Tag Archives: Nadim Damluji

Can the Subaltern Draw?: Reframing Caste in Indian Graphic Novels

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I have not yet been to India. Unlike Belgium, China, or Egypt — who’s respective comics’ scenes I feel comfortable writing about at length predominately because I’ve lived in those places with the time afforded to trace how the Ninth Art relates to their national histories — I am coming at the Indian landscape of comics with little more than the information provided by Internet strangers. I also know a paltry amount about the socio-economic issues historical and currently facing Indian people (save what is to be learned from a New Yorker article or two). To recap: I know who Nehru was the and the jackets he wore, I understand the concept of caste, I enjoy the writing of Amartya Sen, I’ve watched Krrish, and I weirdly had dinner with Salman Rushdie one time. As one might imagine, this admittedly makes me a very poor candidate to write at length about Indian Comics and history with any sort of authoritative voice. However, my lack of India credentials does make me the ideal candidate to consume the graphic novels recently released by New Delhi based publisher Navayana.

Navayana — translation: “New Vehicle” — was founded by S. Anand and Ravikumar with the explicit interest of being, “India’s first and only publishing house to exclusively focus on the issue of caste from an anticaste perspective.”  To that measure they have released an impressively diverse catalogue of books since 2003 addressing the issues of caste in India through critical essays, poetry collections, nonfiction novels, and, most recently, graphic novels. Today I will look at the two politically charged English-language graphic novels Navayana has published in the last year under the creative direction of S. Anand: Bhimayana (2011) and A Gardener in the Wasteland (2012). In particular, their relative successes at addressing issues of caste dating back to the 18th century for a global comics audience in the 21st century.

Before readers get into the innards of Bhimayana: Incidents in the life of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, they must first process a helping of expectations-building praise from an impressive cadre of writers. Scattered along the jacket sleeve are pull quotes from John Berger (who also pens a fawning Forward), Arundhati Roy, and Joe Sacco. “Extraordinary” writes Berger, “Unusually beautiful” writes Roy, “Distinctive” writes Sacco, and from the flip of the first page these accolades have a context that makes sense. The story itself, as the title indicates, weaves together snapshots from the life of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956) — one of India’s fiercest opponents of the caste system who is best known for crafting the language of India’s human rights constitution. Bhimayana assumes the reader has no knowledge of Ambedkar at the onset and proceeds to provide an education of the events that shaped his life and how he in turn shaped the lives of many in India.

Born as a Dalit (the lowest of castes known as untouchables), Ambedkar faced a great deal of hardship in his youth before a generous Maharaja Sayaji Rao-sponsored fellowship afforded him the opportunity to study abroad at Columbia University and the London School of Economics. After returning to India with a Western education (problematic, I know!), Ambedkar devoted his life to an anticaste agenda which he realized through impassioned speeches, books, law briefs, a controversial series of debates with Ghandi, and a latter day conversion to Buddhism. But while the particulars of Ambedkar’s story are as inspirational as any other of his few civil rights leader contemporaries, they are not what makes Bhimayana ground-breaking. In most hands a story like this could come out as a boring and by-the-numbers graphic biography, but thankfully those are not the hands of married artists’ Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam, who bring Ambedkar’s story to graphic novel.

 

A young Ambedkar is denied the right to water as an untouchable.

In a beautifully abstract way, the Vyams take a story scripted by S. Anand and Srividya Natarajan and strip it of many signifiers of Western sequential art through their own heavily detailed illustrations. For example, Ambedkar (the only constant character between vignettes) rather awesomely does not appear in a consistently drawn way throughout the book. As S. Anand recounts in Bhimayana‘s afterward — actually its “Digna” — while he dutifully provided the Vyams with a primer on graphic novel luminaries ranging from Eisner to Spiegelman to Tezuka to Satrapi, they rejected these influences: “We’d like to state one thing very clear from the outset. We shall not force our characters into boxes. It stifles them. We prefer to mount our work in open spaces. Our art is khulia (open) where there’s space for all to breathe” (p. 100). The result of this determined openness is a narrative that weaves different moments from Ambedkar’s life in a loose chronological order and produces a collection of pages that function both as a “graphic novel” and a distilled showcase of Pardhan Gond art.

An example of how the Vvyams abstract notions like travel (this scene is of a re-caste affirming train conversation Ambedkar has after returning to India from the England) into a single page which serves as both a Pardhan Gond art painting and a narrative sequence.

While the larger Gond tribe of central India has a centuries long heritage of oral story telling, the Vyams are members of a more recent subset clan of artists called the Pardhan Gonds. The Pardhan Gond bards were formed in the early-1980s as artists that were dedicated to transmitting older Gond ritual performances into narrative visual art using everything from silkscreen prints to acrylic paintings to detailed ink drawings. Therefore, the most ingenious part of Bhimayana is Navayana’s idea to pair two talented Pardhan Gond artists — who were already creating a distinct form of “sequential art” — with the globally buzz-worthy format of “graphic novel”; effectively repackaging the forgotten and overshadowed legacy of a civil rights leader in India into something worth tweeting about. Case in point: I, resident of California, didn’t know who Ambedkar was before reading Bhimayana, and I surely wouldn’t have heard of Bhimayana if it weren’t a comic. And let’s say I had been curious enough to skim a biography of Ambedkar on Wikipedia, that medium wouldn’t have provided me with the ample space to connect with India particular issues like Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism through powerful artwork:

The clever conceit behind Bhimayana is a striking example of how Navayana lives up to its name of being a “new vehicle” for old ideas. Put differently, the book makes critically talking about caste sexy in the way that social justice topics rarely are. The salience of framing an issue for a global audience is one that Ambedkar himself seems to have understood very well throughout his struggle to challenge the caste system. After a 1923 decision by the Bombay Legislative Council to allow untouchables to use all public resources as basic as education and water — services that Ambedkar had been denied growing up as a Dalit — he gave a speech asserting the inalienable rights known in the Dalit movement as the “Declaration of Independence”:

“If we seek for another meeting in the past to equal this, we shall have to go to the history of France: the revolutionary French National Assembly convened in 1789 that set new principles for the organization of society. … People forget that if the rulers of France had not been treacherous to the Assembly, if the upper classes had resisted it, it would have had no need to use violence in the work of the revolution. We say to our opponent too: Please do not oppose us. Put away the orthodox scriptures. Follow justice.”

Just as Ambedkar frames an Indian human rights struggle in the context of a recognizable Western one, Navayana’s editor-in-chief S. Anand seems to understand the value in reframing intellectual human rights arguments in the medium of comic art. In this way S. Anand is like the protagonist of the story he wrote: using universal signifiers to address an India-specific issue. This point dredges up a deeper favorite question of mine: who exactly is the intended audience of Bhimayana? As with some of its more relatively famous contemporaries (par example Persepolis) reading Bhimayana can bring up a lingering fear that the book is seeking “First World” readers to make money from “Third World” problems. Ultimately, this line of questioning doesn’t hold enough weight against the beautiful education that Bhimayana provides to non-Indian readers like myself. Although, it should be noted that a similar thought might have been pondered by Navayana, who announced ahead of their 2012 Angoulême appearance that Bhimayana will see new editions in five Indian languages later this year.

This brings us to A Gardener in the Wasteland (2012), Navayana’s most recent stab at providing a forum for anticaste ideology in the world of comics. A Gardener digs back even further into the history of anticaste reformers to tell the story of Jotiba Phule (1827-1890) and his wife Savitri Phule (1831-1897). The Phules were fierce critics of caste-based exploitation by brahman’s (the highest caste in the Hindu system) under British rule and lifelong campaigners for women’s education in India who opened the countries’ first school for girls in 1948. A Gardener is written by Canadian-based Srividya Natarajan and is drawn by New Delhi-based artist Aparajita Ninan, with the text itself based predominately on Jotiba Phule’s 1873 work Slavery. Impressively, the female transglobal team bring Phule’s 1873 writing to life in a way that feels like a product that is relevant in 2012.

Throughout the book Natarajan and Ninan engage in the same sort of re-framing that is prevalent in Bhimayana, this time building on Phule’s comparisons of archaic notions of Caste hierarchy to slavery in the United States. Where Phule saw the way the brahman’s exploit those in lower castes as akin to slavery, Natarajan and Ninan extend the metaphor to compare the lives of the Phule’s to those of U.S. civil rights leaders. For example, the hardships Savitri Phule endures trying to educate women is met with an echo panel of segregation in the the South, in effect tying the histories of oppression to one another:

While the American history shorthand gets the point across efficiently, it is when re-framing moments like this that Natarajan and Ninan hinder their otherwise strong debut. At several points A Gardener in the Wasteland produces comparisons that feel overly heavy-handed, instead of letting the fascinating tale of the Phule’s fight against an established hierarchy subtly speak for itself. While it is easy to understand why the creators felt the need to draw somber parallels when telling such a reverential story, those parallels leave the book overly stuffed with asides that weaken the narrative flow for the benefit of readers like me. Put differently, I rather feel lost in the world of an artists’ imagination and grapple to find meaning than be spoon fed educational antidotes from my own frame of reference.


A spread which compares brahman lawmakers to the Klu Klux Klan

If A Gardener in the Wasteland feels like a mediated success, it is predominately mediated by the innovation on display in Bhimayana. While Bhimayana uses artwork to interpret a narrative loosely, A Gardener often skews towards using its strong art for straightforward exposition. The moments where A Gardener succeeds at becoming a “new vehicle” are when it forgoes panels and Westward analogies in favor of the cleverness found in the pages of Phule’s anticaste arguments. The best example of how A Gardener takes a risk with content to produce something unique is an extended midsection which walks readers through a socratic discussion between Jotiba Phule and his friend where Phule challenges many of the assumptions on which the brahman base their caste based view. In what has become the lynchpin of the book’s marketing campaign, A Gardener illustrates an argument that has Brahma (the father of the brahmans) menstruating out of his mouth. It is in the moments like this where Ninan is having clear fun with her art that make Phule’s 19th Century argument feel 21st century compatible.

