IDENTITY REPRESENTATION:
SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM
IN ARAB* DESIGN
Imad Gebrael
* A ictional construct
‘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’
Arabian Nights - Aladdin, 1992
AKV|St.Joost
Breda, the Netherlands
Master Graphic Design
Graduation Thesis 2017
HEAD OF THE MASTER'S PROGRAMME
Miriam Bestebreurtje
TUTORS
Annemarie Quispel
Matthias Noordzij
Petr van Blokland
Simon Davis
GUEST TUTORS
Lauren Alexander
Marijke Cobbenhagen
Ruben Pater
CONTENTS
i. Preface
ii. Summary
1. Introduction
1.1 Focus
1.2 Questions
1.3 Methodology
13
13
15
16
2. Identity representation and Orientalism
2.1- Deinitions and Evolution
20
20
3. Orientalist Representations
3.1 Orientalist representations in visual culture
3.1.1- Film and animation
3.1.2 Journalism
3.1.3 Gaming
3.1.4 Advertising and Design
3.2 Conclusion
26
26
27
33
36
37
41
4. Self-Representation in Modern Arab Design
4.1 Constructing and Mediating the Arab identity
4.2 Signiiers of Arab identity: the kaiye case study
4.3 Identity in conlict: A focus on Lebanon
4.4 Designing an alternative identity
4.5 Conclusion
46
47
52
56
64
68
5. Self-Representation: international benchmarking 72
5.1 Turkey: sustaining a visual culture through hybrid
representation
73
5.2 India: extreme polarities and market dynamics
74
5.3 Iran: controversial representations in exile
76
5.4 The Netherlands: funding ‘identity’
79
5.5 Conclusion
84
6. Hyper-Nationalism: the fetish of cultural identity 88
6.1 Designing a nationality
89
6.2 Designing political propaganda
92
6.3 Arab-Nationalism taking new forms
97
6.4 From Hyper-Nationalism to cultural appropriation
101
7. The Project
7.1 Subjective mapping
7.2 Visual experiments
7.3 Mapping Identity: reversing cultural representation
106
106
108
108
8. Discussion and Conclusions
8.1 Analysis
8.2 Recommendations
8.3 Conclusion
128
128
129
132
9. References
9.1 Image index
9.2 Interviews
138
143
145
01
I. PREFACE
As a designer, our discipline has always come full circle for me
when intrinsically aligned with investigative journalism —my
main passion—. Try as I might to adhere to more general precepts
of graphic design’s functionality, I continually revert back to
my belief that my primary role as a designer is not to resolve
vital problems, but rather question those who represent or
misrepresent them.
I also believe that we’re born and raised in a political context
and should therefore be actively engaged in its present challenges
of race, ownership, urbanism and identity. In that light, my
research presents a critical viewpoint perceiving, conceiving
and projecting thoughts on identity and self-representation in
the context of current main challenges facing every Arab
around the globe.
I present to you months of investigation and a lifetime of
opinions in hopes of initiating a career in visual communication
and academic research.
To Zeina, Kate and Sandra.
II. SUMMARY
How can designers depict a national identity when the national
identity itself is in question? It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that
the Arab world seems to be dealing with an ‘optional’ identity;
one that churns and morphs to the whim of the moment.
But what is Arab identity? Shaped by Orientalism, moulded by
colonialism and impacted by globalism, a uniied Arab identity
does not exist. As this paper traces the evolution of Self-Orientalism
across a variety of communication channels, a prism of individual
distorted representations emerge, squeezed by ‘othering’ into
a collective dynamic, which Arab designers themselves, seemingly
unaware, are nurturing.
The research focuses on the designer’s role and responsibility in
depicting a cultural identity, in a world where Hyper-Nationalism
is inding new roots in politics and media. Visual communicators
have played an extensive role in the identity portrayal of the Arab
world, that mirrors in many ways what Orientalists previously
did in literature, cinema and academia. The paper highlights
problematic design approaches visualizing the Arab world as an
exotic place of mystery, erotica and stereotypes. Productions as
such are leading a self-Orientalist reductionist wave in design
and altering contextual realities.
This tendency isn’t unique to the Arab world. Cultural exoticism
does not only apply to projects holding a negative charge
and coming from Arabia, but is a phenomenon also present in the
dynamics of nationalism in visual cultures worldwide. This much
is evident in a comparative to western design in the Netherlands,
India, US and Turkey.
Self-Orientalism and Hyper-Nationalism work hand-in-hand in
altering perceptions on cultural identities. In a world of political
turmoil, visual communication plays a vital role in rectifying or
exaggerating representation problems. Designers have a crucial
role to play and should therefore develop platforms for criticism
and testing, for a more accurate representation of context.
The main deliverables of my research are a publication showcasing
my theoretical and visual indings with a series of maps expressing
a reversed gaze. A culture is represented through different vehicles,
one of which is mapping, serving as a functional tool for navigation
and as an effective way to represent data and trace identity narratives
in the case of subjective mapping. Reversing the colonial gaze started
through several experiments in subverting symbols of national
identities belonging to the main past empires of the world, by altering money, lags, stamps as well as symbolic visuals and domestic
objects. The exercise depicted political nuances but risked falling
into the quick-consumption nature of today’s online propaganda.
A deeper research into functional visual queues used in urban
contexts lead the project into subverting city maps and recreating
them through different criteria; new geographic entities were
formed by visualizing small ethnic units inside the main cities
and giving them an independent existence within new borders.
While the project serves as a questioning discourse for visual
communicators and their role in identity representation within
graphic design, it certainly doesn't exclude the role of media, politics
and economic agendas in shaping and altering perceptions.
With subjectivity as a constant detractor and accountability as
a driving imperative, can design rise to redeine, deconstruct
and contextualize an authentic identity or self-representation,
without obliterating the collective truth of the subject-matter?
1. INTRODUCTION
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IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 1
1. INTRODUCTION
In the beginning was the context: A designer is driven to constantly
redeine and contextualize his profession and purpose within the
continuous evolution of daily cultural and technological changes.
My context is the Arab world, which has been thriving to ind a
cultural identity that was long lost due to a whole history of colonial
and religious turmoil.
Finding a single deinition for an ‘Arab cultural identity’ is highly
problematic and unrealistic due to numerous contextual differences
within the region itself, not to mention the divergence of conlicting
systems of rituals, ethnicities and religions.
