Challenging Representations by Celebrating Difference

In her Words. YouTube.com. 2011. Web.

The predominant stereotypes of Asian identity in Hollywood have been framed by Caucasian cultural producers. Typifying this approach is a fundamentally Marxist ideology whereby the boundaries of identity, be it positive or negative, provide justification for social control and normative models of thought and power.

Identities, Woodward observed, are “forged through the marking of difference” (1997, 29). These are often forged on the basis of binary difference, like, for example, Durkheim’s sacred/profane distinction, or “white”/“not-white”, “civilized”/“barbaric” and “us”/”them”, where the former takes precedence over the latter. The representation of Asian identity in accordance with this binary marking of difference is complicit to the policing of oversimplified differences between white and non-white, and in the segregation and degradation of those who are different (Shah, 2003, 2).

Resistance to this model of representation have generally come from outside of Hollywood by Asian directors.  Their primary concern was neither political nor necessarily framed in terms of building as sense of Asian community. Directors like Wayne Wang wanted to give a sensitive and realistic depiction of Asian-American life incorporating symbols and markers of a range of Asian communities.  The power of doing so is not from merely seeking to subvert the binary opposition of power, but deny it utterly by a celebration of difference. 

The power of representation in building intercultural difference is clear. A movement towards this approach in Hollywood would liberate identity from the binary logic that has defined cross-cultural relationships since the dawn of time.

References

Woodward, K. 1997. “Concepts of identity and difference”. In Woodward, K (ed.). Identity and Difference pp. 7 – 50. London: Sage.

Shah, H. “’Asian Culture’ and Asian American Identities in the Television and Film Industries of the United States”. Studies in Media and Information Literacy Education 3.3, August 2003: 1 – 10. 

The Danger of the Dominant Gaze: A Case Study

The portrayal of Indigenous Culture in 

The Gods Must be Crazy

Marx describes dominant ideology as when one ideology is deemed paramount over another through inherent social/ power relations. When these ideologies make their way into mainstream media they are cast into a broader consciousness and redistributed as truths. The identities of the indigenous subjects of The Gods Must be Crazy are reconstructed through the dominant lens of the Western, white subject and give way to a false narrative that supports a specific power structure. Namely, the San people are cast as backward, ignorant and undeveloped.

The film was directed by James Uys, a Caucasian South African filmmaker in 1980, during the heat of the anti-apartheid movement. The film follows a member of the San tribe of the Kalahari desert on his journey to return a mysterious Coke Bottle that fell from the sky back to its rightful owners, “the gods”.

The anthropomorphic style of filming automatically positions the subject as the other, and the viewer as an outsider looking in from the dominant perspective. In this case, the Western/colonial perspective represents the dominant gaze. The cultural differences of the San are explained as deficiencies in social and technological progress. The subject has no agency, and no control over the formulation of his/her identity.

The denial of coeavalness found in mainstream films depicting indigenous cultures from a Western perspective exemplifies how this binary opposition of power is out of touch with the material processes of history. Coeavalness is a Fabian term describing the mistake of cultural differences for differences in time and space. In reality, the dominant gaze of the Western world in the film is integral to a propaganda campaign to do exactly this, deny coeavelness. The film peddles its own brand of reality where the indigenous people are cast as backward, out of touch and unaware of the “real-world” socioeconomic processes of the dominant West.

Richard Lee outlines these solutions to intercultural and international communication in his article “The Gods Must Be Crazy”: The Challenge of the Intercultural. He advocates the necessary recognition of the instability and ambiguity of cross-cultural signifiers. Culture is a changing construct, not a fixed boundary of identity. It must be understood as a plurality and mixture of spatiotemporal realities. Ultimately, cross-cultural communication must be understood as dialogic.

References

Bennett, Tony. Formalism and Marxism. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.

"Coca-Cola Bushmen: Social Politics." 2010. YouTube. Retrieved 15 May 2013.

Kolker, Robert. Film, Form and Culture. Boston: McGraw-Hill College, 1999. Print.

Lee, Richard. “The Gods must be Crazy.” Reviews. June 1985. Web. 15 May 2013.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen. Autumn 1975. Web. 15 May 2013. 