The success of both of Navayana’s graphic novels is recasting biography of anticaste leaders as intriguing graphic novel. Bhimayana and A Gardener work towards this goal from different starting points, but they both end up as strong debuts in the global comics landscape. For a long-form comic to balance entertainment, technical skill, and Theory is not easy, which makes it somewhat remarkable that out of the gate Navayana has two comics that pull of such an act. Bhimayana and A Gardener in the Wasteland are worth receiving the spotlight not just because they are Indian, but because they are good.

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Navayana books can be purchased from Scholars Without Borders.

A Conversation about Habibi’s Orientalism with Craig Thompson

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Around the time I was writing my critique of Orientalism in Craig Thompson’s Habibi a strange thing happened: I got to know Craig Thompson. Through a mutual acquaintance and a series of chance convention run-ins at San Diego Comic Con and the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco, we became casual acquaintances. While writing up my honest reaction to Habibi I decided to burden our new friendship with the weight of criticism by calling to ask him a few clarifying questions. The result expanded the scheduled ten minutes of chat time in to a much longer conversation about Orientalism, feminism, cultural appropriation, the burden of relationships, and the thematic successes of Habibi. The only thing I’d like to add before presenting our conversation is something that should become evident to you while reading it: Craig Thompson is a supreme class act. Not only did he take time out of an extraordinarily busy schedule to directly confront my criticism of a book he spent over seven years making, but he did it with an amount of grace and humility that I didn’t know was possible.

 

Nadim Damluji: I want to start by talking about Orientalism, which it appears you were conscious of during the process of making Habibi. During the creation process, did you ever second guess your ability the distinguish between using Orientalism as a playground versus simply reproducing it?

Craig Thompson: I don’t want to repeat myself, but I keep saying that the book was a conscious mash up between the sacred medium of holy books like the Qu’ran and the Bible and the trashy medium of Comic Books. And I was keeping in sight this sort of unpretentious, self-deprecating, low-brow, motivation of comics.

As for the charge of Orientalism, I knew it was going to come up no matter what, so why not embrace it? More broadly, I’ve always liked genres that have a degree of exploitation to them like horror films. They play on these really crass and appealing elements that also exist in 1,0001 Nights or French Orientalist paintings. It was fun to think of Orientalism as a sensationalized genre like Cowboys and Indians, which is a very poor representation of the reality of the American West, but fun to think of as a fantastical genre. And at this point in history, most people who watch things in the Cowboys and Indians genre totally realize it paints an inaccurate image of what the West was like … well actually you know there are people who watch cowboy films and think that’s what it must have been like. In fact, I’m pretty sure George W. Bush is one of those guys whose political beliefs are shaped by those films.

 

ND: I’m familiar with French Orientalist paintings and it feels that you are expanding on the snapshots those painting provide — like the scenes of Habibi that take place in the Slave Market or in the Sultan’s Palace — but those images are very loaded with this implicit “White Man’s Burden” element. In other words, we need to save the Arab women from the Arab men, and that’s how the French imagined “the Orient.” Did you ever fear that you were carrying the baggage of the medium by imitating that style? Specifically, I’m curious to know how you set a limit for yourself when sexualizing Dodola to avoid reducing her to simply another exotic Arab woman in Western literature?

CT: I wanted to sexualize Dodola, because I wanted the reader to experience her through the lustful gaze of all men, and primarily the gaze of Zam. Hopefully the lust of Zam is transmitted in those drawings, and maybe at times the reader identifies with it or other times feels disgusted by it or ashamed by it, which mirrors the experience Zam was having. Throughout the book even the Orientalism is a commentary on exoticization. Which isn’t just about any specific culture or ethnicity, but a stereotype of what men do in general or what a lot of people do in romantic relationships. I’m examining American guilt and I’m examining male guilt. In male guilt there is so much of this energy of objectification and idolatry and eroticization. When I think of those French paintings I don’t see the “White Man’s Burden” of the French needing to save the beautiful Arabic women from their oppressors, I see the opposite: French men swarming in a perverted sort of way and trying to make fantasy reproductions of what those ladies look like under their hijab. I don’t think it paints the colonists in a positive manner, it makes them seem like these creepy little voyeurs.

 

ND: Especially because so many of those paintings were created without the painters actually going to the Middle East…

CT: Yes, exactly.

ND: Which makes those paintings problematic because those landscapes are imagined but purporting to portray reality. You’ve talked previously about trusting your subconscious in the creative process to guide you in navigating taboo. That makes for two distinct parts of Habibi: the subconscious imagined landscapes element that is the bedrock of Zam and Dodola’s love story, which you’ve noted was created aware of Orientalism, and then the research heavy elements of the book which deal more with the Qur’an. What I’m afraid of is that readers will take the more imagined and playful parts and give them the same level of plausibility as the clearly research heavy sections of your book. Now obviously you can’t be responsible for all your readers…

CT: That’s an understandable concern. For me it seems, on some level, a little silly that people keep talking about and examining Habibi as if it were some academic book, which it definitely isn’t. I keep labeling it as a “fairy tale” because that is definitely my intent. As much as an artist I want to strive to create comics as art or as literature, I’m still at my core just a cartoonist. Cartoonists want to make these exaggerated caricatured playful ridiculous irreverent drawings in some ways. I do feel reverent and respectful to elements of Islamic faith, but through the whole book there is a sense of play and self-awareness around the fact it’s still just a comic book. It’s super heroes in some ways. It’s Star Wars. But maybe the energy to focus on Habibi as an academic text is coming from outside the comics medium, where people are surprised to see more mature elements in a comic. In some ways the dialogue should also revolve back to the medium itself, which still has a satiric intent. I hesitate to say that, because I don’t want to say that Habibi is satiric towards any faith or religion. But comics are this sort of a self-deprecating medium inherently.

 

ND: I can speak to the academic tendency! For me, a lot of that has to do with the packaging. It’s this big tome and it’s by “Craig Thompson, author of Blankets,” and it feels a lot more “literary” just by virtue of packaging and the Pantheon label than more crass comics do. Do you ever feel a burden as one of a very few comics artist that is sold in Barnes & Nobles as well as local independent comic shops? You have those two worlds of fans that you have to appease and respond to.

CT: I feel privileged to be in that position. Since I’ve started my career in comics I always wanted to extend to a broader audience. I always felt that comics as a medium was untapped in terms of audience potential and that I was being held back by a lot of the retailers, distributors, and the attitude of fans in the industry. I definitely wanted to embrace this little fad in publishing of “graphic novels” because it feels like a window to extend comics to a bigger audience. I was excited to bring comics outside of the weird collector’s world. You know there’s been these different explosions in comic’s history of interest in the medium, but they’ve always seemed real tied up with the speculator culture. For me the bookstore is taking it back to the mass arts roots, like the Daily Newspaper, something that a common reader has access too and stumbles on and not just sequestered to a little cult Indie following the way an obscure punk record store would be. And I love buying a lot of those “tome” like products…

 

ND: Me too! When you’ve talked previously about about the goal for Blankets being 500-pages before you even had the story, I get that as a collector and fan of books in general.

CT: But I would like to create more modest projects too. Maybe naturally Habibi had to be this kind of book as a follow up to Blankets, because there was so much expectation of this as my “sophomore effort.” I don’t know, I think it also happened because of the emotional space I was in at that point in my life. I was being reclusive and in my Salinger phase. It would have been strange to emerge from that with something less.

 

ND: You’ve mentioned Joe Sacco as an influence. I don’t know if you understood it this way, but I found a lot of the Qur’anic elements to be a more Sacco-like project that had you looking at the footnotes of Suras and Haddith to pull out a really interesting research thread. Those are the parts of Habibi that I felt were most in your voice. I wonder if you ever had more of a desire to work in that vein as opposed to fiction? And jumping off that, our mutual friend Edward Said writes about the need for authors to “catalogue personal inventory” which in a very basic sense is a call for the author to put themselves in relation to the text in writing which creates a space for readers to know where the author is coming from. This is especially crucial in writing about the “East” from the “West,” which Sacco seems aware of by putting himself in his comics with obscured glasses; he is drawing in his subject position. Have you ever thought more about if post-Habibi you’d attempt a project more explicitly like that?

CT: You know what they say about dream analysis is that every character in your dream is a role that is played by yourself. You have to look at your dreams like “why am I stabbing myself with a butcher knife?” and you can’t judge any character because they are all representations of you. I feel similar about fiction. I can see parts of myself in pretty much every character in Habibi, even the ugly ones. For example there is one of the eunuchs that is creepy, more bad cop hijra, and I tried to draw that as a gross drag version of myself. I thought, what would I look like if I was a hijra and I focused it on my features. So there you have a character who is supposed to be a ridiculous hijra version of myself. Elsewhere I certainly saw myself in the fisherman, Noah. The Sultan, a lot of my female readers are disturbed and disgusted by him, but most of my male readers think he’s hilarious and identify him as a caricature of male sexuality in general. I can see that. I was playing that up for laughs for myself, like this is the way guys think a lot of the time.

 

ND: It’s really illuminating to hear that. The Sultan’s one of the more problematic characters for me so it’s interesting to hear you recast him in that light. With the fisherman, and the recurring focus on the Abraham story from both the Bible and Qur’an, it seems that Habibi is a way for you to explore sacrifice and the role it plays in our lives. It might be hard to articulate, but why was that such an important thread for you at the time you were making Habibi? I mean the role of sacrifice in relationships must have been important if you agreed that you were going to spend 7 years on a project dwelling on it.