Design and communication disciplines have been historically
active and involved in the construct of cultural identities and have
consequently provided tools, processes and products of high
nationalistic connotations and contributed to collective memory
and citizenship. By acknowledging their impact, designers stand
responsible and accountable alongside media platforms and other
communication vehicles.
My fascination with identity starts from questioning my own.
I am the product of a nation with intertwined systems of religionbound politics where genders, sects, laws and conventions are
heavily inluenced by more than twenty-ive years of civil war,
displacement and corruption.
I come from Lebanon, a country that has been highly engaged in
the creative self-representation of the Arab region. Graphic design
programmes emerged from Beirut, a city that embraces a cosmopolitan identity and a European appeal on the surface, but is still
truly immersed in a complex system of identiication. A privatized
city living post-colonialism to the extreme edge, Beirut is facing
a new identity challenge: Self-Orientalism — deined and researched
in this paper—.
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IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 1
Not an innocent design trend, it is a class-related socio-political
problem that excessively alters self-representation, internally
and externally to an extent where we have surpassed ‘being
Orientalized by the West’ to ‘Exoticizing our own culture’.
Self-Exoticism is not to be taken lightly as it can lead to numerous
visual and ideological consequences on local cultures, such as
alteration, distortion and decontextualization. Tormented between
battleields in Palestine and Syria on one side, hailed as safe haven
for economic expansion courtesy of Dubai on the other, the Arab
world is one of contrast, which creates biases and disables the
creation of a common understanding of an Arab identity, further
emphasized as international media answers populist agendas and
reinforces the expansion of extremist groups in the Middle East.
New biases are born.
A closer look at what is visually occurring today and one sees that
the Arabesque, the harem, the Gold are all on trend, as are the
Kaiye, the Kaftan and vintage-gone-minimal oriental household
items. Arabic calligraphy evolved into street and body art, at a
time when young calligraphers can barely speak the language, let
alone write a grammatically correct Arabic sentence. Type designers
have been brutally producing Arabic adaptations of Western typefaces with marginal considerations for any roots, be they technical
or aesthetic.
We are mesmerized by oriental shapes and letterforms, by the
gold and the beautiful, we are on trend and coming full circle with
what was planned and projected though art: the hyper-sexual, the
exotic and the wanted… We are right in the realm of Orientalism,
but we cannot blame it on the rich West anymore. It is the dark
age of ‘self-Orientalism’.
Amidst that cultural turmoil, designers should count the mines
and redraw new boundaries between image-making and political
implications while avoiding cultural appropriation, Orientalism,
generalization and counteracting the creation of a hyper-nationalistic
stereotypical visual culture.
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IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 1
1.1 FOCUS
The roots of self-representation have always fascinated me as a
designer. Cultural relevance is an underestimated key player in
any graphic design work especially when it connotes and projects
the different links between design and class hierarchies from one
end, to design and political agendas from the other.
Self-Orientalism and Hyper-Nationalism in Arab* Design
delves into the effects of colonization on the production of local
identities and traces the origins of cultural distortion through the
lens of visual arts in general and design in particular, to reassess
and redeine accountable creative contributions to identity
representation within an authentic, responsible framework.
1.2 QUESTIONS
This paper aims to investigate the causes, effects and resolutions
to self-Orientalism in Arab Design:
What is cultural self-representation in design?
What are the visual manifestations of self-exoticism?
What are this phenomenon’s international comparative benchmarks?
And inally, what is hyper-nationalism and how can designers play
an actively accountable role in identity construction?
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IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 1
1.3 METHODOLOGY
The paper outlines dynamic identity representation matters in
relation to Orientalism (Said, 1978) and other reactionary publications in contemporary times (Chapter 2) then delves into Orientalist
representation through academic and journalistic publications
across different disciplines: ilm and animation, journalism, gaming
and reaches advertising and design, with the emergence of a consumerist era. (Chapter 3)
The research also tests theoretical indings through a series of interviews conducted with Lebanese and Arab designers to thoroughly
understand their process and constraints that reshaped their work
while focusing on Lebanon as a context (chapter 4).
This contextual approach then takes a comparative aspect through
contrasting projects relecting notions of nationalism and representation in contexts like Iran, India, Turkey and the Netherlands
where different aspects contributed to designing national identities
(chapter 5).
Seen through that lens, designers and communicators are an effective ally in stereotyping national identity in what is identiied as
hyper-nationalism (chapter 6), highly manipulated by populist
propaganda.
The research culminates in a visual outcome lipping the colonial
gaze through a subjective take on city mapping (chapter 7) and closes
on the importance of political accountability in design and the
imperative need for criticism, collaboration and authorship, to
reorient the relationship between design — as a voice — and its
contextual conception (chapter 8 and 9).
04
2. IDENTITY REPRESENTATION AND ORIENTALISM
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IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 2
2. IDENTITY REPRESENTATION AND ORIENTALISM
Societies function within systems of self-expression developed
according to their habits, traditions and rituals. Such systems
form cultural identities, promoted and mediated through different
tools, amongst which, design takes the lead as a primary agent of
communication. Identity representation has adopted various forms
throughout history in ways tightly bound to political, geographic
and economic factors causing an altered image of the other by
means of colonialism, a process identiied as Orientalism.
Orientalism as a construct emerged under the pioneering pen of
‘Edward Said’ who launched a literary discourse on identity
and representation through this construct, analyzed in his academically acclaimed ‘bible’, Orientalism published in 1978.
While many academics later studied, analyzed and critiqued Said’s
work, I selected Iranian author Hamid Dabashi who expanded the
subject further in his book Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power
in a Time of Terror. Culturally relevant and didactically masterful,
Dabashi positions Orientalism within our current context by questioning Said’s premise, its relevance after 9/11 and its drastic
consequences on the politics of power and representation.
2.1- DEFINITIONS AND EVOLUTION
Edward Said on what is Orientalism
Born in Jerusalem in 1935, Edward Said was for many years
America’s foremost spokesman for the Palestinian cause. His
writings have been translated into 26 languages, including his
most inluential book, Orientalism (1978). This book was
exceedingly signiicant because it maps identity representation
through an orientalist viewpoint.
