Caro posted this in comments earlier today. I hope she’ll forgive me for turning it into a post.
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The classic examples I think of when I think about “good” exoticism are things like World’s Fair pavilions and ’60s musical exotica — all trafficking in stereotypes and generalizations and even caricatures, but also, importantly, drawing on indigenous voices and crafting exotic representations that are, overall, positive, rather than dehumanizing ones. They can create interest in the outside world that’s a valuable counter to jingoistic tendencies.
So without intending any criticism of Nadim’s use of Said’s argument, I think that digging a little deeper into Said might be worthwhile, as it seems like we’re moving toward entrenched positions that really are more axiomatic than anything Said himself said. I take Eric’s point (and I don’t know for sure whether Franklin has read Orientalism or not) but it seems like he might find it more palatable than most French theory — Orientalism is from 1978, and it’s much closer to a traditional textual and historical treatise than the canonical works of poststructuralism or psychoanalytic feminism (and Said’s later work.) There’s a copy of the book online, and even skimming the introduction is valuable.
It’s also interesting to note that by the 1990s, in books like Culture and Imperialism (which were much more overtly theoretical than the earlier work from the late ’70s), Said was putting forth defenses of books like Heart of Darkness specifically on the grounds that Conrad was self-aware, that is, even though he couldn’t really think outside of the discourse of Orientalism, he perceived the places where it was insufficient, and that perception comes across in his writing. Said says:
What makes Conrad different from the other colonial writers who were his contemporaries is that, for reasons having partly to do with the colonialism that turned him, a Polish expatriate, into an employee of the imperial system, he was so self-conscious about what he did. Like most of his other tales, therefore, Heart of Darkness cannot just be a straightforward recital of Marlow’s adventures: it is also a dramatization of Marlow himself, the former wanderer in colonial regions, telling his story to a group of British listeners at a particular time and in a specific place. That this group of people is drawn largely from the business world is Conrad’s way of emphasizing the fact that during the 1890S the business of empire, once an adventurous and often individualistic enterprise, had become the empire of business. […] Although the almost oppressive force of Marlow’s narrative leaves us with a quite accurate sense that there is no way out of the sovereign historical force of imperialism, and that it has the power of a system representing as well as speaking for everything within its dominion, Conrad shows us that what Marlow does is contingent, acted out for a set of like-minded British hearers, and limited to that situation.
[…] Heart of Darkness works so effectively because its politics and aesthetics are, so to speak, imperialist, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century seemed to be at the same time an aesthetic, politics, and even epistemology inevitable and unavoidable. For if we cannot truly understand someone else’s experience and if we must therefore depend upon the assertive authority of the sort of power that Kurtz wields as a white man in the jungle or that Marlow, another white man, wields as narrator, there is no use looking for other, non-imperialist alternatives; the system has simply eliminated them and made them unthinkable. The circularity, the perfect closure of the whole thing is not only aestherica1ly but also mentally unassailable.
Conrad is so self-conscious about situating Marlow’s tale in a narrative moment that he allows us simultaneously to realize after all that imperialism, far from swallowing up its own history, was taking place in and was circumscribed by a larger history, one just outside the tightly inclusive circle of Europeans on the deck of the Nellie. As yet, however, no one seemed to inhabit that region, and so Conrad left it empty.
I think the important next question, therefore, is not whether Thompson’s Habibi traffics in orientalist stereotypes, since Thompson has acknowledged that and Nadim does a good job of highlighting them, but whether it does anything interesting structurally with those stereotypes, whether and how it deepens our understanding of them. His right to use them is rather besides the point, IMO. Of course he can use anything he wants, but is what he does with them smart?
I haven’t seen any arguments that he does anything particularly smart with these tropes, in the sense of the type of insight that Said identifies in Conrad. It seems to me, on the surface, that a “cowboys and indians” perspective isn’t all that likely to get to those types of profound dissections of the sociodynamics of Western prejudice. But that doesn’t mean he won’t surprise me! An argument that he accomplishes something that smart is what I’d like to see, from Thompson and people who appreciate the book, and it’s what I’ll be looking for when I read it.
that’s an interesting book cover for heart of darkness for similar reasons: http://www.studio-gs.com/neuland.html
Ouch. That’s what I get for pulling the first cover I saw off of google image search….
Good enough!
I can’t find anything about that book cover; does anybody know who created it or what edition it was for?
Caro, you are spot on here. Kudos indeed!
I’m not sure I’d call the reading of H of D in C & I a defense, per se. Said’s point is that H of D is ambivalent on these issues—both offensive and dehumanizing AND critical of imperialism. The ambivalence of the book teaches us something about the nature of imperialism itself…that’s really the argument. So, yes, he argues H of D is a worthwhile book, but he doesn’t really “defend” its racism. He does think it’s a worthwhile book to read despite being racist in a number of ways. This is all probably just semantics, I guess… It is my favorite assessment of H of D, though. Culture and Imperialism is really a good ‘un.
I’ll buy not calling it a defense with the caveat that he thinks it’s worthwhile. That’s what I was going for!
Oh, and thanks, Mike! I’m not getting alerts for this since Noah posted it LOL.
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ao says:
that’s an interesting book cover for heart of darkness for similar reasons: http://www.studio-gs.com/neuland.html
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What a fascinating link! (Thanks so much…)
I was particularly interested because as a graphic designer I’ve used a typeface much in the spirit of Neuland, named Shaka Zulu ( http://www.azfonts.net/load_font/shaswfte.html ), for some Black History Month posters.