CT: Well that definitely coming from a more Christian angle. That’s something I was thinking about while working on the book. Other than obviously the core Abraham story, sacrifice overall is a bigger theme in Christianity and the shame and guilt associated with having someone sacrifice their life for you. But, personally at the inception of Habibi I was processing being a caretaker in a relationship. I was in a long romantic relationship where I was also a caretaker and those are conflicting roles: to be a parent and a lover simultaneously, which is what Dodola is to Zam. I’m getting off track… I was thinking a lot about how much these sort of guilt feelings that shape my spirituality are purely about coming from a Christian background. As I talked with a lot of Muslim friends I didn’t find they shared that same core guilt and shame and sense of martyrdom in their faith. Of course, if you look at Islamaphobic observations of Islam people think of suicide bombers and jihad. So there it becomes an idea of sacrifice and martyrdom.

 

ND: As a Muslim myself, I feel the Qur’an is more about exploring love than extreme sacrifice. Although, there is Ramadan. Either way, I do really like that thread and how you weave it throughout Habibi. I want to switch gears to talk about Wanatolia and the decision to make it a timeless city, and how that factors into the end of the comic. I was hoping you could articulate how you had the decision for Dodola and Zam to return to Wanatolia and the reveal that it is modern in the western conception, even though at the heart of it is this palace which is backwards.

CT: In earlier drafts of the Sultan’s palace, I was mediating on the Bush administration and feeling like it was this sort of clueless world that existed outside of our own society. That was in the aftermath of 9/11 when you would see Bush off golfing somewhere. And certainly some Sultans during the Ottoman Empire have been critiqued historically for being clueless what was happening in society. That’s how the Ottoman Empire fell, the Sultans were living in a hedonistic cushion. By hedonistic I don’t mean they were sleeping with all their courtesans … it’s just the role of Americans and rich people in general that are totally oblivious of the state of the world. In terms of that clashing of the new and old world, that exists everywhere. If you travel to a developing country, you see people living in incredible poverty and living very simple lifestyles similar to 100 years ago brushing up against modernity and global trade. You can see how obviously our consumerist society is feasting off of poverty in their countries and how all our waste is there. Here we just consume and produce a lot of waste and then it sort of disappears and we don’t have to deal with it precisely because we are heaping it on to other people. And that’s a reality… I’m doing a fairy tale or parable version of that, but I don’t feel like it’s dramatically abstracted from the world we live in.

 

ND: For me the way it does feel abstracted is that there are no time markers and there are key fairytale elements. But then there’s that page in the book where you write “The proximity of the site of both our separation and reunion disrupted the boundaries within me” when Dodola and Zam see the Sultan’s palace from their new makeshift condo. The problem I had with this moment is the extent to which the backwardness of the “timeless palace,” as a place where they are both slaves, and the spot of their freedom, evidenced by that moment when Dodola takes off her hijab, are so close; I find it somewhat disrupting. And you don’t have to account for why me or any reader should feel disrupted by this revelation, but it is a shocking thing to have a modern city fueled by such tremendous backwardness that I don’t see justified in the text. Hearing the George Bush analogy at least helps put Wanatolia in a better context.

 

CT: Being in a city is about being in America basically. Having all these creature comforts and material comforts, but Dodola and Zam are coming from a place where they are also aware of suffering elsewhere. Which is sort of an adult experience, becoming more aware of the privileges you have compared to the rest of the world. It’s developing a sense of how you’re a passive participant in taking advantage of other cultures. And someone else has brought up the hijab thing to me, and for me the only real moment Dodola removes her hijab is when she does it to wrap up and clothe this little child at the end. For me that’s the only real moment and any other moment is incidental. If she has a hijab in one panel and off in the next, it mostly has to do with the comfortable space between her and Zam.

 

ND: The scene I’m specifically referring to is when she sees the “modern women” shopping in the city and there is a moment she takes it off then she gets accosted by lustful men a page later and she puts it back on…

CT: For me that scene is not “Oh! I realize I can be free like this women,” but more that she wants to fit in in this new context. She feels like an outsider, which I think the reader will perceive the other women that way because they seem to be from another world. And she does cover herself up because of this male gaze.

 

ND: This brings us back to how Dodola’s body functions primarily as a commodity, how even when the resources run out her body remains a marketable asset. I’m curious about if you ever felt aware of the baggage of her being sexed the whole time, even if that is purposefully through Zam’s perspective. If you ever felt wary of the contradiction between putting a feminist character into a societal position where there is perpetual forced sexualization of her body. I understand you as a “feminist” by putting Dodola out there in a way readers can sympathize with her, but then there’s an aspect of some readers maybe living out their own perverse sexual fantasies through the ways she’s treated. Do you see a danger in that?

CT: I don’t see a danger in it, but I definitely see a contradiction in it. So when you define me as a feminist, I’m OKAY with that, but there’s an irony in men claiming to be feminist to some degree. You can be sort of intellectually feminist, or claim to be, but there’s still a more primal animal instinct. You know, it’s the irony that some men who claim to be so intellectually feminist are the exact same people who are womanizers. Every time I meet another sensitive male it just bores me. And there’s nothing more painful than hearing a guy say he’s a lesbian trapped in a male body. So I’m exploring that contradiction: any man claiming he’s feminist is bullshitting, because your still animalisticly male. Again, I’m talking about heterosexual desires, but this crosses over to all sexual genders from transsexual people to homosexuals. That’s what I was exploring in my own life, that your sex drive is in conflict sometimes with ethical beliefs and you have to recognize both energies. If you put all the negative aspects of your sexuality in the shadow, then you’re probably going to fuck up and make some sort of mistake in your life, the way that politicians and televangelists do when we hear about their sexually deviancy. It’s the classic Catholic Priest scenario: if you don’t own up to your own shadow elements then they’ll emerge anyways and much more destructively.

 

ND: Without a doubt that sounds like a contradiction worth exploring. The problem for me is that for much of Habibi we go for long stretches of only seeing the shadow and then it becomes an issue of who’s casting that perverse shadow. When I hear you talk about it it makes a lot more sense holistically, but when I’m reading it as a stand-alone piece there is this disembodied voice of the author that makes it harder to accept those narrative choices. I guess that you exploring your own sexual contradictions gives readers a space to explore that to and maybe what I’m responding to is how uncomfortable that makes me as a reader feel…

CT: GOOD! That makes me happy I think. Maybe not happy, but it means the art has done its job if it makes the reader uncomfortable.

 

ND: When I heard about the project of Habibi I was expecting maybe a lighter fairy tale, but then as a reader you get confronted with slavery and rape and it’s all at the service of this endearing love story, but it’s pretty jarring throughout.

CT: And when I think of fairytales I think of those dark elements. It seems that all the great nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and children’s stories are full of those exact same dark twisted elements. It’s the tradition of the genre. And I’m not speaking of 1,001 Nights even, but Hansel and Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood.

 

ND: Well to pick up on that it seems that in order for you to call it a fairy tale it has to have a more happy ending. And you provide that by having Dodola and Zam reunited and creating a safe space for a new child, but did you ever have the impulse for it not be happy at the end? To just be brutal?

CT: Oh yeah. Definitely. I never wanted the book to have a cinematic Hollywood ending, and I wrote variations that were more cynical, but ultimately the end that was the most truthful was the far more optimistic one. That said, people see what that they want to see in the endings. With both Blankets and Habibi I’ve heard people say both that they were either super depressing or super hopeful. I find it very interesting when the reader imposes their own experience onto the endings.

 

ND: In Habibi there are these moments were you get a completely new character, like Noah the Fisherman, that feel part of their own complete story. Was that a product of the amount of time you were spending on Habibi and needing a new narrative voice to take a break?

CT: Noah was there from the very first draft. As I was working on the book a lot of people wanted me to remove him. They felt he was too much of a total aside and irreverent basically. But I really enjoyed writing him for my own sake and felt he was a necessary dash of levity in the midst of all the darkness and heaviness. For me he made me laugh a lot and there’s a lot of pleasure writing that character even though there’s an intense sadness to him. I did want the chapters to feel like their own graphic novels to some degree. I was very aware that Zam and Dodola would be apart for hundreds of pages, I wanted it to feel that way almost to the point you forgot about the other character at times. They only existed in this idealized memory. I like that in books where things wander for quite a while and you lose site of where you began.

 

ND: It’s definitely a powerful element that they go through so much change on their own and have to reconcile that when they are reunited. I’m interested in your fan’s reaction to Habibi and what readers have said to you about Dodola and Zam. Are they taking to them the same way they do a cute Chunky Rice?

CT: I think so actually! Yeah! Which is the greatest compliment as an author. I felt really attached to them and they felt like real people to me and that is the sort of response I’m hearing from readers.

 

ND: So if this book is coming from a place of post-9/11 guilt, which I interpret as Islamaphobia in the US, then do you think that Dodola and Zam were the direct product of that? 

CT: No no no! They are unrelated to it at all. They don’t even seem like they’re created. They just kind of arrived from the subconscious fully realized. And they predate anything else in the book. They’re of their own making. Laughs.

 

ND: So they came with their geography and their own history?

CT: I knew they were child slaves from the start, but I didn’t know what kind of world they inhabited. And my research of slavery and randomly reading books about slavery pointed me in the direction of the East African/Arab slave trade that predated the cross-Atlantic slave trade by 700 years. As I was reading some of those research books they eluded often to 1,001 Arabian Nights which drew me towards that, and while reading Nights I became aware of the Orientalism in the Richard Burton anthology. Around the same time I started studying Islamic Art. But I did attach myself fairly early on to the Arabian Nights landscape. Right away I could see it for both its strength and weaknesses, but I thought of it as a genre that would be fun to work in like Superheros, Science Fiction, or Noir.

 

ND: But is just such a loaded genre…

CT: Yeah! Bring it on, right!