Said identiied Orientalism as a powerful European ideological
creation — a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the ‘otherness’ of Eastern culture, customs and
beliefs. He traced this view through the writings of authors whose
imaginative depictions have greatly contributed to the West’s
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IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 2
romantic and exotic picture of the Orient such as Homer, Nerval,
Disraeli and others.
A colored lens: Orientalism through colonization
Orientalism therefore, transformed at the whim of a pen, the stroke
of a brush and the imagination of its portrayer at a time where the
only source of information came from those who visited the Orient,
its civilizations, peoples and localities. This links colonization and
Orientalism through a power structure: “…they are a subject race,
dominated by a race that knows them and what is good for them
better than they could possibly know themselves…” Said writes. In
using that divide as both the starting and end point of analysis,
research and public policy, the result is usually a polarized distinction: the Oriental becomes more Oriental, and the Westerner more
Western, which limits the human encounter between different
cultures, traditions and societies and this in turn gives rises to
extremism which we still face today.
The book discusses an ‘Orientalist Repertoire’ that shaped and designed the European perception of the constructed Orient and enriched the European imagination: the Sphinx, Cleopatra, Eden,
Troy, Sodom and Gomorrah, Babylon, the Genii and in some cases
names only, half-imagined, half-known; monsters, heroes, devils,
terrors, pleasures, and desires. Subject to hyper-sexualized reportages across history in art and literature, the eccentricities of Oriental
life, with its odd calendars, exotic spatial conigurations, hopelessly
strange languages, and seemingly perverse morality were portrayed
extensively in European works. ‘Everything about the Orient, exuded
dangerous sex, threatened hygiene and domestic seemliness with an
excessive freedom of intercourse’ as reported by British Orientalist
Edward William Lane (Said, 1978).
Said’s closing mocks this skewed portrayal which in fact, conveys
a fundamentally political dogma willed over the Orient because
of its presumed weakness compared to Western powers.
30 years later, Hamid Dabashi, Professor of Iranian Studies
and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York,
moved the dialogue of Orientalism further in his book Post-
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IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 2
Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror. He reinterpreted the crisis of representation and authority, outlined the
epistemological distinction between the Orient and Occident, deined
the constitution of subjectivity, the intellectuals’ role in present
world politics, and the politics of knowledge production in post
9/11 world order. He also articulated the theoretical foregrounding
of the power of self-representation and rebellious agency of the
subaltern: the colonized.
He questions ‘who gets to represent whom and by what authority?’,
while arguing that the igure of the exilic intellectual is paramount
to producing counter-knowledge in a time of terror.
Like Edward Said, he disputed the authority and credibility of the
West in representing the orient. He framed it by questioning the
methods and mechanisms in which the area was represented
and subsequently dominated. He asserted that the question of
representation is no longer as linear as it used to be, citing that
it has become complicated with the cross-border representation
of the revolutionary movements of Che Guevera, Frantz Fanon,
Malcolm X, and Ali Shari’ati.
The next evolution: Mis-representation through
Imperialism
Dabashi then contended that Orientalism didn’t end with the process
of decolonization but evolved to become Imperialism today, deined
as the process of extending the power and dominion of a nation by
gaining direct or indirect control over other areas and highly affecting the creation of their national symbols and communication
devices, as demonstrated in this research.
The author points that although Said’s discursive constitution
on colonialism helped a generation in its critical enquiry, it failed
post-colonially. He further holds that Spivak’s question ‘can the
subaltern speak?’ is nothing but rhetorical. The impact of colonialism is evident in its wake as subordinates cannot speak except
in the language of their oppressors hence Imperialism. ‘The
subaltern was speaking loud and clear—“for indeed,” he insisted,
“the subaltern can speak, as the history of liberation movements
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IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 2
in the twentieth century eloquently attests.” (Goldziher, 1971) (…)
The subaltern is not a collective individual— the subaltern is heterogeneous, gendered, classed, cultured. The subaltern cannot be
represented without being ipso facto violated’.
One of the main attributes of Orientalism as a cultural discourse
is the creation of a distinct system of identity representation:
‘along with all other peoples variously designated as backward,
degenerate, uncivilized, and retarded, the Orientals were viewed in
a framework constructed out of biological determinism and moralpolitical admonishment. The Oriental was linked thus to elements
in Western society (delinquents, loose women, the insane, the poor
etc.) having in common an identity best described as lamentably
alien’. (Said, 1978)
In his contemporary representations of ‘the Arab’ amidst the
political turmoil of the region, Said writes: ‘… if the Arab occupies
space enough for attention, it is as a negative value. He is seen as
the disrupter of Israel’s and the West’s existence (…) Insofar as this
Arab has any history, it is part of the history given to him (or taken
from him: the difference is slight) by the Orientalist tradition,
and later, the Zionist tradition’ (Ibid.). This is still valid today to
varying extent, in assessing how the Middle East (today’s Orient)
is represented as the power dynamics are still locked in place.
Said’s goal was to challenge the notion that difference implies
hostility, opposition and a whole adversarial knowledge built off
an inaccurate, highly political imagination and an unbalanced
relation of power.
3. ORIENTALIST REPRESENTATIONS
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IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3
3. ORIENTALIST REPRESENTATIONS
Orientalist representations are amongst the direct causes of cultural
hegemony manifested through art, literature, design and communication forming a visual language that affected generations of
designers ignoring — intentionally or not — the blurred lines between
contextual truths and ictional ones.
Subsequent to factual infractions in recent years, these representations emphasized the world’s unseen public threat with a revisited
stereotype in visual culture of ‘the terrorist’, whose role is to keep
people stirred up and angry while themedia broadcasts images to
reinforce such stereotypes at times of crisis and insecurity of the
kind that the post-9/11 period has created to validate the government’s general line while backed by the most bloated military
budget in history as per Said’s own words.
3.1 ORIENTALIST REPRESENTATIONS IN VISUAL CULTURE
Cultural identity is a theme explored ad nauseam ad ininitum in
visual representation platforms, one of which is cinema, a powerful
tool of cultural manufacture at the heart of the modern Middle
East’s portrayal and an effective instrument of documentation
reaching and affecting large masses.
So much politic is conducted through visual language (Weber,
2008), which makes it inevitable to analyze and understand visual
media such as ilm, photography and design as a way in which we
gather information and form opinions about the world. We need
to study it as a form of representation that allows others to ‘read’
meanings and values attached to various artifacts (Ibid.).
