How the East was spun

Staging the Orient traces early dissemination of a persistent theme of Western prejudice

By Jim Quilty – Daily Star staff
Monday, January 10, 2005

BEIRUT: Time was, “Orientalism” was a just a word that described someone’s area of expertise, or indulgence. Then in 1978 the late Edward Said published a book of the same name and all that went out the window. Said was one of several scholars who argued that there was something dodgy about Orientalism – a Western habit of mind that projects certain essential qualities upon the people of the Middle East. Europeans were no more averse to making gross generalizations about themselves. Back in the 18th century, Europe’s intellectual elite agreed that their culture was characterized by clarity, rationality and equality. The Orient was represented in terms that the West was not – or not supposed to be: obscure, irrational, cruel and sensual. Direct experience later modified this fiction, but the basic concepts have persisted until today.

Twenty-six years on, many have sought to apply Said’s basic critique to less rarefied cultural production. His “Covering Islam” (1981) addresses the media, for instance, while Jack Shaheen’s “Reel Bad Arabs” (2001) examines contemporary cinema.

By and large, though, such books remain elite objects. Few address the diffusion of Orientalist conceptions from the intellectual elite to the popular imagination. Fewer still seek to open up the discussion to a non-academic readership. Very few indeed have sought to do so via the pop-culture medium of the coffee table book.

Wolf-Dieter Lemke’s “Staging the Orient: fin de sicle popular visions” (2004) manages to cross these boundaries, doing so with considerable grace. As he explains in one of his book’s preliminary chapters, the title was chosen for its metaphorical value. “Staging,” suggests the hybrid nature of the pop Orientalism Lemke is addressing – an amalgam of scholarship, art, entertainment and business. In this regard most of the material that he contextualizes for our scrutiny are “picture postcards, a popular fin de sicle medium for mass communication. These postcards rest side by side with lantern [projector] slides, carte-de-visit photographs, stereoscopic cards, trade cards, postage stamps, [scrapbook mementos], posters, book illustrations and book covers … “Collectors albums and optical gadgets demonstrate how pictures were taken, studied and collected. The material comes mainly from Europe, while some pieces point to a shared European-American experience. Most of these images have never been published before.”

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