 

ND: And I think that’s ultimately my response: it’s hard separating you as a creator who’s clearly very sympathetic and is so good at humanizing characters — which comes across so well in the Qur’anic parts — and the fact that you are swinging around in this playground that is so deeply tied up in a history of otherizing.

CT: And ultimately I like the conflict between those two elements.

___________
This is part of an ongoing roundtable on Habibi and Orientalism.

Can the Subaltern Draw?: The Spectre of Orientalism in Craig Thompson’s Habibi

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“Edward Said talks about Orientalism in very negative terms because it reflects the prejudices of the west towards the exotic east. But I was also having fun thinking of Orientalism as a genre like Cowboys and Indians is a genre – they’re not an accurate representation of the American west, they’re like a fairy tale genre.” – Craig Thompson, PopTones Interview, September 1, 2011

It’s easy to inventory my feelings about Craig Thompson’s Habibi. For well over a year, I approached its release with equal parts excitement and fear. The fear sprang from the 2010 Stumptown Comics Festival — held in Thompson’s hometown of Portland, OR near the completion of Habibi — as I sat in the audience of a Q&A session with him about the processes of publishing and creation. There he explained (as he has in many venues since) that Habibi was going to be an expansive book about Islam and the idea was birthed out a place of post-9/11 guilt he felt in reaction to America’s Islamophobic tendencies. Had he traveled much in the Middle East? No, except Morocco. Did he know Arabic? No, but he had learned the alphabet. At one point he actively said he was playing “fast and loose with culture” picking from here and there in order to tell his story as he saw fit. As I sat in the audience I saw red flags going up. I was about the spend a year abroad studying how The Adventures of Tintin is a Orientalist text precisely because Hergé rarely left the confines of Belgium while drawing the far off landscapes of India, Egypt, China, or made-up Arab lands like Khemed. And here was Craig Thompson some 80 odd years later, well intentioned, proposing a very similar project of creating a made-up Arab land of Wanatolia for the purposes of quelling his own guilt. What he called “fast and loose,” I called cultural appropriation.

Habibi at its best and worst.

Now that the tome is here and I’ve had a chance to read it I feel no less nauseous or enthusiastic about the work that Thompson has produced. To be clear, Habibi is a success on many levels, but it also contains elements that are strikingly problematic through the lens of Orientalism. There are three key components to Habibi: Calligraphy and Islamic patterns, illustrated Suras from the Qur’an and Haddith, and a love story between the characters Dodola and Zam. On the first two counts, Thompson has more than excelled in creating a beautiful rarity for U.S. bookshelves. On the last count of the decades-spanning love story that Thompson has chosen to tell and the setting he has chosen to tell it in, I find that Habibi is a tragically familiar Orientalist tale that a reader can find in books by Kipling or many a French painter.

The Slave Market by Jean-Leon Gerome (1866)

I will get to how the book fails to escape many classic Orientalist trappings soon, but first let’s discuss what Habibi gets right. The good is found foremost in the calligraphy and geometric patterns Thompson employs throughout Habibi. Given the technical skill and confidence Thompson uses when writing in Arabic, it is really unbelievable that he doesn’t actually know the language. Here is a prime example from early in the text:

From any perspective this is stunning artwork. Through Dodola’s first husband, a scribe, Thompson creates a space to explore the beauty of calligraphy in the larger narrative. Therefore, on a meta-level, Habibi is a format for Thompson to practice calligraphy: an art form that lends itself well to the loose expressive brush line he made iconic in Blankets. As a reader, Thompson’s joy in learning the Arabic alphabet and how it can work simultaneously as a symbolic and literal art form comes across. His perspective as a non-native speaker with a strong artistic background works towards him making interesting connections about Arabic in Habibi:

Along these lines, Thompson explores the geometric shapes of Islamic art to great success. The heavily detailed patterns he often uses in borders are the work of a talented, and slightly obsessive-compulsive, artist. The finely detailed explorations of Islamic patterns are a key part of what makes reading Habibi such a treat. As a reader I was often forced to pause in a page in praise of Thompson’s technical skill. While over-relying on this ornate style as shorthand for “Arab setting” made me raise a cautionary eyebrow beforehand, it is clear that Thompson is thoughtful in a way that escapes the pitfall. Here is a late in the text explanation of patterns that offers a glimpse into how thorough the cartoonist was in his research:

The second thematic triumph of Habibi is the manner which Thompson explores Islam. This clearly and heavily researched portion of the text contains the most exciting and memorable sections of Habibi by far. Thompson has mentioned the influence of Joe Sacco during the book making process and it is clear this is where Sacco’s research and report approach has influenced Thompson the most. Just as Sacco’s work lives in the footnotes of Gaza, here we get the product of Thompson diving deep into Islamic Hadith (the reported statements and actions of the Prophet Muhammad during his life), specific suras (chapters) of the Qur’an, and pre-Qur’anic mysticism. The threads he pulls out of his research are fascinating on their own right. His act of discovery is shared with the reader and it is clear he was excited to make it.

After reading the book it is evident that these are the sections Thompson refers to in his press when he talks about the book coming from a place of post-9/11 guilt. In the aftermath of September 11th, American Islamaphobia was predicated on understanding the attack by a few extremists as representative of an entire faith. Realizing this, Thompson uses Habibi to perform the due diligence of going into the Qur’an to reveal the large venn diagrams in between faiths. The question Thompson puts out there is: How can so many Christians and Jewish people be so against Islam when there are so many similarities between the faiths?

This exploration of the slight differences of the Abraham story between the Old Testament and the Qur’an — namely which son he takes to sacrifice — is one of the more successful uses of the Qur’an in Habibi. Thompson returns to this story of sacrifice multiple times in the narrative to increasing success, even when it simply used as a visual cue. By the end we get Thompson resolving the story by noting that in both versions what matters is that God spared the son, and from them the lineages of both faiths became deeply intertwined.

Thompson uses Habibi as a venue to argue that Islam and Christianity are not at odds with each other, but interconnected to one another. On this mark, Habibi is a well-done and original contribution to the canon of contemporary Western comics literature. I applaud Thompson for humanizing a religion that many have been quick to vilify, and for managing to do it in a non-preachy way. In fact, because he approaches Islam with a clear compassion and level-headedness, I suspect many readers let Thompson off the hook for the Orientalist elements of the text.

Which brings us to the bulk of the book: the love story between Dodola and Zam spanning multiple decades, set predominately in the land of Wanatolia. While this story is drawn with the same detail-attentive pen that Thompson uses at the service of calligraphy and geometric patterns, here it predominantly captures the vagueness of stereotypes. Thompson contributes to (instead of resisting) Orientalist discourse by overly sexualizing women, littering the text with an abundance of savage Arabs, and dually constructing the city of Wanatolia as modern and timeless.

One of the biggest missteps that Habibi makes is relying heavily on unrequited sex as a main narrative thrust. In John Acocella’s critique of Stieg Larsson’s popular Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series from earlier this year, he notes that some charge Larsson of “having his feminism and eating it too” based on the blunt manner in which he uses rape as a plot device. I think a similar charge can be laid against Thompson, who uses the repeated rape (and sometimes consensual sex by circumstance) of Dodola as an emotional tool that never feels wholly earned.

The rape of Dodola

What Thompson makes repeatedly explicit throughout Habibi is implicit in the classic Orientalist painting “The Slave Market” by Jean-Leon Gerome pictured earlier. In that painting, as with many more from the same era, the savagery of Orientals is imagined by European artists and portrayed for European audiences. What is reflected in these paintings is the White Man’s Burden: the felt need among those in the West to save Arab women from Arab men. By imitating the style of French Orientalist paintings as a vessel for his story, Thompson also transfers the message those paintings are loaded with. It is the same White Man’s Burden that drives readers to register Dodola as a damsel in distress (a position she inhabits for the majority of the book). She needs saving from the savage Arab men that over-populate the book.

Furthermore, Thompson creates a world where Dodola’s chief asset is her sexed body. She sacrifices herself to men to feed Zam, gain a version of “freedom” with the Sultan, and save herself from jail. Thompson crafts a societal position for the main character of the book where she must always be exotic and sexualized. Proof of our empowered heroin:

The thing about this version of empowerment (as Acocella argues with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) is that while readers do feel solidarity with Dodola, they are also given a space to live out a version of their own sexual fantasies via the text. It’s hard to make the distinction between a character being overly sexualized as a necessity for a larger feminist narrative and the reality that the product of this narrative is a book with a nude exotic Arab woman in panel after panel.

The question, then, is if Thompson so badly wanted to tell a story about what sex means in the context of love (familial to sexual), survival, and sacrifice, why did he choose this vessel? The answer I come to is that because this was the easy context. The artistic playground he chose of barbaric Arabs devoid of history but not savagery is a well-trod environment in Western literature, and one that is consistently reinforced in the pages of Habibi. In too many panels, Thompson conjures up familiar and lazy stereotypes of Arabs. From the greedy Sultan in his palace, to the Opium dazed harem, to the overly crowded streets of beggars, and the general status of women as property, Thompson layers the book with the hollow caricatures from other literature. These settings are easy to imagine because they have been passed down and recycled throughout much of Western media, so we immediately register these vague settings as natural:

Nudity in Sultan’s Harem

Thompson constructs a version of the Orient that is filled with savage Arab men and sexualized Arab women, all at the service of penning a humanizing love story between slaves. The thing about humanizing, the way that Thompson does it here, is that while Dodola and Zam arrive as three-dimensional characters, they are made so by comparison to a cast of extremely dehumanized Arabs. While reading Habibi you can count the characters of depth on one hand with fingers to spare, but the amount of shallow stereotypes embodied in the supporting cast is staggering. The Sultan’s palace perhaps contains the most abundant examples of Thompson’s Orientalism. For the majority of the comic that takes place in the palace, the dialogue is so cliché-ridden that one could take out the words from the panels and the flow of the story would not be disrupted.