Engagement with the depiction of Eastern politics is not restricted
to Hollywood as a Western ilmmaking context but extends it to the
Arab world, also engaged in the creation of stereotypical cinematic
images (Khatib, 2006). This section explores such representations
and prolongs the debate from the big screen to gaming, advertising
and different design disciplines mirroringa similar process in
image-making and mediation.
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IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3
3.1.1- FILM AND ANIMATION
In her book Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the
Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (2006), Lina Khatib
examines the cinematic depictions of major political issues, from
the Arab-Israeli conlict and the Gulf War, to Islamic fundamentalism, looking at ilms made in the US and different Arab countries.
Khatib builds on Jack Shaheen’s study of American ilm and media
representations of Arabs in Reel Bad Arabs (2001). While Shaheen
critiqued portrayals of Arabs and Islam in Hollywood ilms, Khatib
advances the critique by not only examining Hollywood representations of the Middle East, but also how Arabs represent themselves,
their politics, and their crises in their very own cinema.
She analyzed 70 American and Arab ilms covering the period
from 1980 to 2005 as well as the role of context and audience,
concluding that Hollywood ilms present a single layer of Arabs
while the different facets of Arab individuality are depicted in
Arabic productions.
The same applies upon closer inspection of Islamic fundamentalism portrayals. Arab ilms depict a more complex vision of
fundamentalism whereas Hollywood single-mindedly focuses on
the face of terrorism without examining the psychology behind
it or differ-entiating between religion and extremism. Gender,
especially womanhood, is often deined as written in the chapter
called ‘Gendered Tools of Nationalism,’ as Khatib argues that
gender has been used to legitimize the actions of America while
demonizing and vilifying the Arabs. Again, we have the female
nations of Arab cinemas in melodramas versus the male nation
of Hollywood in action ilms, representing clashing political
and cultural stances. However, the author highlights a point of
convergence between the two cinemas, mainly in the way they
utilize gender to strengthen their own national identities and
construct outsiders as enemies that threaten those identities.
Linking both sets of ilms show how both Hollywood and Arab
ilms operate within a general Orientalist perspective, where
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IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3
Hollywood’s Arab men are depicted as the “ultimate essential
Others”, and the Arab ilm’s Others, the women, are “objects of
the gaze of the men in the ilm and the audience” (Khatib, 2006).
05
06
Defne Bilir, Adjunct professor in humanities and modern languages
and research associate in communication at Florida State University,
discusses Khatib’s book profoundly and links her approach to Said’s
examination of the discourse in Orientalism. Khatib’s universe according to Bilir’s analysis - rotates around four principal notions,
providing examples from popular ilms:
•
Profound differences between the West and the East:
This can be seen in The Mummy (1999), where American
characters are shown as civilized, and Egyptians as ignorant
and barbaric.
•
Lumping the non-West into one-large entity,
ignoring the vast differences among non-Westerners:
The ictional creation of this monolithic Orient is exempliied
through the 1994 American ilm, True Lies, where Arab
characters are shown with no particular nationality.
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IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3
We can also include Disney’s Aladdin (1992), which evidences
the myths and misconceptions of East overtly enough for
children, lumping diverse groups of people from Iran and the
Arab world to China, as a uniied Eastern stereotype.
•
Labeling the Orient as “eternal,” “uniform,”
and “incapable of deining itself”: This way of justifying
Western hegemony over the Orient is again exempliied with
The Mummy, “where the cinema of mystery (mummies
coming back to life) is mixed with ‘realism’ (casting one of
the leading characters—a British woman—as an expert on
Egyptology; using authentic-looking scenery)”.
•
Recognizing the East as an entity to be feared
and/or controlled. The Siege (1998) represents this
fear through a portrayal of Arabs threatening the U.S. with
terrorism. This depiction mirrors what Said states, ‘the
relationship between the Orient and Occident is that of
domination and hegemony, and it ‘is hegemony … that gives
Orientalism… durability and strength’.
Hollywood’s stereotypical representation of Arabs has survived;
as Khatib denotes ‘its transformation from being about the
womanizer/seducer of the 1920s in ilms like The Sheik, to being
about the terrorist of today’.
This misrepresentation of reality is due to distorted images in
medieval literature in particular. Travelers to the Orient delighted
in making up stories about the Sultan's harem, which reinforced
the sexual hyperdrive already associated with Muslims and brought
their tales to life on screen, though ilms like Kismet (1955).
Rana Kabbani who takes up the ‘constructed’ association between
Islam and sexual indulgence in her book Europe's Myths of Orient
(1986) also pinpoints the translation of a number of folkloric stories
from Eastern countries, like India, Persia, Iraq, Syria and Egypt,
irst put together by Antoine Galland in 1704, appearing under
the title of Arabian Nights or Les Milles et Une Nuits. According
to her research, these stories were never transcribed in a book
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IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3
in the Arab/Muslim world; they were in fact, stories told and re -told
by raconteurs which a Westerner moulded into the tales we know
today and then used them as a guideline for Arab identity representation (Kabbani, 1986).
The creation of such images was “an intrinsic part of the imperial
world-view” says Kabbani. In order to provide further validity for
colonization, the East was portrayed as a “sexual domain” and most
often regarded as female.
Ella Shohat who has written extensively on East/West commonly
recurrent depictions in ilm, considered a slight shift in representation in works like Lawrence of Arabia and Khartoum. While
the two movies portray Arabian images, they also attempted to
document facts, based on historical events with numerous inaccuracies and a focus on Western superiority and images of white
heroes leading Arabs to salvation.
Unveiling/hyper-veiling: Symbol objectifying in ilm
One of the key highlights of Orientalism in ilm is that representations of veiling, harem and dancing bore little, if any, relationship
to social reality. Film directors, whether in the dunes of California
or Algeria, indulged in pure fantasy. (Macmaster & Lewis, 1998).
The dominant and eroticized representation of the veil and harem
was suddenly challenged and subverted by decolonization and, in
particular, by the tragic events of the Algerian War (1954-1962).
A pioneering essay by Franz Fanon, ‘Algeria unveiled’, and Gillo
Pontecorvo’s ilm, The Battle of Algiers (1966) documented this
period, which marked a decisive fracturing of colonial hegemony
and a dramatic shift in French perceptions of the veil away from
the erotic (unveiling) towards a new emphasis on the over-veiled
as a signiier of political danger. This shift in perception stemmed
from the role of Arab women in the Battle of Algiers.
