“Arabs, for example, are thought of as camel-riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth is an affront to real civilization. Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being.” ― Orientalism
Edward Said’s Orientalism made a wide-reaching mark when it debuted in 1978. With this book, Said established the title’s term, the concept that Western ideas of “the East” (ranging from Egypt to Japan) were based not in anthropological or scientific fact, but a long history of self-confirming biases. In March 1994, Said wrote an approximately 150-page addendum called Orientalism Now, reframing Orientalism for the modern era and responding to feedback received on the first writing. These works unpack the imbalanced relationship between “Occident” and “Orient”—through the lens of art and academia, but applicable on a much larger societal scale.
The microcosm of Orientalism illustrates the greater soft war the West has waged in asserting its cultural dominance. As Said writes in his addendum, “What we must reckon with is a long and slow process of appropriation by which Europe, or the European awareness of the Orient, transformed itself from being textual and contemplative into being administrative, economic, and even military.” Today, there is a far more prominent conversation about the power imbalance innate to the default perspectives society hands down through this cultural war.
As a cultural vehicle, large portions of this conversation take place through visual art.
As Said notes with that passage, some of the writers and academics who laid the groundwork for Orientalism didn’t necessarily intend to contribute to the global system of colonization. In some cases, these writers and academics and painters were genuinely contemplative, fascinated with the cultures they were documenting. The problem is, they came to their practice laden with false biases about their own superiority. It is a problem human beings deal with on a biological level.
Said’s study states that Orientalism began emerging in the late 18th-century. This is a scary short time ago. This is the same era where Europe was mutilating Africa amongst itself (sterilely regarded by historians as “New Imperialism”), and it was only approximately the generation of great grandparents ago for those of us alive right now.
Thus, even forty years after its publication, the ideas Said originally espoused with Orientalism remain pertinent today, especially in this era of active dismantlement—a blossoming revolt against that centuries-old soft war. It is a delicate balance and gray area whose bounds we can only effectively feel out with active conversation.
By my estimate, these two things make life worthwhile: culture and pleasure. Culture is just the way society teaches us to understand and gain meaning from the world—though we often understand culture in terms of the artifacts it yields, like food and clothing, music and artwork. Pleasure of all senses, from the nose and ears to tongue and eyes, is the upside to all the tedium (or worse) that life shoves ups its livers.
Pleasure, one way or another, is why artists paint and musicians play and I write.
My point is that celebrating culture and enjoying culture proves a net positive. The problem is, that people bring their own biases at all times, even with the best of intentions. So the question that comes from Orientalism here in 2021 seems to be—Is there any ethical manner in which a creator can contend with a culture beyond their own experience?
If any one person can answer this question, it is not me. My neighbor and I were talking about this as I decided how to tackle Orientalism’s relationship to art today. Our conversation meandered to her own practice in photography. She told me men who shoot exclusively boudoir photography bother her because even at best—the intention for female empowerment—it’s innately impossible when approached through the male gaze. There is a difference between participating in another culture and exploiting its raw materials.
With the academic field of Orientalism and its greater expansion into general culture came a serious score of Orientalist painters. Their works catered to a growing market of European consumers with an interest in the exotic (albeit ‘savage’) cultures of the East that they were learning more about. “Travel was made easier by steamships and trains, so paintings tended to focus on cities, such as Constantinople, Cairo and Marrakesh, the arrival points for artists and their potential customers alike,” write the British Museum’s blog. In satiating their customers’ desires, coveted artworks of everyday life in these exotic lands sometimes eschewed fact completely, “where objects and clothes from different periods and places were liberally mixed as props.”
Maybe they found real beauty in their subject matter, but their efforts essentially profited through a system that pillaged that subject matter.
Parallel realities persist today. For example, the internet offers an unending array of Arabic wall murals. These motifs can still feel sexy, mysterious in that Orientalist way. However, the true facts of the subject matter’s enigma run so much deeper. Arabic calligraphy is an actual tradition, handed down from master to student through unbroken lineages. French-Tunisian artist eL Seed got back in touch with the Middle Eastern culture Parisian life had set him at odds with, reconnecting with the Arabic language through a proprietary art style he calls “calligraffiti.” The heart and personal experience in this work is palpable—eL Seed even researches the towns he goes to while determining which quote to paint in each mural.
Irish artist and muralist FinDac has built his whole career on sexualized images of Eurasian women. I actually can’t believe his style hasn’t changed a bit since the last time I wrote about his work, about two years back. Maybe this (admittedly pretty) artwork could feel fulfilling for some Eastern women, but I intuit they’d much prefer the tales of graff artists like Shiro and Lady Aiko, who cut their teeth bombing walls and stereotypes on New York City streets, making their way in America alone as they grew into international street art superstars.
While enjoying and celebrating cultures is the spice of life across continents and historical eras, using another culture as raw material for one’s own work rarely seems empowering, like the work of that male boudoir photographer with no other interests. This feels especially true when the utilizer comes from the class still on the heavier side of that imbalance. In his 1994 writing, Said points out that “it has been estimated that around 60,000 books dealing with the Near Orient were written between 1800 and 1950; there is no remotely comparable figure for Oriental books about the West.” I would like a portrait of FinDac by one of his subjects. It’s not so hard to find new ideas. For a small fee, I’m full of them.
“As a cultural apparatus,” Said continues, “Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgement, will-to-truth and knowledge.”
Through this angle, Said shows that the Western mindset has shaped more than the content of our thoughts, but also the shapes and forms they take. I’m American, and aggro as all hell. The Orientalists did not pop up out of thin air or their own accord, but through a series of systems. One pertinent circumstance is the “culturally sanctioned habit of deploying large generalizations,” Said states, explaining shortly after how “Underlying these categories is the rigidly binomial oppositions of ‘ours’ and ‘theirs,’ with the former always encroaching upon the latter.”
The antidote to the default Western superiority requires active curiosity, humility.
Eliminating this mental habit doesn’t impose limits, it actually opens up a reality of greater choice. In this increasingly interconnected world, globalization poses a great threat to the biodiversity of human cultures. An ever-whittling oligopoly controls more and more resources—just check out that widening wealth gap. In an effort to increase their own interests, companies also wage their own soft war over hearts and minds, using the collective psyche to bolster profits. It is the modern colonialism, shouldered by less powerful nations around the world trapped in Western systems that exploit their labor and resources for cheap to help sustain that bottom line. Capitalism considers static or steady growth a relative loss. It requires more, more, more.
Someday the resulting monolith culture could produce a dystopian future where the only option for entertainment is that day’s trending TikTok produced by some all-powerful corporate team. We can already see this in street art a little—the standardization so many cities seek with prestigious installations from the likes of ubiquitous mainstream names like Shepard Fairey. Hierarchical standards nourish Orientalist-type structures at the root, and they just might decimate culture in the end. Celebrating and seeking new cultural artifacts isn’t off limits, it actually might prove the life force that ensures we have cultures that can continue interacting.
So long as we can understand the difference between tasting and swallowing, the delicate line between contemplation and exploitation can be toed.