The Tusken Raiders present “the phantom courtesan of the desert”

Thompson has often mentioned the influence of 1001 Arabian Nights on him when creating the setting for Habibi. It’s easy to see this connection through Dodola’s status in the palace, but I think Thompson may be understating the influence of a more contemporary take on one of those tales: Disney’s Aladdin. In the same way that this Gulf War children’s classic is a prime contemporary example of Orientalism in America, Habibi repeats many of the moves in a more highbrow setting. As Aladdin opens, a nameless desert merchant sets the tone for viewers in a song about the Arabian Nights we are entering:

Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place

Where the caravan camels roam

Where they cut off your ear

If they don’t like your face

It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home*

I thought of these lyrics repeatedly while reading through Habibi, as I could easily imagine the same desert merchant popping up in panels of Habibi to chime in: “It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home!” In Habibi, Dodola and Zam are struggling for a better life in a fixed system of backwardness. What is ultimately most frustrating about the brutality of Habibi‘s Arabs is it is a brutality that is never justified or made to face consequences: it just sits there as normalcy. Dodola being raped, the harsh way the city treats Zam when he is on his own, the Sultan’s ruthlessness, the caravan camels roaming: these are all just acceptable facets of Wanatolia being a faraway place. Like Arguba in Aladdin, Wanatolia is a made-up and timeless setting for love to spring in spite of Arabness.

Wanatolia represents the heart of Habibi’s most problematic elements. In the sense that Habibi is a fairy tale (which Thompson has stated he was intending to create) it is understandable that the city is constructed as “timeless.” In other words, the majority of Dodola and Zam’s story isn’t tied to an analogous timeline. The problem arises when in the latter chapters of the book Thompson reveals that the same backward setting of Wanatolia (which houses the harem filled palace of the Sultan) dually houses a modern urban city. When Dodola and Zam return to Wanatolia after escaping the palace and recouping with a fisherman, we see the city in a completely new light: it is now a vibrant bustling city with billboards for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, SUVs, and free women pushing strollers.

The reveal means that readers now have to reconcile that the same city of Wanatolia houses in a small proximity a site of forced sexual slavery and a site of Western-style modernity; a city where an Arguba-like brutality lives in tandem with a KFC. Therefore, Thompson presents a version of modernization for Arabs that is fueled by backwardness. The entire events of the book are retroactively a modern reality in the wake of an urban Wanatolia.

Dodola flirts with “being modern,” where “being modern” means taking off the hijab.

Wanatolia represents the poignant identity crisis at the heart of Habibi: it wants to be a fairytale and commentary on capitalism at the same time. The problem is that in sampling both genres so fluidly, Thompson breaks down the boundaries that keep the Oriental elements in the realm of make-believe. In other words, the way in which Wanatolia is portrayed as simultaneously savage and “modern” reinforces how readers conceive of the whole of the Middle East. Although Thompson is coming from a very different place, he is presenting the same logic here that stifles discourse in the United States on issues like the right to Palestinian statehood. If we are able to understand Arabs in a perpetual version of Arabian Nights, then we are able to deny them a seat at the table of “civilized discourse.”

Ultimately, when looking at Habibi we are left with the value of intention. Thompson has argued rather convincingly in recent talks that the book is knowingly Orientalist and he wanted to engage with these stereotypes to simply play within the genre. As he claims in the quote that leads this review, he intended to use Orientalism as a genre to tell a tale about Arabs the same way that stories in the genre of Cowboys and Indians are both fun and inaccurate. The problem in making something knowingly racist is that the final product can still be read as racist.

I know that Craig Thompson is a great guy who would probably win an award for thoughtfulness if such an award existed, but the issue remains that Habibi reproduces many of the Orientalist stereotypes already abundant in Western literature and popular culture. Although Thompson set out to play with these stereotypes, he never does a good enough job distinguishing what separates play from his own belief.

Habibi is an imperfect attempt to humanize Arabs for an American audience. There are definitely large technical and thematic triumphs to note, some of which I’ve mentioned here (from calligraphy to Qur’an) and others of which I didn’t get to (particularly the role of water/environmental concerns in the narrative). On an aesthetic level, Habibi is a wonderful experience that I recommend to anyone with spare time and the ability to lift heavy objects. Thompson is one of the most talented comic artists and writers working today, and that he took seven years working on Habibi is evident in the ink on display throughout the book. Yet, between the eroticized women, the savage men, and the presentation of these elements as constituents of Arab modernity, it is unfortunate Thompson’s skills are being used at the service of a mostly Orientalist narrative.

* The lyric “they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face” was removed in subsequent versions of Aladdin due to a complaint by the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). I recommend reading the ADC’s explanation of the situation.
_____________
Update by Noah: Nadim’s thoughts have inspired an impromptu roundtable on Orientalism. which can be read here as it develops.

Can The Subaltern Draw?: A Survey of Contemporary Arab Comics

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Since around 2006, the Middle East has played host to a small and steadily growing scene of locally produced comics. Distinct from the rich history of children’s comics in the region (the likes of which I have touched on in the past), this contemporary comics’ culture has seen the output of comics that are explicitly intended for an adult audience. This new crop of independent Middle Eastern comics spans familiar western formats such as graphic novels, monthly issues, and anthologies, while addressing topics ranging from religion to politics to sex. The survey I’ve compiled here is not complete, but it is a start at cataloguing the wonderful dialogue that is happening right now with comic art in the Arab world. My hope is that what follows can serve as a space for others to add to, comment on, and maybe encourage some space shaving on bookshelves.

Lebanon:

Samandal (2007 – Present)

Creators/Editors: Omar Khouri, Tarek Nabaa, Hatem Imam, Lena Merhej, and Fadi Baki (as Fdz Bx)

Website: http://www.samandal.org/

About: If there is a ground zero for this recent wave of Arab comics than Samandal marks the spot. Samandal started in 2006 as a fully-realized and fully-packed comics’ magazine for “picture stories from here and there.” Each subsequent issue — currently up to 11 — has been a sizable collection of comics from local artists in all three of Lebanon’s official languages (Arabic, French, and English). The quality varies, but Samandal at its best features comics that are better than many of its global counterparts. It’s hard not to be excited when reading an issue of Samandal: at its core it is a comics’ anthology that captures the vibrancy and complexity of the country which it was created in. It is no surprise this successful DIY effort has since inspired so many others in the country and region to take a stab at making comics.

In the premier issue the staff offers an answer to “What is Samandal?”

Supplementary Links:

A page from co-founder Omar Khouri’s “Salon Tarek el Khurafi” in Issue One

The Educator (2007-2010)

Creator: Fouad Mezher

Website: http://fouadmezher.blogspot.com/

About: The best longer form comic to emerge from the depths of Samandal is the work of Fouad Mezher in The Educator. The story of how straight-laced John Fawkes finds love and a cause in the backdrop of a totalitarian academy seams simple enough at first blush (ha) but one of Mezher’s greatest talents is embedding a seemingly straightforward action comic with commentary about Lebanese politics. Put differently, imagine if Vertigo knew how to do subtlety and refrain from being overly-preachy and you would have something resembling The Educator. This charming (and violent!) comic is also notable for using the high contrast black-and-white approach masterfully for capturing the pseudo-Lebanese landscape.

Mezher’s follow up to The Educator, a comic about an Arab-American girl who becomes a superhero called Enigma, is currently one chapter in and looks like an extradroadinarly promising follow-up.

More black-and-white goodness from The Educator.

Malaak, Angel of Peace (2006 – Present)

Creator: Joumana Medlej

Website: http://www.malaakonline.com/index.html

About: Malaak: Angel of Peace is a prime example of how Arab artists are using a long-established medium to convey a very different kind of message. I’m not usually crazy about superhero comics, but then again superhero comics aren’t usually about measuring the human cost of sectarian violence. As a fellow Lebanese who is discouraged by the political bickering of the country (and region) almost always, it is nice to read Medlej’s clever response to inflammatory rhetoric in the form a superhero who champions the people. In my opinion, the series (currently in its fifth volume and all available for free online) greatest success is the way in which Medlej wonderfully captures Beirut in her pages. From the backgrounds to the people to the dialogue, this is a comic with a distinct point of view from an author who is a keen observer of her surroundings.

Also, it needs to be mentioned that Malaak is pretty great at fighting.

As a parting thought I feel comfortable recommending Malaak based solely on the sublime and beautifully executed dream sequences. Proof:

Supplementary Links:

Mazen Kerbaj

Websites: http://mazenkerblog.blogspot.com/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/kerbaj

About: You can’t really talk about Arab comics without talking about Mazen Kerbaj. Although he hasn’t produced a proper collection of comics to my knowledge, he has been an active practitioner since at least 2000. Kerbaj’s comics skew towards the political (above, obviously) as he bridges the gap between the older generation of Middle Eastern political cartoonists (dating back to 1920s) and the newer Samandal-influenced crop. I find his straightforward approach to comics to be highly effective, almost like a millennial Handala.

Translation: In Beirut there are ugly buildings, and beautiful women! (It’s funny because those words are similar in Arabic. And because it’s true.)

 

All Photos From Kerbaj’s extensive Flickr Feed.

Egypt:

Metro (2008)

Creator: Magdy El-Shafee

Publisher: Mohamed El-Sharkawi

Website: http://www.magdycomics.com/

About: Because of the recent media attention Magdy El-Shafee’s Metro has garnered, you may already know about this comic that was published in Arabic by El-Malameh Publishing House. Billed as “the first Arabic graphic novel,” Metro tells the story of a young software designer named Shihab who decides to rob a bank in order to pay back a massive amount of debt he owes corrupt officials. The comic paints a scathing portrait of Mubarak-era Egypt (known for last the thirty years as “Egypt”) where all police are corrupt and Egyptians themselves are too complacent to change anything. It should come as no surprise then that during the era of Mubarak’s police state control this revolution-friendly comic was banned soon after its release. El-Shafee and El-Sharkawi were slapped with fines for “distributing graphic pornography” (there is a sex scene in the comic), but not before police raided and confiscated the majority of El-Sharkawi’s offices. Just this past year an unshaken El-Sharkawi tried to open a comic book store only to be thrown in jail and have the property taken away. In my opinion, the story surrounding this comic most certainly eclipses the comic itself.