Suddenly, to the French, veiling assumed a menacing and overtly
political meaning and the more complete or radical the form of
the veil, the more threatening it became, since it concealed the
activities of the terrorist (Horne, 1987).
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IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3
Rapid decolonization, particularly of Algeria, fractured the Orientalist aesthetic and led to a politicization of some of its symbols,
the veil in that case. While classical Orientalism was centered on
erotic images of ‘unveiling’ and erotica, Neo-Orientalism consists of
‘hyper-veiling’ the female body and an exaggerated focus on conservatism, in order to “[maximize] the social, cultural and political
distance between the ‘West’ and ‘Islam’ and [convey] a sense of
threat” (MacMaster, Lewis, 1998).
The below photograph on the front-page of a French weekly
newspaper (Fig.07) clearly bears the symptoms — polarization
and hyper-veiling — of this contemporary trend.
07
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IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3
This dramatic shift in the connotation or the ‘signiied’ - whoever
the ‘signiier’ might be - is deinitely not an imaginative series of
visual queues strictly manipulated by designers, ilm-makers or
writers but is essentially a real intersection of politics, aesthetics
and power, transferred from policy-making bureaus to the wide
realms of popular culture and thus continuously creating and recreating new manifestations of the Orient and its visual, cultural
and communication patterns.
Orientalist misrepresentation was not only restricted to ilm;
it found its way to different social classes and generations through
animation, reaching a peak in the early 1990s with the release of
one of Disney’s most successful ilms to date, ‘Aladdin’.
The ilm has long been criticized for its unfair portrayal of the
Arab world and is one of the more widely known examples of
modern Orientalism, still present in today's Western memory.
Aladdin's opening theme song, ‘Arabian Nights’, is criticized for
its lyrics ‘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’ (Aladdin, 1992).
Following numerous complaints Disney slightly altered the lyric
‘Where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face’ to ‘Where
it’s lat and immense/And the heat is intense’ but this change
still represents a false reality to the audience. Once thought of as
barbaric and mysterious, the song now portrays Aladdin's home
as a vast and uninhabitable area. Orientalist representations in
animation movies were even found in Japanese productions such
as Eiichi Yamamoto’s 1969 animation movie ‘One Thousand and
one nights’ depicting an overly sexualized oriental atmosphere
with passive naked women in an almost psychedelic low of lust,
power and male naivety. Other animated series such as American
Dad (Stan of Arabia, 2005) and The Simpsons have also represented Arabs in various acts of stereotypical clichés turning their
shows from satirical entertainment to an indirect propaganda tool.
Arab/Muslim images in ilm have not varied tremendously over
a century of Hollywood productions, however, the most notable
change in representation came as a result of the Arab/Israeli
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08
09
conlict, with Arabs being relegated to the role of enemy or bad
guy then progressed or, more appropriately, regressed into
murderous terrorist behavior carried out by Arabs in ilms like
Black Sunday (Dajani, 2000).
Further political events attributed to Arabs and Muslims, such as
9/11, continually fueled the Hollywood ilmmaker's imagination.
The result was further hostile and prejudicial to Arabs and Muslims.
In a ‘new world order’ where societies are made up of different
races, one would think that people would learn from past errors
of judgment, but as Hollywood has repeatedly shown in ilms like
The Peacemaker (Mimi Leder, 1997), America needs its enemies
in order to emerge as the do-gooder (Dajani, 2000).
3.1.2 JOURNALISM
When discussing Arab identity representation in visual arts, one
cannot leave the media oration out of the conversation for the
mere fact that design in general, and graphic design in particular
are in direct interaction and exchange with different media
platforms as resources and mediation tools.
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How identity representation became an industry
Soumaya Ghannoushi, a British Tunisian writer and specialist
in Middle Eastern politics talks about Islam becoming a local
and globalized issue at once, transmitted in countless daily images
across the globe. The writer talks primarily about journalism, but
the conversation extends further when mirroring her claims with
other means of visual communication such as graphic design.
Both communication disciplines play a rather non-passive role in
altering perception, by actively creating, shaping, and manufacturing thoughts, through a lengthy process of selection, iltering,
interpretation, and editing (Ghannoushi, 2011).
This problematic coverage of the ‘other’ has turned into a whole
industry specializing in the engineering of images, scenes, and
messages in which designers are deeply involved and should be
held accountable for.
‘In a globalized world governed by the power of the image, the
question is no longer what has sparked this event or that incident
and how it has unfolded on the ground, but how it gets captured
by the camera and reported to the audience’ (Ibid.), Ghannoushi
states while investigating the issue of representation even further.
Anchoring and mis-perception
Orientalism identiies three anchors that contributed to negatively
altering the perception of Arabs and Islam into a highly politicized
public arena:
•
•
•
The history of popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice
in the West
The struggle between the Arabs and Israeli Zionism, and its
effects on American Jews and the population at large
The almost complete absence of any cultural position, making
it possible either to identify with or to discuss the Arabs
or Islam.
Needless to say, this only worsened as the Middle East is now
synonymous with great power politics, oil economics and other
struggles over land, resources and propaganda.
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In her article, Ghannoushi discusses the reductive attitude in
reports covering Middle Eastern matters and conlicting events.
Of the 57 countries known as the Muslim world, some are rich,
others poor; some royal, others republican; some conservative,
others liberal; some stable, others less so; some where women
preside over the state, others that deny them the right to vote
and the list goes on. She considers this strikingly varied mosaic
as absent from mainstream coverage of the subject, reduced to a
narrow set of violent narratives, further validated when reaching
out to a study conducted by Greg Philo and Mike Berry of the
Glasgow University Group. It was later published as a book
entitled Bad news from Israeli.
The researchers monitored hours of BBC and ITV coverage of the
2002 Intifada, examined 200 news programmes, and interviewed
over 800 people about their perceptions of the conlict. The report
identiies an alarming level of ignorance and confusion among
the viewers, of whom only 9 percent knew that the “occupied
territories” were occupied by Israel, with the majority believing
that Palestinians were the occupiers, to list just a few of the
altered notions conveyed in the study (Philo and Berry, 2004).
