Seated
at a table topped by several Shriner hats, yellowing magazine
ads for Fatima cigarettes and a stack of bodice-rippers with titles
such as "In the Sheikh's Marriage Bed," Jonathan Friedlander has
a confession.
"I was really seduced by it," he says of the paraphernalia, part
of a trove of souvenirs he's accumulated everywhere from Minnesota
antiques shops to a Sav-On near his Van Nuys home.
Friedlander says he should have known better than to indulge himself
so. On the other hand, the cache he's kept adding to for years,
mostly out of curiosity, has become a serious scholarly collection
— perhaps the largest of its kind. His goal has been to
"put in one place something called Middle Eastern Americana,"
from consumer wares to photos of ersatz "Oriental" architecture
to "sin" products such as cigarettes and alcohol.
But Friedlander, 55, whose Hawaiian shirt, complicated eyeglasses
and slangy speech give him a youthful air, is not just an obsessed
pack rat. He's assistant director of the UCLA Center for Near
Eastern Studies, and part of his collection went on display this
week at the university's Powell Library. The exhibition's title,
appropriately, is "Seducing America: Selling the Middle Eastern
Mystique."
Several hundred items will be on view until Dec. 16. The complete
collection, by contrast, comprises more than 1,500 pieces: 1930s
comics and pulp fiction such as "Spicy Adventures" and "Desert
Madness"; ads for Ben Hur Flour; bottles of Pyramid Beer; video
games such as "The Prince of Persia"; sheet music for songs including
"The Sheik of Araby" and "Persian Moon." Exotic topless women
undulate on the covers of Arabic music CDs. Fierce warriors scowl
from the covers of DVDs. (Most of the collection is available
for view on a database at the exhibition, which includes listening
stations and film clips.)
Despite his attraction to these artifacts, Friedlander maintains
there's something pernicious at work in them. The images, which
seem increasingly cartoonish the more you look, portray the Middle
East as an irrational, oversexed, violent land given to despotism
and mysticism. The women tend to move in harems and wear very
little; the men seem not to go very far without their scimitars.
"It becomes ahistorical — anything goes," Friedlander says
of the mishmash of myth, reality and disparate historical periods
portrayed. "And you erase people's cultures this way: It all becomes
'the East,' 'the Orient.' "
With such sentiments, Friedlander is walking in the footsteps
of Edward Said, the late Palestinian American scholar whose 1978
book, "Orientalism," examines the way the West long saw and heard
the Near East — and how the resulting stereotypes and clichés
accompanied and justified conquests by the British and French
empires.
"It's a living tradition," Friedlander, a native of Israel who
grew up in New York City, says of Orientalist distortion. "It's
the next mummy movie, it's Vegas, it's the pageantry of the Indio
Date Festival. People smoke Camel cigarettes, they live in those
homes, they drink those beers. It's in us. It's alive."
Friedlander's stash, which he plans to donate to UCLA in increments,
is not the only event at the university this season that has grown
out of Said's work. The Charles E. Young Research Library will
host an exhibition devoted to "The Arabian Nights" in October,
and a conference on Oct. 21 and 22 — " 'Arabian Nights'
in Historical Context: From Galland to Burton" — will look
at how the tales of Ali Baba, Sinbad and Aladdin helped create
the West's sense of the exotic East.
The publication of "Orientalism" was another watershed: The book
encouraged skepticism about many of the scholars and historians
then writing on the Middle East, and it helped launch the discipline
of "post-colonial studies," which changed university departments
of history, politics and literature.
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the war in Iraq and many Westerners'
ensuing curiosity about Islam and the Near East gave new pertinence
to Said's work (he died of leukemia in 2003, at age 67), even
though detractors criticized it as trendy, politically correct
or over-generalized.
Friedlander, of course, counts himself an admirer. His goal, he
says, is to bring the book's argument up to the present and to
show how the United States has created a consumerist Orientalism
that has in some ways replaced the scholarly Orientalism of Britain
and France.
"Smoking Camel cigarettes — I gave it up in 1975 —
I always understood the power of that iconography," he says. Indeed,
he's found that ads for cigarettes were some of the first to use
Oriental imagery, even when the products were made with tobacco
from the American South.
He sees the humor in such juxtapositions, but he also wonders
about their effect on people with little knowledge of either Islam
or the region where it was born.
"Like kids who are learning about the Middle East through an onslaught
of images. Once it becomes films, album jackets and mainstream,
it has a life of its own. I'm also amazed by the sadism, the violence
against women" in many of these books, comic strips and movies.
"It's usually Arabs or pharaohs torturing white women in bikinis."
The imagery has evolved as it's been refracted through such concerns
as the Cold War, fear of an "Arab menace" and the rise of terrorism.
But the foundation for them, Friedlander says, was laid down by
the "Arabian Nights," which first became available in Europe in
a French translation 300 years ago.
UCLA professor Saree Makdisi — one of the organizers of
the "Arabian Nights" conference and a nephew of Said — agrees.
Eventually, he says, those tales that originated in the Middle
East in the 9th and 10th centuries helped give English speakers,
especially, their first sense of the exotic "other."
"You can recognize toward the end of the 18th century, there's
suddenly, almost for the first time, a very clear sense of what
it is to be English, as opposed to all these other things," Makdisi
says.
He says the process continues, as in the argument that the fighting
in Iraq is a struggle of civilization against barbarism. "It's
almost as if the West is reassuring itself that it's still there,
that it still stands for reason and civilization."
Whether in stories, magazine ads or presidential speeches, says
Makdisi, the objectification of the Arab world is "not just what
we're saying about other people. It's what we're saying about
ourselves."
Friedlander says many of his Arab and Muslim friends share his
amusement at his Orientalist Americana (though they're dead-sensitive
about attacks on Islam).
Like him, they're willing to grant pop culture some room to be
vulgar.
"There's a point at which it becomes you, it becomes America,"
he says, but "sometimes you have to let go."
Reprinted
from the Los Angeles Times