Supplementary Links:

TokTok (2011)

Creators/Editors: Andil, Tawfi2, Shennawy, Makhlouf, Hisham Rahma, Khaled Ab3ziz, Mona Sonbol, and Anwar. 

Website: http://toktokmag.com/

 

About: Egypt’s response to Samandal comes in the form of this new comics’ magazine. As the creators describe the Arabic-only magazine, “TokTok is different from traditional comic books, which are usually made for children.  It’s a monthly review that aims to produce a bustling mass of comic strips in a free, contemporary spirit, drawn and edited by its own artists.” Despite the whole revolution thing happening shortly after the release of their first issue, Toktok is back on its monthly rate with this Summer’s release of issue three. The first couple of issues look promising!

From the very well attended TokTok release party. Photos by me.

Supplementary Links:

 

Ruins of the Future (2009)

All photos from Ganzeer’s blog

Creator: Ganzeer

Website: www.ganzeer.com / http://ganzeer.blogspot.com/2009/12/archives-ruins-of-future.html

About: Although I haven’t gotten a chance to read Ruins of the Future for myself, it sounds pretty amazing. From what I gather from Ganzeer’s blog it a science fiction graphic novel set in the pyramids. As he writes, “Upon noticing that all scenes at the pyramids in Egyptian movies either take place in the past or present, but nothing in the future, so the idea was suggested to borrow a bit from Egyptian novels, the only source of science fiction in Egypt, and look up some scenes that take place at the pyramids, and see if a full-fledged sci fi graphic novel can come out of it.”

Since the release of Ruins of the Future, Ganzeer has strayed away from pure comics while venturing into some pretty amazing illustrative work. Most recently his street art has become a critical component of the revolution. A great example is this “Mask of Fredoom” sticker that Ganzeer has been passing out around Tahrir Square:

Supplementary Links:

 

The United Arab Emirates:

Gold Ring (2009 – Present)

Creator: Qais Sedki

Website: http://www.goldring.ae/main.html

 

 

About: A highly buzzed about comic created by an Emirati software engineer turned comics creator by the name of Qais Sedki. Gold Ring marks another “first,” this time the first Arab-language Manga. Because of the UAE’s proximity to Asia it makes sense Dubai was the the first place to use the Manga format to tell a distinctly Arab story. And what a story it is, from the press release: “The story revolves around Sultan, an Arab boy who watches the Gold Ring falconry competition with his friend Ziad. At the competition they find a caged falcon. Sultan convinces his friend to release the falcon into the wild. The next morning, the falcon is at Sultan’s doorstep. Sultan calls the bird ‘Majid’ and trains her for an upcoming falconry competition.” The comic currently has one volume out, with an English translation of the first and a second Arabic volume on the way soon.

Supplementary Links:

Kuwait:

The 99 (2004 – 2011)

 

Creator: Dr. Naif Al Mutaway

Website: http://www.the99.org/

About: This is certainly the most well-known Arab comic outside of the Middle East, no doubt attributable to the media savvy of its creator Dr. Naif Al Mutaway. And when I say widely known, I mean that even President Obama gave it a shout out in a speech. The 99 is the tale of superheroes whose powers are based on the 99 attributes of Allah. Although this is a particularly Islamic set-up, Dr. Al Mutaway recruited Marvel/DC vets such as Fabian Nicieza, Stuart Moore, June Brigman, and more to give it that distinct superhero polish from the get go. The ties to the American comic industry are further exemplified by a recent cross over event which saw members of The 99 fighting crime alongside the JLA. Since its premiere and wild success in the Middle East, the comic has spawned a theme park, a television show and there are future talks of developing it into a movie. In fact, as of this year The 99 has halted production as a comic book.

Supplementary Links:

Can The Subaltern Draw?: The Case of the Arab Henchman

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While I haven’t yet met anybody whose favorite Tintin adventure is The Crab with the Golden Claws (Crab), it is certainly an important text in the scale of Hergé’s overall story about the boy reporter.* For one, Crab is the album in which Tintin meets, is repeatedly almost killed by, and ultimately befriends the perpetually drunk Captain Haddock. As such the album will presumably serve as the first act of Steven Spielberg’s 3-D monster The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Anglophiles. Penned in 1941, Crab is also notable for being the first story Hergé published during Belgium’s occupation by Nazi Germany in the newspaper Le Soir. But what I find most intriguing about Crab (besides its relatively recent Simpsons cameo) is its long and curious history of edits, some of which I will explore today.

Deckhand “Jumbo” becomes markedly whiter.
Soon after World Word II, under the request of new publisher Casterman Hergé was asked to color Crab and the other completed black-and-white Tintins in hopes of marketing the comics to a larger global audience. During that process of colorization and reformatting (where Hergé took the liberty to self-edit), the only thing that changed about Crab content-wise was the language in the speech bubbles. However in 1959, Hergé was asked to make revisions to the nearly twenty year old panels at the behest of American publisher Golden Press, who were looking to make The Adventures of Tintin available in the United States. Chris Owens has written an account of Tintin’s move to (and ultimate failure in) the American market in the 1960s on Tintinologist.com in a piece titled, “Tintin Crosses The Atlantic: The Golden Press Affair.” He does a thorough job at highlighting the specifics of the move, so instead of going into all the adjustments (“Snowy” to “Buddy,” no drinking Whiskey from the bottle, etc.) I want to focus particularly on how Hergé adjusted the race of his more problematic characters. As Owens puts it:

Before the translations [into American English] began in earnest, Hergé agreed to redraw several panels for The Crab with the Golden Claws depicting black characters. The US censors didn’t approve of mixing races in children’s books, so the artist created new frames, replacing black deckhand Jumbo with another character, possibly of Puerto-Rican origin. Elsewhere, a black character shown whipping Captain Haddock was replaced by someone of North African appearance.

Put simply, Hergé replaced his black characters with a possible “Puerto-Rican” in one instance (illustrated above) and an Arab in the other. In his wonderful series Tintin in Otherland, Alex Buchet has addressed Hergé’s overall problem with representing “others” and touches on the creators often sardonic response to charges of racism. A typical defense from Hergé in his latter days reads like this quote from a 1975 interview: “In a nutshell, Soviets and Congo were ‘sins of my youth.’ That’s not to say that I disown them, but in the end, if I had to do them again, I would do everything differently for sure, and then all my sins would be forgiven!” (Hergé in His Own Words, 25).

Indeed, in response to these very edits that Golden Press requested him to make for American editions of Crab, Hergé sarcastically stated: “Everyone knows that there are no blacks in America” (Source). While I can spend (and others already have spent) hours parsing Hergé’s half-hearted verbal defense of his “sins of youth,” I rather call to question specifically why he changed the mysterious and speechless henchman featured heavily in the latter pages of Crab from African to Arab.

(Click to Enlarge)

Privately, I’ve come to refer to this textual change as “The Case of the Arab Henchman” and it is a case I often refer to while trying to locate Hergé’s view on non-white people. Considering Tintin was Hergé’s job for the majority of his life, often the best point of entry into the man’s personal beliefs are scattered throughout the pages of the comics themselves. Not to overstate this, but having read both versions of Crab — one with the African Henchman and one with Arab Henchman — it is remarkable how similarly they flow. Put differently, even though he changes the race of a character featured in upwards of 12 panels, nothing feels different narrative-wise. Which forces me to ask why?

(Click to Enlarge)

The question Hergé had to answer (probably implicitly) when requested to edit out the nameless black henchman he drew in 1921 for someone new in 1959 was “who can I change this with so that the narrative will maintain its plausibility, but without offending anyone’s sensibilities?” The answer came in the new acceptable stereotype of Arab lackey, which is precisely harmful as most stereotypes are because of its vagueness and interchangeability. To be clear, I’m not saying that this new henchman was a worse stereotype than the old one, or that the original crude depiction shouldn’t have been changed, but I am questioning how this new stereotype was acceptable in a way that the old one was no longer. And while I’m not pointing out anything you can’t find worded better in Said’s Orientalism, I still find the need to point it out pressing, especially considering the Arab henchman was re-presented without question to an Arab audience upon Tintin’s translation into Arabic:

In the 1970s, Tintin was translated (legally) into Arabic by long-running Egyptian publisher Daar el Maaref and thereafter made available in the standard album format for a receptive Arab audience.** During the translation/transition into Arabic, it is important to note a few things were adjusted to fit better culturally among the new readership. However, while the censors of Golden Press were enough to make Hergé change a henchman from African to Arab, there clearly wasn’t enough sensibilities being upset to make the henchman change yet again. The Arab Henchman was accepted, and future generations of Arab children would internalize the mustachioed man whipping their beloved Captain Haddock, hoping for Tintin to interrupt with his gun in the name of justice. Equally intriguing as I’ve reread Crab is what did get changed as Tintin learned to speak Arabic:

I’ll give you a second to re-read the dialogue from the top panels. As it is available on bookshelves today (English readers, check your collection), Captain Haddock calls the Arab Henchman a “Negro.” I was curious to see how this bad bit of editing was translated into Arabic, only to find that it wasn’t translated at all. As you can see (from right to left because that’s how Arabic works), Haddock tells the police to arrest the “man,” not the “Negro.” Therefore it appears the translator/s were aware there was a weird edit in the pages, and their solution (with Hergé’s old age no doubt a factor) was to accept the art and change the words. Elsewhere, the Arabic version of Crab contains another bit of tidy work:

(Click to Enlarge)

Above in the desert shoot off between Haddock and another unnamed Arab, two distinctive edits are made in the Arabic translation. First, instead of saying “By the beard of the Prophet!” as Hergé supposedly imagined an Arab in combat might, the reference to Prophet Mohamed is replaced with “You won’t escape.” Second, instead of keeping the nonsensical squiggly lines that Hergé used to represent a phrase in Arabic, the translator put actual Arabic text (“This will be the last shot!”). I find these two subtle edits to be a positive element of the Arabic editions of Crab. Instead of accepting Hergé’s stereotyped language decisions for an Arab character (prophet-referencing, fury squiggles) the translator took it upon herself to create language based slightly closer on reality. While these edits don’t produce the same (arguably) culturally-balanced product as Hergé’s famous collaboration with Zhang Chongren in The Blue Lotus, they do help the work take a small step away from being based solely on Hergé’s mind-forged manacles. The translators clearly made a conscious effort in the small wiggle room they had access to, but when faced with a speechless character like “The Arab Henchman,” it seems an eraser is the only way to effectively curb a misguided stereotype.