The article goes further in identifying the media bias as a “machinery
of truth” about Islam, Muslims, Arabs, and the Middle East, through
which, the lens is directed and small narratives are constantly
produced and reproduced.
Reports boil down to a pattern of identiication closely overlapping
with that of Said’s few decades ago and found as well in Debashi’s
post-Orientalism; both complementary discourses were previously
reviewed in this paper.
i. Bad news from Israel: based on rigorous research by The Glasgow University Media Group, the book
examines media coverage of the current conflict in the Middle East and the impact this coverage has on
public opinion. It begins with a history of the present crisis from the period of the British mandate in
Palestine through to the creation of Israel, the refugee crisis, the wars, attempts at peace, Oslo and Wye
Accords and the intifadas, In the largest study ever undertaken in this area the authors then examine
media coverage of the conflict, focusing on television news. They illustrate major differences in the way
Israelis and Palestinians are represented, including how casualties are shown and the presentation of
the motives and rationales of both sides. This is combined with a very extensive audience study involving
hundreds of participants from the USA, Britain and Germany.
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3.1.3 GAMING
Widening the viewpoint to other aspects of popular culture shows
an inluential wave of Orientalist representations in video games.
Vit Sisler researches and discusses this matter in his paper entitled
‘Digital Arabs: Representation in Video Games’ published by
SAGE and the European Journal of Cultural Studies in 2008
and supported by Charles University, Prague.
Sisler’s study is based primarily on qualitative research and content
analysis of more than 90 European or American and 15 Arab video
games identiies video games as a form of mainstream media that
shapes our comprehension and understanding of the world by
constructing, conveying and iterating various representations
(Sisler, 2008). The examined games are set in the Middle East
(or settings reminiscent of the Middle East), and the representation
of Muslims and Arabs plays a key role in the gameplay. A substantive
portion of the materials used in his study was gathered during
ieldwork in Damascus and Beirut in 2005 and Cairo in 2006.
Examples for the studied games are: Prince of Persia (Broderbund,
1989), The Magic of Scheherazade (Cultural Brain, 1989), Arabian
Nights (Krisalis, 1993), Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse (SSI, 1994),
Beyond Oasis (Sega, 1995), Persian Wars (Cryo, 2001) and Prince
of Persia: The Two Thrones (Ubisoft, 2005).
Almost all of these games construct a ‘fantastical’ Middle East
using quasi-historical elements in order to give the player an
oriental impression. Only a few games are based on real historical
events, such as Age of Empires 2 (Microsoft, 1999), which includes
the campaign of Saladin. On the other hand, the narrative of these
games evokes the realm of A Thousand and One Nights, representing
the Middle East as a place without history. Thus, this prevalent
‘Orientalist’ mode of representation can be acknowledged as an
exclusion from contemporary reality (Sisler, 2008).
In the majority of action games, the point of the gameplay is to kill
‘others’, who typically are ‘one of them’ (Dahlberg, 2005). The key
question, then, is how the ‘Others’ are constructed by the game.
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The Middle East is a favorite virtual battleground. Action-genre
games such as War in the Gulf (Empire, 1993), Delta Force
(NovaLogic, 1998), Conlict: Desert Storm (SCi Games, 2002)
for example, take place in the Middle East or in presumably
anonymous yet overtly Middle Eastern settings.
A direct answer to such phenomena in games came from the
Central Internet Bureau of Hezbollah in 2003. The action game,
entitled Al-Quwwat al-Khasa (Special Force, Solution, 2003),
is a promotional tool for the movement, dealing with the Israeli
occupation of southern Lebanon and glorifying the role of
Hezbollah in the retreat of the Israeli army (Sisler, 2008).
Sisler concludes his paper with a call to re-assess and re-inform:
‘today we are in crucial need of critically understanding the
symbolic and ideological dimensions of in-game representational
politics. The most dangerous effect of stereotyping is that sometimes, negative images are perceived as a real portrayal of the
other culture. This applies mainly in the absence of positive
ethnic images, particularly when these schematizations remain
unchallenged’ (Ibid.).
3.1.4 ADVERTISING AND DESIGN
In 2009, a paper written by Naomi Rosenblatt and published by the
University of Pennsylvania talks about an ‘Orientalist aesthetic’
in memory and consumption at an age of lourishing consumerism
that American vendors and businessmen took advantage of to
encourage consumer spending and indulgence (Rosenblatt, 2009).
In America, Orientalism, as an expression of cultural superiority
by means of material possession — primarily concerned with the
Arab lands of the Middle East — began to emerge in the mid19th century as a distinct aesthetic when American retail strategy
conveyed Orientalist images of exotic lands associated with luxury
and sensuality, if not debauchery (Ibid.).
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The emergence of an Orientalist aesthetic in marketing
and advertising
This paradigm managed to lourish on visual communication platforms with the emergence of advertising and then graphic design,
a ield developing into a current phase of stagnation in identity
representation. With the rise of consumer goods’ mass production
during the second Industrial Revolution in the US, a need for
increasing the average consumption per person became evident.
This resulted according to Rosenblatt in a new attitude in marketing
leading to the rapid emergence of the advertising industry embracing
Orientalist aesthetics. To amplify consumption, ordinary American
department stores were transformed into ‘emporiums laden with
enticing Orientalist displays of merchandise’ as called by the author.
10.
During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a number
of speciic luxury items became intrinsically associated with the
Orient – most particularly the cigarette. Producers saw the Orientalist aesthetic as the ideal forum for advertising their products,
and launched the tobacco industry into ‘the most sustained
campaign to capitalize on Oriental motifs.’ Before the mechanization
of cigarette-rolling, cigarettes were “typically hand-rolled from
Turkish leaf, [and] were seen as a foreign luxury, combining
European sophistication and oriental panache (Edward, 2000).
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Cigarettes brands were named after famous Middle Eastern cities
and well-known Oriental igures, used Oriental-style fonts in their
advertising and printed images of camels and harem girls onto
their cigarette boxes. ‘This association between smoking and the
Orient (…) was used to market tobacco products by means of cigar
store sultans and sultanas’ (Ibid.).
Camel cigarettes, which enjoyed the most longevity of the original
brands, is still a successful company today although it no longer
employs overt Orientalist tactics in its advertising. If that was the
trigger in marketing and advertising, how did Orientalism pave its
way to complementary disciplines of the commercial arts, known
as graphic design at a later stage?
