ISSN : 0128-5157