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*To put this in context, I even met someone who named Soviets as their favorite album.

** I should note that Tintin adventures have been available in colloquial Arabic for consumers as far back as 1956 in the pages of Cairo-based Samir Magazine. Although not legal, these translations meant readers were exposed to Tintin well before Daar Al Maaref editions were available.

Can The Subaltern Draw?: Defining Manhua -or- A Translated Marketplace in Contemporary China

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I realized about halfway through a recent interview with Cult Youth founding member Chairman Ca that I was asking the wrong questions. I was nearing the end of my stay in Beijing when I finally got a meeting with Ca, who was seeming more and more like the leader of the only real contemporary comics’ collective in China. In him I sought proof that Chinese comics (or “Manhua”) not only had a present, but a future; a future that would create a discursive political/social space for young critics like it had for so many countries before China. In him I found not the leader of a comics’ revolution, but a very talented dude who likes to make comics about Zombies.

Pages from Chairman Ca’s Zombie Pie

But before we discuss the salience of Cult Youth (CY), it is important to understand the larger comics’ community (or lack thereof) in which they operate. To put it simply, besides CY and a few rare exceptions, there aren’t any contemporary Chinese artists producing comics. However, this doesn’t mean that Chinese people aren’t avidly consuming comics on their iPhones and knock off iPhones alike. You see, the comics that are popular in China aren’t made in China, they’re translated Japanese imports. If you are remotely familiar with the history of China-Japan relations — from The Rape of Nanking all the way to the Diaoyu Islands — hearing that China openly embraces Japanese culture might appear contradictory to popular opinion. And for scholars of Manhua’s history (which you are about to get a primer on!), the reality would seem even stranger. As I’ll explore today, it somehow works that the culture which has youths actively devoting weekends to reading translated Japanese comics is the same culture where you can still read bumper stickers like this:

The history of Manga and Manhua have long been intertwined. The shared heritage should be evident from the name “Manhua” itself, a term adopted by Chinese to approximate the name “Manga” that Japanese caricaturist Hokusai Katsushika famously gave to his depictions of everyday life back in 1814. For a long while after that, Japanese held regional dominance over what was produced under that term, including work like Li De’s strangely Western-like The Rat’s Plaint in 1891. But as Japan-China relations soured under the weight of Japan’s imperial tendencies in the early 1900s, Manhua and Manga saw a clean break.

That clean break is perhaps best exemplified in the clear lines of Feng Zikai, who emerged in the early twentieth century as China’s preeminent comics artist. According to the wonderful Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua by Wendy Siuyi Wong, it was Zikai’s first published collection of cartoons, Zikai Manhua, in 1925 that better defined “Manhua” as a distinct art form in Chinese society. Through the work of Zikai, Manhua transformed from a loose pan-Asian signifier to describing a specialized Chinese art form with a common aesthetic. I’ll pause here to share some of Zikai’s art, which understandably galvanized a whole nation to define a term around it:

These Feng Zikai’s illustrations come via Cultural China and China Online Museum (where I encourage you to take in many more pieces)

Before long, Manhua became a venue for the political as the nation grew increasingly resentful of Japan’s growing regional dominance. In 1927, the Shanghai Cartoon Association — the first cartoon society of its kind in China — formed as a gathering point for a growing roster of Manhua artist. Founding members included Ding Song, Zhang Guangyu, Lu Zhengei, Wang Dunqing, and, of course, Feng Zikai. “The association helped to solidify the loosely organized network of artists that made up the comics industry,” argues Wong in HK Comics, “and it encouraged efforts to raise the quality of its products.” Indeed, the Chinese artists not only used the organization to better their art, but through it explicitly defined Manhua as an art-form and a nationalistic enterprise. Like most nationalistic enterprises, Manhua came to define itself in opposition to other nations; namely Japan. At the Shanghai Animation and Comics Museum the association’s emblem hangs proudly near the entrance with an explanation:

“The association’s emblem is a Cartoon Dragon, representing a caricatured dragon awakening, taking off, determined to fight for the future of the homeland. Members of the association played a leadership role in the cartoon circle at that time, acted as hardcore force in cartoon creation and initiated many periodicals.” (Text from Display)

The dragon awakened within the pages of Chinese cartoon magazines and newspapers alike in the 1930s, determined to fight for its homeland at the start of the Sino-Japanese War. In this especially heated time, many artists became popular for creating anti-Japanese characters. One such artist was Huang Yao, who developed the character Niu Bi Zi. Here is perhaps Yao’s most famous cartoon, which depicts Niu Bi Zi (as China) helplessly crying in the wake of the West’s selfish gutting of the world:

Image via Lambiek

Then there is Zhang Leping, one of the most revered Manhua artists of his generation who is best-known for creating the cartoon character”Sanmao.” For decades the very popular Sanmao represented the struggle of the Chinese people and helped expose the cruelty of occupying Japanese forces. Take for example this typical anti-Japanese Sanmao comic, which shows the Japanese soldiers as senseless and ruthless killers.

Image via Lambiek

The members of the Shanghai Cartoon Association stoked the nationalist flame of China with hatred of Japanese, a fuel source that the PRC has repeatedly used through history when needing to drum up nationalism quickly. The work of these mainland artists from the 1920s until the early 1950s distinguished Manhua from Manga, seemingly putting the two countries in a race for regional dominance in the world of comics.* Today, it takes just one foot inside a Manhua store in any Chinese city to see that the two-way race was won by Japan long ago.

This all leads me back to Cult Youth, an independent Beijing-collective who at first blush looks like a 21st Century incarnation of the Shanghai Cartoon Association. I discovered Cult Youth through this short documentary of them floating around online:

(Click For Video)

Just like the Shanghai Cartoon Association did in the 1920s, Cult Youth have formed a community built around making (and re-defining) Manhua. A productive community at that: since 2007, Cult Youth has self-published three jam-packed collections of work that they sell online. They come across as a rare creative force in an otherwise stagnant market, willing to embrace “DIY” touchstones and break a few rules in the name of putting out relatively provocative comics. “If you were not born in the 80s and couldn’t decode the plots, then give up! This is not for you!,” reads the CY manifesto at the video’s start, “this is a new generation free of the reasons and worries of the past.” In the context of mainland China this bold self-determinative statement feels radical (at least to an outsider like myself). Which is why when I finally met founding member Chairman Ca I was expecting him to embody the language of young revolutionaries, when in reality he was much more modest about his ambitions.

Chairman Ca in his studio.

In my interview with Ca, he politely deflated my suggestions that maybe China was on the verge of a new comics renaissance. Instead, he explained that for him comics are more about a group of friends having fun on the side of their day-jobs, not a potential career path. Ca is an immense talent who has been actively making comics and other art since his days in university, yet he doesn’t keep a portfolio because he doesn’t feel like he needs one. When I asked him about the influence of luminaries like Feng Zikai or where he sees himself in the larger continuum of Manhua he gave me an unexpected answer: “Growing up here we come into contact with more Japanese comics. Only after the Internet became prevalent did we learn about European or North American comics.” Which is to say, the major influences of Ca and Cult Youth’s creative aspirations are not found in the history of Chinese comics, but downloaded copies of R. Crumb and translated Manga. Where the forefathers of Manhua defined themselves in opposition to Japan, Ca represents a generation that defines themselves in collaboration with Japan.

According to Ca the prevalence of translated Japanese comics in today’s market arose because while Manga was establishing itself as an industry in 70s, 80s, and 90s, independent comics were ostensibly made illegal in mainland China. Meanwhile, while the mainland had run dry of original content, Japanese publishers responded to a continued demand for comics in Taiwan and Hong Kong by translating Manga series into Chinese. Hence, Ca and his peers grew up in the mainland with the only new comics available in their language being pirated Manga translations from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Ca’s reference points are then Western reference points: Rockabilly was his first musical love, Zombies are cool, and he identifies philosophically as a Existentialist. For Ca, the fact that Japan is the chief-purveyor of comics in the region isn’t a cultural defeat as older generations would understand it, but simply a reality.

“The industry does well there, it has certain principles and successful cases. It’s easy for young people to turn themselves into that comic industry because it’s an established business,” says Ca of Japan’s Manga market, “For a Chinese person to make a living out of comics it takes a lot of resolute determination to get there. Maybe too much.” Ca’s stance exemplifies a generational shift in Chinese society in the wake of Mao. A generation who now unabashedly embraces Japanese culture through Manga is perhaps the logical extension of Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms from 1978 onwards: for better or worse, China shifted from a self-contained market to a interdependent player in the world’s economy by opening up. It appears that in the last twenty years the definition of “Manhua” has itself opened up. No longer in a vacuum where it is used as a political tool to encourage nationalism, Manhua is now a term that encompasses a rich history, a translated marketplace, and a few stray youths.