Design and the new economic giants in the Arab world
Orientalist tactics did not solely succeed in advertising and consumer goods; the marketing efforts of big corporations lourished
when the movement continued crawling towards other disciplines
and designers found themselves invested in the reproduction of
Orientalist stereotypes in movie posters, typography and advertising with the rise of the the Gulf Cooperation Council - GCC as
an economic giant.
Beirut was both the primary importer and exporter of foreign
design models — a focus to be thoroughly discussed in a separate
section — but the GCC was a pioneering goldmine for international
agencies and branding consultants, serving as the new hotspot
for the recreation of the same wave of representation previously
reported in the states.
Gulf countries hired international designers for multi-million
dollar projects on city branding and consultancy, and with this
low of money and ‘international’ positioning, the area suffered
from decontextualized design outcomes: cities were branded
following a model labeled as ‘Arabization’ which basically borrows
elements from known Orientalist gimmicks and forces them to a
Latin lettering approach. This process is identiied in typography
as ‘the Arabic Frankenstein’: ‘In the past, companies have based
Arabic fonts on the Latin alphabet used in the West, forming
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disconnected letters that are the same no matter where they are
written’, states Nadine Chahine, a Linotype Lebanese type designer
(Khalil, 2015). Chahine talks further about Orientalist views in
type design, a ield trying to enrich the Arab identity and culture
by conveying the diversity of ‘Arabness’ through the diversity of
type: ‘to be an Arab we need to move away from the Orientalist
view of us. We are able to be free, we are able to be hip, and we
are also able to be Arab.’ (Ibid.)
A discussion arises when studying cultural relevance in visual
communication. Designer Rana Salam – one of the pioneers in
shaping the region’s design identity — questions the need for
identity representation in an interview for this paper: ‘if a design
is from Barcelona, should it look Spanish? And what is Spanish?
Should we Arabs always use gold, shawarma and belly dancers?
There’s no need to always refer to culture in design work’.
Designed dynamics of representation
Efforts to counteract Orientalism in design are starting to come
together under clear mandates. ‘Decolonizing Design’ is a platform
dedicated to re-thinking the current status quo in professional
practices and academia, presenting an urge for design to be decolonized, de-centralized and re-designed, in order to ignite a change
in power and perspective. The initiative quotes: ‘Decolonizing Design’
aims to connect and foster exchanges of knowledge that speak from,
cross, and remain in the borderlands of design and coloniality’
(Oliveira and Abdulla, 2016). Dana Abdulla, co-founder of the
initiative speaks about nostalgia in that sense: ‘Orientalist productions symbolize the golden age in the Arab world and a romantic
memory of an inaccurate moment in history; we Arabs are taking
part in it to revive that long-gone prosperous history.
Dynamics of representation are clearly bound to political
and economic factors in most design disciplines, due to the mere
fact that graphic design at its core, is a ield based on commissions
and driven by market tendencies. The question here remains: are
designers holding onto their cultural and political responsibilities
or are they controlled by bigger PR and consultancy agencies
making alien decisions for excessive Arab consumers?
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3.2 CONCLUSION
Characteristics of the Orientalist aesthetic
After years of colonialism followed by economic challenges
and threats of scarce resources, an Orientalist aesthetic was
constructed to deine the boundaries within which the Orient,
Arabs and later on Muslims were represented.
Different writers and painters started making realities about the
Orient out of their own observations, problematically equating the
Orient with private fantasy, even if that fantasy was of a very high
order, aesthetically speaking; ‘Orientalism enjoyed a powerful
inluence on how the Orient was described and characterized’
as per Said’s analysis of different literary ventures.
Orientalism highlighted the mystery, sensuality and hypersexuality of the Orient, through the use of deep, warm colors,
exotic patterns, and depictions of oases, harems, mosques,
orgies and bazaars (Said, 1978).
Hamed Dabashi identiied only one politically dominant ‘modernity’
by virtue of the organizing forces of the capital — and that was the
European-based capitalist modernity, and the rest of the world
was — Colored, coded, colonized, othered, eroticized, infantilized,
museumized, catalogued, studied, distanced, dispatched, denied
— received it from its colonial end as per his reactionary book
Post-Orientalism (Dabashi, 2009).
Dabashi inds the process to be highly similar in many colonial
contexts: the colonial world actively veriied negative deinitions
of the colonized, which self-Orientalized itself, or else resisted
them in terms domestic to the colonial modernity they thought
they were ighting but in effect consolidating in different ields
and especially in popular culture.
International efforts in visualizing the ‘Orient’ have ignited a
mirrored dynamic: how do Arabs represent their own cultures
on visual communication platforms? What are then the roots,
milestones and challenges of self-representation in modern
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Arab design, contextualized within a politically charged history
of colonialism, war and cultural regression? To what extent can
the appropriation of stereotypical representations offer successful
ways of problematizing these depictions?
In some way, artists and designers playing the tricky game of
deconstructing representations can be caught in the dualisms they
try to abolish. A thorough review of the research pushes one to
question whether re-reading and re-imagining history will offer a
way to invert, erase, or otherwise change relations of domination,
separation and inequality.
11
4. SELF-REPRESENTATION IN MODERN ARAB DESIGN
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4. SELF-REPRESENTATION IN MODERN ARAB DESIGN
‘The colonized could not but speak the language of the colonizer
and thus negationally implicate the validity of colonial modernity,
imitate its parameters, whether they celebrated or opposed it’
(Dabashi, 2009). Dabashi scores right at the heart of selfrepresentation, deined in this paper as self-Orientalism, a process
that mimics the dynamics of traditional Orientalism but is planned,
practiced and projected by the traditionally deined ‘other’ onto
his own context.
In the Arab world and due to economic, social and political
criteria, an increased demand for ‘Arabism’ found its way to the
mass markets. Visual, product and fashion design disciplines
immersed in the reproduction of cultural symbols that in many
attempts failed to acknowledge the proper connotations, roots
or ideologies behind such symbols.
At the level of graphic design, and in a post-colonial situation of
confusion and residues, designers ind themselves — consciously
or not — taking one of four distinct paths:
A dismissive attitude: A total embrace of the dominant culture
and a direct honest reach for westernization relected through a
minimalist aesthetic.