Identity owes itself to the Media: When does News become Politics?

Recent political demonstrations from spilling over into social life, from the Cronulla riots to protests over the Innocence of Muslims film last year, polarized Arab-Australians in a binary mentality of “us” versus “them”. Arguably, the media capitalized on these (among other) events to further a political prerogative, namely to seek to villanise the Muslim world as inextricably linked to the terrorist events of 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

News coverage of Muslims in Australia equates Islam with the Lebanese national identity and Arabic ethnicity (Hopkins, 2008: 41).  This demarcates the boundaries of Muslim identity according to artificial criterion based on a sectarian understanding of Islam. That is to say, it excludes non-Arab Muslims from the popular discursive conceptualization of Muslim identity and links the faith with the socio-politics of the Middle-East.

Consequently, discourse in Australia tends to make Arab identity synonymous with a single identity category of ‘Muslim’, when in fact 11% of Australian Muslims are born in Lebanon and 9% in Turkey (ABS, 2007). In so doing, Islam is linked to the political agenda of the Middle East, and interpreted according to Australia’s relationship to those politics.

The rise of political Islam is not passively accepted as community norm, even in Muslim majority countries. Media discourse needs to be problematized to recognise the fundamentalist politics of few do not, by any stretch, represent the sacred beliefs of the majority.

 Islamic protestors face-off with police in Sydney.

Source: WikiCommons

Islamophobia in the media is fuelled by the notion that Islam is counterintuitive with the goals of democracy. Followers arguably invert the principle of multiculturalism, according greater weight to submission to sacred laws than to national laws (Hage, 2006). Consequently, there stems the crude deduction that Muslims are ‘un-Australian’. This consciously overlooks the clear intuition that, as with any religion, followers may not always believe the same things or to the same extent (Hopkins, 2008: 44). Cultural Muslims, for instance, can adhere to religious tradition and maintain obedience to the laws of a secular state.

Who is really un-Australian?

Source: WikiCommons

Identity is contextual. Any blanket interpretation that does not recognise the unfixed, contingent, malleable nature of culture will inevitably exclude and narrow what it means to claim an identity.

References

Australian Bureau Statistics (2007). Year Book 2007. Retrieved May 5, 2013, from http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/bb8db737e2af84b8ca2571780015701e/7056F90A147D09D3CA25723600006532?opendocument

Hage, G. 2006. “The doubts down under”. Catalyst: Journal of the British Commission for Racial Equality: pp. 1 – 7.

Hopkins, Liza. 2008. “Muslim Turks and anti-Muslim discourse”. Australian Journal of Communication 35.1: pp. 41 – 55.

Representation and Media Responsibility: Politicizing Islam

The representation of Muslims in popular Western media is imbued with negative, political connotations of violent, deceitful and villainous characters. Essentialist stereotypes have been reinforced in western television and film, where 80% of the population gets their news (Iman). Crude and exaggerated stereotypes fuel Islamophobia, from popular media to news stories and infotainment.

In a post 9/11 world, Islam has been denotatively linked to the war on terror, symbolizing a binary opposition between the Shariah faith of the East and the secularism, liberalism, and predominately Judeo-Christian values of the West. The politicization of this binary has arguably been a key element for the justification of War in the Middle East. To further this motif, Western media represents Islam as a religion of oppression, punishment and war.

According to a study by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, in popular film, from Disney’s ‘Aladdin’ to the Indiana Jones blockbuster ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, representations of Muslims have helped “demonize Muslims as dangerous and threatening, and reinforce prejudices” (Ward, 2007). Overwhelming, Muslims are often the violent character or ‘bad guy’. Failing that, as in Aladdin, they are daft, impractical and bordering ridiculous in their beliefs and speech. Where Aladdin has an American accident, the rest of the cast has daft and exaggerated ‘Arabic’ accents, and Aladdin’s hometown is explicitly referred to as ‘barbaric’. Ostensibly, the hero or protagonist is overwhelmingly never Muslim in Western film.

The villain Jafar, from the movie Aladdin, one of the only characters to retain his Arabic name from the original story.
Source: Wikicommons

Some of these representations pre-date the 9/11 attacks, thwarting any suggestion that such representations are a natural recourse against the terror attacks. Instead, the representations indicate a deeper politicization of Islam more generally, a faith apparently endemically linked to violence. Since 9/11, this has only become more exaggerated.