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* The 1950s marks the formation of the PRC by Mao, and the point where innovative Manhua fled with many Chinese to Hong Kong. While Manhua continued in the mainland during the twentieth century, it was mainly in a bastardized and government sanctioned-only form unlike its early creative years.

A very special thanks to my friend Alec Sugar who served as my fearless translator during the Chairman Ca interview.

And one more Zikai for the road:

One For All and All For One

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I was recently reading an essay by sociologist and comics scholar Casey Brienza about the rise of American manga titled “Books Not Comics: Publishing Fields, Globalization, and Japanese Manga in the United States” (first published in Publishing Research Quarterly.) Most of the essay is an interesting discussion of the format rejiggering by Tokyopop which triggered the manga boom in the U.S. However, at the very end, she broadens her net a bit to focus on the implications of globalization in general.

This is the great tragedy of globalization. Although globalization has changed the world in which we live dramatically, there are places within our interior worlds that even those outward changes cannot penetrate. There is an irreducible distance between different people and different cultures that globalization cannot bridge. Much of manga’s “cultural odor,” to borrow a term from Iwabuchi, is preserved intact on the level of content. But as the manga field migrates into the book field, and manga became just another category of books, like cookbooks, science fiction, or biographies, actors throughout the field will slowly lose their ability to detect that odor at all. Therefore, even though we may all be looking at exactly the same pictures and reading exactly the same prose, there is no positive guarantee that, when we do so, we are seeing anything else besides our own, forever-separate selves reflected back at us.

For Brienza, cultural imports do not change the importer; instead, they themselves are altered. Manga doesn’t make America more Japanese; instead, America simply swallows manga and turns it into plain old bland American books.

In Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the Center of Taste, Carl Wilson observes the same phenomena of cultural adaptation…but he sees it as a positive, not a negative. In discussing Celine Dion’s global appeal, he notes that she has to be marketed carefully and specifically to each global region. Instead of creating a one world of Dion, she has to change herself to fit each niche. Wilson writes:

Now a successful artist has to figuratively become local by fulfilling entertainment conventions in other parts of the world. It is less homogenization than hybridization of cultures. As Jan Nederveen Pieterse of the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague writes, “How do we come to terms with phenomena such as Thai boxing by Moroccan girls in Amsterdam, Asian rap in London, Irish bagels, Chinese tacos and Mardi Gras Indians in the United States…? Cultural experiences, past or present, have not been simply moving in the direction of cultural uniformity and standardization.” He suggests what we’re witnessing is a “creolisation of global culture.” It does not follow that creolization will take a standard form. Localism is ignored, as Celine’s marketers know, at peril. Likewise the global hegemony model presumes there won’t be reciprocal cultural influence on the West, but the counterevidence is all around us: Asian video-game music, for example, is arguably among the most pervasive influences on young pop musicians now. And as Pieterse points out, with the exception of isolated indigenous groups, civilization and hybridization have been synonymous for centuries.

Canadian singer Celine Dion and Japanese signer Juna Ito

So where Brienza laments the hybridization and adaptation of borrowed cultural objects, Wilson celebrates it. Where Brienza experiences a loss of manga’s unique cultural smell, Wilson argues for the joyful blending which results in Asian video game music taking on an altogether new odor in an American context.

As a final take on globalization, here’s Nadim Damluji’s essay about Mickey Mouse in Egypt, written a while back on HU. Nadim discusses an Uncle Scrooge story about Egypt which was reprinted in an Egyptian comic.

The Western ducks discover a historical landmark that the Disney Arabs were incapable of finding on their own and what naturally follows their act of discovery in a foreign land is their immediate sense of ownership (Christopher Columbus much?). Furthermore, we as readers are lead to believe that the pyramids do not possess inherent value for their historical and cultural significance, but only for their ability to hold potential treasure. You see, without this treasure it wouldn’t have been worth digging out the pyramid, not worth hiring the cheap Arab labor. Lastly, we see the popular trope of Pharaonic culture being used as shorthand for all of Egyptian culture. In other words, traveling to Egypt for the Ducks is traveling into the past, not into a different contemporary culture.

Ultimately, I believe the real harm of this story is that it was tucked within the pages of a comic’s magazine that had Mickey wishing young readers Happy Ramadan or celebrating Mawlad on the cover. Mickey was localized insomuch as he could help Disney sell more comics globally, extending their commercial reach deep in to an emerging comic’s market. To be an avid Miki fans means to be an avid internalizer of the importance of capitalism and hence a way of seeing the world that makes certain countries first and others third. Mickey Mouse certainly has a big place in the history of Arab comics, but I believe it is a history whose depth we must challenge and whose psychological harm may be immeasurable.

Against Wilson’s joyful vision of hybridization, Nadim sees the same old hegemony. And where Brienza mourns the fact that cultural objects don’t change people, Nadim mourns the fact that they do. For Brienza, manga is altered so much that it loses its foreign flavor; for Nadim, Uncle Scrooge is given just enough foreign spice so that Egyptian readers can be poisoned by it.

So is globalization bad because it does not make us more alike? Is it good because it does not make us more alike? Is it bad because it does make us more alike? Or (as a possible fourth position) is it good because it makes us more alike?

Or, to put it another way, is the world better if people are more alike or less alike? And how does globalization affect that?

Philosopher Alain Badiou argues that these are the wrong questions. In his book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Badiou insists that, in terms of the movement of global capital (both economic and, presumably, cultural), homogeneity and diversity are not in opposition. They’re the same thing. Wonderful hybridized Arab Mickey and sneaky Mickey hegemon are not opposed — they work together.

Our world is in no way as “complex” as those who wish to ensure its perpeturation claim. It is even, in its broad outline, perfectly simple.

On the one hand, there is an extension of the automatisms of capital, fulfilling one of Marx’s inspired predictions: the world finally configured, but as a market, as a world-market. This configuration imposes the rule of an abstract homogenization…. For capitalist monetary abstraction is certainly a singularity, but a singularity that has no consideration for any singularity whatsoever: singularity as indifferent to the persistent infinity of existence as it is to the evental becoming of truths.

On the other side, there is a process of fragmentation into closed identitities, and the culturalist and relativist ideology that accompanies fragmentation.

Both processes are perfectly intertwined. For each identification (the creation or cobbling together of identity) creates a figure that provides a material for its investment by the market. There is nothing more captive, so far as commercial investment is concerned, nothing more amenable to the invention of new figures of monetary homogeneity, than a community and its territory of territories…. What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments in this upsurge — taking the form of communities demanding recognition and so-called cultural singularities — of women, homosexuals, the disabled, Arabs. And these infinite combinations of predicative traits, what a godsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles, moderate Muslims, married priests, ecologist yuppies, the submissive unemployed, prematurely aged youth! Each time, a social image authorized new products, specialized magazines, improved shopping malls… (All italics are Badiou’s; ellipses are mine.)

So, for Badiou, Celine singing first in Spanish then in Japanese is not a sign that hegemony has been defeated. It’s simply the flip side of the universalism of capitalism; the reduction of every individual soul to a marketing demographic. Similarly,a truly Egyptian Mickey Mouse (or truly Muslim superheroes) would not resist the logic of Western hegemony; it would simply reinscribe the identity of “Arab” on which (with all other identities) Western hegemony depends. The world is one giant bland glob, but not because, as Brienza would have it, we our trapped in our own national identities. Rather, it’s because all identities are the same identity. The lack of smell when you read manga is not a product of Americanization. Rather, the lack of smell is the result of the fact that an identity based on reading manga, whether Americanized or not, is an identity that it entirely permeable by the market.

So if, for Badiou, homogeneity and heterogeneity are the same thing, what exactly is the alternative? Well, among other things, I think he’d probably like us to ignore “culture” all together (he has acid things to say about the flattening of “art” into “culture.”) But more than that, he argues for the primacy of the Event.

The Event for Badiou is something like a miracle and something like a paradigm shift; Paul’s revelation on the rode to Damascus is his exemplar. Subjects do not experience or create the Event, rather they are created by it, and remain subjects to the extent they keep faith with it. Childbirth makes you a mother; having your mother shot makes you Batman. The Event, and your continued investment in the event, is who you are.

In the wake of the Event,individual differences are neither obliterated nor homogenized. Rather, they are accepted without being fetishized or even especially emphasized. So, for example, in Twilight, whether a vampire is white or black, male or female, is unimportant, not because those differences vanish, but because the vampire’s subjectivity is created by the Event of the transformation.

Neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female in vampirism.

Similarly, Badiou points out that for Paul whether Christians were circumcised or uncircumcised made no difference. Thus, Badiou argues, for Paul, Christianity was not a sectarian identity among many, but an insistently universal human subjectivity, available to all through faith in the Resurrection, rather than through coercion or insistent self-demarcation. (Badiou, presumably, hates the Inquisition and Christian pop about equally.)

Badiou’s formulation raises perhaps as many questions as it answers. As just one example —how can you tell a sectarian identity from a universal one? Aren’t the vampires in Twilight themselves essentially a subculture? Isn’t Christianity an identity? Moreover, Badiou bases his whole thinking on idea that the Event constitutes Truth — but his paradigmatic Event is the Resurrection, which (as an atheist) he insists is false. So how exactly do you tell if the Event is true? And if Christianity was not universal because it was true, why was it universal?

Still, arguing with Badiou is, I think, a helpful corrective to arguments about globalization, which can slip rather quickly into disputes about the ideal purchasable cultural product. For Badiou, such managerial fiddling at the marketing margins is a depressing simulacrum of utopian thinking. If we’re going to dream, why not imagine a world where our souls aren’t for sale — where, as Bert Stabler said in a recent comment, “everyone can create shared institutions that aren’t niche markets or normality factories.”