Showing Orientalism in the current visual culture (Essay Sample)

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Image Analysis
Image1: Showing Orientalism in the current visual culture
The idea of Orientalism is an old one, thought to have originated with the orient or east. The concept of Orientalism has developed and changed over time and does not encompass the Orient only. This concept refers to understanding the stranger (referred as ‘the other’) that look different from you. The concept may also refer to other aspects such as religion, country, race or gender that are different from us. There are two ways of understanding this other; the first way is by taming it which means making the other familiar through identifying with their similarities and eliminating the differences so as to incorporate that other within ourselves. The other way is by seeing presentation of the other through images in newspapers, media as well as our daily lives (Andrew p. 35).
Historians and literary artists use the term to emphasize and understand the Arab people and their cultures in comparison to that of U.S. and Europe. Indian culture is for example associated with mysticism, temples, music and dance, women clads, great architecture, snakes and sadhus. In order to understand this concept, one has to back date to the time when missionaries, colonial officers, western travelers, writers and other ethnographers depicted the orient through paintings, photographs, lithographs, novels, diaries and other practices.
Orientalism tries to answer the question of why when we think of middle East for example we have a pre-conceived notion of the kind of people who live there in terms of what they believe, how they act even though we may never have been there or indeed met anyone from there. More generally, Orientalism asks how we come to understand people or strangers who look different to us by virtue of color of their skin. The central argument of Orientalism is that the way we acquire this is not innocent or objective but the end result that reflects certain interest i.e. it is highly motivated. Specifically Said argues that the wider West i.e. Europe and U.S. looks at countries and people in Middle East into a length that distorts the actual reality of those places and those people. He calls this length through which we view that part of the world Orientalism. A framework that we use to understand the unfamiliar and strange to make the people of Middle East appear different and threatening.
Said says that the heart of how this new American Orientalism operates is a threatening and demonized figure of an Islamic terrorist that is emphasized by journalists and Hollywood. This paper looks at what Orientalism is today, whether Said’s definition is true today and the manifestation of Orientalism in the current visual culture as well as how one juggles through the prejudices and biases to come to a clear understanding of Orientalism today.
Visual culture refers to the studies that is aimed at recognizing the visual forms predominance in communication, media and information in the postmodern world
(Andrew p 33). Visual Culture refers to all types of media such as films, television within the context of the modern day world. The study of Orientalism and how it manifests in the current visual culture merge the popular ‘low’ cultural forms (communication and media) and the ‘high’ cultural forms that constitute design, fine arts and architecture. This paper looks at the shift of social and cultural visual culture in the past century and how its acceleration impacts our understanding of Orientalism today.
The concept of Orientalism is manifested in today’s visual culture through the images that have saturated world in our day to day life. The experience of image dominated world through photographic images defines the role of visual culture in the understanding of Orientalism today. Many elements of the visual culture is understood by the culture driven images in the visual mass-mediated world. Most of these images are used for advertising with the aim of promoting consumption as a lifestyle (Mirzoeff p. 115). The modes of visuality helps to form the systems of theory and production rules that describe the visual grammars of fashion, advertising, design, film, visual art and television genres. The viewing of images and other visual media are some of the ways of interpreting cultures.
Messages once conveyed by means of literary texts are now embedded in forms of media enhanced by visual images. The emergence and growth of visual culture has resulted to decline of the literary culture and other underlying effects.
Orientalism for most part of middle Ages and times before pre-modern France referred to the interaction of the west with the orient especially the cultural, artistic, scientific and scholarly impact of these interaction. The study of Oriental Languages were first made in Rome by the church after the establishment of studio Linguarum with the aim of helping the Dominicans to free their fellow Christians who had been held captives in the Islamic territories. Raymond Penaforte established the first school in Tunis in the late 12th century and early 13th century. More schools were established in 1311 when the council of Vienne implemented a policy of establishing Oriental Language schools in Rome, Paris, Oxford, Bologna and Salamanca universities.
From the 16th century, Orientalism related cultures and languages were progressively transformed to a loyal patronage from religious context after Francis I had taken an alliance with the Ottoman Empire. Scientific exchanges are supposed to have ensued as numerous Arabic works especially relating to astronomy was introduced. Orientalism came to have a big influence in development of trade not only in France but also in other parts of the world (MEF 30).
Edward Said in his book Orientalism re-defines the concept of modern Orientalism to be a concept of negative connotation marked by prejudice against Arab-Islamic people. Dr. Albert M. Hourani (1991) in his book Islam in European Thought explores the development of Orientalism from historical pre-medieval times to the modern day Orientalism. He examines the arguments laid down by Said and disagrees with some of Said’s conclusions. Said hypothesis of Orientalism is that it is a constructed knowledge aimed at dominating the Orient in this case referring to Islam. Hourani agrees with Said that western scholarship and other Islamic images were motivated politically as reflected by many scholars in the west. The author notes that some serious Orientalists such as Browne E.G. from England strongly supported revolution in Iran while Massignon Louis supported the movement for independence in Algeria (Hourani p. 38).
According to the modern western perspective, the world is composed of two sides namely; geographical world in one side and the cultural, political, the economical and linguistic on the other side. Edward Said 1978 looks at the concept of Orientalism in terms of these two sides that are differentiated as West and the East. Said popularizing this term in 1978 was referring to a body of scholarship that was using egocentric assumptions and biases in approaching other cultures and communities. Said argues that much of academic scholarship in the west is Orientalist (Said 69).
Said further describing the term Orientalism states that terrorism exists as a result of the violent political situation in the Middle East. However, he argues that there are more going on there that is misunderstood or not seen by the people of the west. "The immediate focus on one negative aspect alone means that all other people from the Islamic world are understood in the same negative and distrustful way i.e. as a threat" Said says (Said 70). He argues that when people think or look at the people who come from that part of the world, they think of fanatic, extreme or violent. Said concludes that understanding as vast and complex written of middle east in this narrow way takes away from the humanity and diversity of millions of people living in decent and humane lives in the middle east.
Andrew Christine states in The Boucicaut Master that when a person is trying to depict another culture or practice unfamiliar to them, they will always use descriptions, images, concepts and structures that are known to them. For example there was a fantasy that India is ancient with elephants and snakes found on the Indian streets (Andrews, 30). Visual culture symbolically represents the Orientalism of a particular culture. In the modern realism, there is a tradition of associating the East with religion, chaos or irrationality. However, the following analysis of a contemporary image in today’s visual culture seeks to critic the definition of Orientalism as presented by Edward Said. This analysis proves that Said’s definition does apply in the manifestation of Orientalism in the current visual culture.
These images which appears in the modern image saturated world are a reflection of Said’s argument. Edward Said points out to a long standing tradition that seeks to create a romanticized Orient. He argues that depictions of the West on the Orient are driven by the historical European colonialism and aim of a political domination over the East. This perception may be a misrepresentation of the visual art and well-mean...