However, I consider the font and its usage perfectly defensible. While at the early times described in the article that style may have been seen as “lower class” and “crude,” modern designers (even those without a collection of African art and many books about it, as I have) see it as hearkening to the vigorous strokes, organic slight curvatures to be found in many African wood sculpture and masks:
http://www.strictlyafrica.com/images_products/AKUBBA_FERTILITY_MASK_L.jpg
http://cdn2.iofferphoto.com/img/item/178/157/137/e7xS.jpg
http://www.genuineafrica.com/images/Bambara/African_Statues_Bambara_Statue_4_RightB.jpg
http://abersig.org/files/dogon_mask.jpg
http://africanheritageculturalcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/African-Masks.jpg
(Yes, I’m perfectly aware African art styles vary widely; but this approach is the most widespread.)
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Caro says:
I can’t find anything about that book cover; does anybody know who created it or what edition it was for?
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Google’ing “heart of darkness book covers” (sorry, couldn’t find anything either) yields a wide variety of approaches, united only in their astonishing mediocrity and inappropriateness (a Gaugin self-portrait, lot of idyllic-looking nature scenes, a bland woodcut, some natives carrying elephant tusks…sheesh! At least the one using a valentine heart motif was a student-assignment work.
This site — leading off with an astonishingly sexed-up 50’s paperback version — discusses some covers: http://www.rcspeck.com/literature/heart-of-darkness-what-a-cover-says
Ah, here’s a reasonably satisfying one (even if not particularly informative): http://apocalypsebook.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/heart-of-darkness-by-joseph-conrad.jpg
And then there’s: http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/1/11307/374751-21373-129100-1-the-darkness-heart_super.jpg
I’m sorry, you mean the World’s Fair pavilions that EXHIBITED NONWHITE HUMAN BEINGS as “primitives”?? I didn’t get further in your essay than that.
No, in fact I don’t. I mean modern Fairs, like this in Shanghai 2010. Or the Boulevard of the World, especially the India pavilion, at the 1962 Seattle Fair. Or even the Soviet pavilion at the ’39 Fair in Queens, although ’39 is early enough that there’s some ambivalence in how the exoticism plays overall.
The exhibition of non-white humans in human zoos was not unique to World’s Fairs, it didn’t start with World’s Fairs, it didn’t end in other contexts when the BIE outlawed it at the Fairs, and it has not been a regular practice at World’s Fairs since the nineteen-teens. The official exception from the BIE did come pretty late — during the ’58 fair with regards to the Congolese Village — despite the fact that the humans “on display” in that village were actors comprised of the Congolese elites serving as the delegation to the fair — on exhibit, but with business cards — yet even the appearance of putting people on exhibit was problematic enough that the policy against the use of actors at Fairs was strengthened. It’s important to contrast the ’58 exhibit with the earlier Congolese village at the Brussels fair in 1897, which was not only a theatrical display but the full-time housing for the native Congolese at the fair, so that they had no privacy at all and were really in a zoo, not only displayed as primitives but treated as such. In the 1958 instance, it wasn’t all that different from, say, Plimouth Plantation, but the principle was nonetheless seen as worth sticking up for. That was the end of human zoos at World’s Fairs — but they continued, continue to this day, in many other contexts.
Furthermore in the mid-19th century, those types of exhibits were extremely common in American museums and zoos. As late as the first decade of the 20th century African people were displayed in cages with Chimpanzees. Do you make the same kind of knee-jerk blunt objection to modern museums and zoos too? The Bronx and Cincinnati zoos, for example, used to host human exhibitions; today they are one of our most important resources for protecting non-human primate species like the mountain gorilla. The British Museum has the stuffed corpses of non-white humans, trophy heads and other skeletal remains, in their collection, a legacy of when they used to display human bodies as natural history artifacts. Would you like the Museum to be shut down?
Honestly. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
I’ve been trying to find a round about way to defend Thompson and the effect he creates in Habibi, but all I ever see is how internally conflicted the book is. So after many hours of ‘habibi bashing’ I came up with a way in which the novel’s flaws could potentialy be its greatest success. The fact that we want to like the book, even though everything tells us we shouldn’t, tells me that he must be doing something right here.
After much consideration, the only defense I might make for the novel comes directly out of the criticisms I’ve already made. For the critical reader, Thompson takes us through a nightmare of contradictions, hypocrisy, and racism. And while doing so, he makes a solid attempt and is nearly successful in trying to make us enjoy it. The beauty of the artwork and the seductive storytelling causes discomfort as we try to resist its allure. This is a book not to be enjoyed but to be suffered through. Craig Thompson challenges us to hate Habibi while simultaneously doing everything he can to convince us we love it. Thompson preys on post-9/11 American guilt but recognizes that while we may readily sympathize with the Islamic faith, we are irreversibly confined to our western, christian, otherizing perspective. He knows men like to sympathize with feminist perspectives, but inevitably still have the urge to sexualize women. But, the hypersexualization of women in Habibi can make a male reader’s own urges to sexualize women seem innocent and forgiven like Zam’s. Zam, whose transgressions are nonexistent when compared to the other men in the book, is the character that Thompson urges men to identify with. All said and done, if you don’t want to burn this book when your done, you’ve been had. And if you do want to burn this book, that’s probably something close to the reaction Craig Thompson was looking for. The internal conflictions in Habibi calls attention to similar ideological conflictions within ourselves.
– I have a bunch more written down thoughts on Habibi and If you think there is anything of value in what I’ve written here, please email me or comment. I’d like to hear your feedback.
That’s quite interesting. I think it pushes too hard on Thompson’s intent, but I think it’s fair to argue that the book (whether aware or not) is working with the tensions it’s creating to some extent.