Voices of Resistance: Music, Art, and New Media

During our class sessions this past week, we talked about "Western" (Europe, United States) perceptions of the Iran and the Middle East. These perceptions are shaped by the images produced by modern-day media (news, films, television shows, etc.) but in many ways these images are rooted in the long history of western European colonial domination. To justify the colonization of large parts of the Middle East, Asia, Africa and the Americas---which included not only the appropriation of land and natural resources, but the enslavement of millions of Africans for the trans-Atlantic slave trade---the colonizers invented a hierarchy which cast the people they have colonized as less than human and therefore in need of "civilizing" and European domination.

Among the tools that colonizers used to ensure the subjugation of their colonies, violence and forced conversion to Christianity were their best weapons. European artists---painters and writers---however, played a substantial role in ensuring the colonial agenda. French, British and other western European artists did so by depicting Africans, Pacific Islanders, Asians and Arabs in their poetry, novels and paintings as they imagined them to be: depraved, uncivilized, savage, sexually deviant, and violent. Edward Said most famously coined the term Orientalism for the genre of art, produced at the height of European colonial power in the 18th and 19th centuries, depicting the colonized Other. Said writes:

Unlike the Americans, the French and the British—less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss—have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. (Said, 1-2)

Here, he argues that the "West" has imagined an image of the "East" based on its interests in the region as colonizers. In so doing, this imagination of the East not defines the identity of the colonized but that it also defines the identity of Europe as something that is opposed and indeed better than (more civilized, more educated, more enlightened) the people they have come to conquer.

Below, are images from French painters that orientalize the Middle East. For your blog post, look closely at these images and answer the following questions: 1) what is ideas about the "East" do these paintings convey? 2) how do the orientalized images from these paintings affect our current perception of Iran and the Middle East?

Your response must be at least two paragraphs long and you must post your response by 5:00 pm on Sunday, April 6th to receive credit.