Popular news perpetuates this myth. In news stories, the juxtaposition of mass prayer alongside horrific images of bombs and killing implicitly links terror as part of the ritual of Islam. Western media arguably used 9/11 to “capitalize its political gain”, depicting Islam as fundamentalist, extremist and radicalist (Imam). There has been little media in response to this, with images of indiscriminate terrorist acts, underscored by emotive text like ‘Why do they hate us?’ and ‘Is Islam compatible with democracy?’ helping the media to show that the west, collectively, are victims of terrorism and terrorism is inherently linked to Islam.

What is needed is a seismic shift in media representation, starting with a sense of responsibility for the imaging and typecasting of ethnic groups and better education about different groups. The Muslim voice is missing in Western media. Only when the viewing public starts to hear that voice, and understand the religion as fundamentally a peaceful one, will these negative stereotypes be redressed.

References:

Iman, Mizra MESIC. The Perception of Islam and Muslims in the Media and the Responsibility of European Muslims Towards the Media.  Conference paper given at Madrasah,Zagreb Mosque, Zagreb, Croatia. Available at < http://www.culturelink.org/conf/dialogue/mesic.pdf>.

Ward, Lucy. 2007. “From Aladdin to Lost Ark, Muslims get ‘bad guy’ film images.” The Guardian. Retrieved 29 April, 2013, from  <http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/jan/25/broadcasting.race>. 

Faith in Nature

What does nature mean? To be in nature, in touch with the physical environment, semantically connotates the natural environment, replete with all the untramelled, untamed majesty of the wild. We picture windows of the globe, untouched by the hand of civilization, where animals and plants live in peaceful union, where the sound of silence fills the lungs, where the atmosphere is clearer, and the soul lies down in the long green grass, where even belief means nothing at all.

 Source: Wikicommons

With the processes of globalization and development, we find these corners become slithers, lit by the glory of nature but shadowed by the walls of man. To be in nature is to be in the urban sprawl. The wild is precious and rare, quantifiable and vulnerable, especially for the city-dweller.  That is not to say it does not exist, nor that its experience is not as tangible as it was pre-settlement. It is to say, however, that nature as a concept and a reality is imbued with a sense of man’s entitlement to it and ownership of it. The feeling that man can quantify and own the land, can tame the wild, and can manipulate the natural form, is assumed as base human extinct and right.

What does this say of man’s relationship to the natural world? Is it too tarnished with the brush of post-Enlightenment rationalism and scientism? Has nature become a child of human understanding, something that we are to grapple with, contemplate and dominate? Even in its preservation we own it. We own it in the green political movements. We own it in clean up Australia day. We own it in the organic produce we buy. We own it every time we quantify its wildness and draw it out of the untouched and into the social.

Is this the attitude that underpins the growth of human rationalism at the expense of metaphysical belief? Perhaps. That does not mean, however, that there is no place for metaphysics, or for the wild, or for faith. It simply involves a re-conception of it.

I sit in merlos, a coffeeshop that borders the manicured edges ‘Great Court’ of the University of Queensland, its own slither of green amidst the towering sandstone of academia. A single tree forms the centre of the courtyard, which students flock to, and cue to be a part of as they sip their soy lattes and sweat over final exams. This is man’s place, but it owes its value to its relationship with nature. The branches canopy the space; they create the space, sheltering the tables from the elements. It reminds us of its presence too, every time the wind blows through the pages of a textbook, or a fly lands on a saucer to sip droplets of chai.

Man’s space could exist without nature, and nature would certainly flourish without man. But does a tree make a sound if it falls in a wood and no one is there to hear it? The two create a sacred union of their own; one which reminds us that we should stretch our minds and our physical capabilities to develop our natural environment. It is a union which tells us that there is something more than us, that we should seek to understand, but that we cannot ostensibly control. We exist in something bigger than ourselves. Nature’s word is final and ultimate. Our spaces take on significance because of their ability to account for nature, and to be one with nature.  This is faith.

As I write a bird relieves itself on the computer. Faith will have the final say.