A passive exchange: A minor interaction with cultural attributes
using a local discourse without necessarily adopting its ideologies.
It is a discourse emerging from design education in the region
starting from Lebanon, and the very ‘imported’ nature of graphic
design in practice and curricula.
A gloriied exoticism of self: A path attempting to reclaim a
local identity, however, mostly addressing a western audience by
using westernized tools and strategies.
A minor reach for arts and crafts: minimal in effect but
highly emerging from an alternative nationalistic and/or leftist
approach to visual arts.
The latter is unfortunately not an innocent design trend, but a
class-related socio-political problem that excessively alters self-
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representation, internally and externally to an extent where we
have surpassed ‘being Orientalized by the West’ to ‘Exoticizing our
own culture’. Self-Exoticism can lead to numerous consequences
on local cultures, both visually and ideologically such as alteration,
distortion and decontextualization.
This chapter delves thoroughly into tendencies of fetishization in
Arab design with a focus on Lebanon as a pioneering context within
which design education started and affected the contemporary
design discourse. Moreover, examples of self-representation
are highlighted through interviews with designers invested in
the recreation of the contemporary Arab image, a case study on
the Palestinian Kaiye and reductive efforts to decontextualize it
locally and internationally, in addition to alternative initiatives
working towards a politically charged design scene with a strict
focus on context and collective work.
In the light of the above, discussing Arab design implies the
existence of an Arab identity. How was it formed? Who contributed
in modeling, making and marketing Arabia and for what reasons?
4.1 CONSTRUCTING AND MEDIATING THE ARAB IDENTITY
Deining ‘Arab cultural identity’ as a uniied entity is virtually
impossible due to numerous regional variations (ethnicities,
religions etc.). It is therefore valid to acknowledge Arabia’ as
a ictitious, constructed entity to start with.
Anna Kokko’s insightful analysis of ‘Where do we go nowii’ an
award-winning movie by celebrated Lebanese director Nadine
Labaki about an unnamed Arab village co-inhabited by Muslims
and Christians is a relevant example. The paper entitled ‘Escaped
from the Harem, Trapped in the Orient’ critiques the movie
for embracing the Orientalist tradition of depicting Arabs with
a series of clichés, thus encapsulating the people and their
environment into an object of “othering” and exposing them to
ii. Where do we go now? - The plot: amid escalating tensions between the two religious groups, women
of the village, tired of the incessant fighting, decide to unite forces to pacify their aggressive men
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a degrading gaze. Labaki’s Orientalist representation works in line
with books like Arabian Nights, or A Thousand and One Nights.
The director further engages with Orientalist preconceptions by
using attractive bellydancing women and hinting that a supernatural
current runs through the village inhabited by superstitious women.
For instance, sacramental wine turns into blood, followed by the
mystical presence of goats in the mosque and a statue of Virgin Mary
shedding tears of blood. Simultaneously with the image of the mystical Orient, another picture of the East is formed: that of the land
of irrational, violent barbarians. (Kokko, 2013)
Kokko advocates critical self-analysis in her critique’s conclusion:
‘Arabs should examine the way they are portrayed in works of art
that originate from their own community, whether in cinema or
visual arts in general’ (Ibid).
Graphic designers have been contributing to the propagation of the
Arab identity in the post-colonial situation, a result of the colonial
period remnants that involved the region in power relations with
Europe from one side, and the fact that design education in the
Arab world is ‘imported’ in roots, resources and processes from
Western academia.
Lynn Osman examined this problematic through the lens of Arabic
calligraphy in her paper Alter(ing) self-representation. The paper
addresses the role of visual representation in conining Arab cultural
identity, by studying the use of Arabic calligraphy today in graphic
design products serving the national and cultural ambitions to reclaim self-identity. In vernacular, calligraphy is often used externally
and locally as an exoticizing medium to portray heritage. The lack
of Arabic typefaces, and the Western postmodernist dissatisfaction
with modern mechanical aesthetics, were purely there to facilitate
this construct.
“…This local fascination of contemporary designers in the vernacular,
and the cult of nostalgia afiliate them with the international postmodernist discourse of the design fetish, which contributes to the
act of mimicry of the Western manufactured representations…”
reports Osman (Osman, 2006).
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In that context, Arabic calligraphy is not only used to refer to the
past, it is used as part of the contemporary scene, as an integral part
of contemporary Arab visual culture representing and promoting
a constructed Arab cultural identity (Ibid).
Osman dissects the use of Arabic calligraphy to two main aspects:
• A contemporary fascination of designers with local historical
or vernacular forms; they often incorporate vernacular forms
as source of Arab identity and/or as a symptom of high
culture of the designer.
• Afiliation with international trends: reiterating the postmodernist discourse on pastiche and nostalgia that is today within
the design fetish, on a less local level, and using it to market
local designers, internationally (Ibid).
12
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The researcher also talks about ‘alienation’ as a crucial result: by
romanticizing the local vernacular or the past forms, there is a
distance within the one culture, a shifting break of high and low
that responds to Western standards, and thus alienates the culture
itself. This opposition reinforces the elitist designer within a
dominant culture (Lupton, 1996).
But how could designers overcome such complex discourses?
Osman calls for re-grounding the vernacular in its Arab context,
rather than exoticizing it. It could then be reconsidered as a source
to study, sustaining the socio-cultural context, and the multiple
identity deinitions.
Contemporary graphic design in the Arab world could resist the
global mainstream trends, by formulating current hybrid identities,
responding with Arabic calligraphy. The collective efforts could
formulate and alter self-representation, allowing a pluralist deinition of Arab identity.
“…Rather than imparting the global to the local, the local could
resist, appropriate, customize, borrow, preserve, and sustain itself,
than sustaining the global system in redrawing geopolitical maps…”,
states Osman in a call for self-sustaining responsible efforts
amongst designers themselves and consequently their audiences
(Osman, 2006).
In a context where self-Orientalized productions by Arab designers
are not limited to calligraphic depictions but extend to reportages
on an exotic Arab visual culture, how do Arab designers report
on their culture and when do their reportages intersect with selfOrientalism?
Mediating the Arab Identity: erotic gazing
While the aim is to change perspectives, the actual impact of using
eroticism in self-representation varies with a fetishized depiction,
done this time by Arab creatives gazing into their own context. That
peephole is nothing but another manifestation of self-Orientalism.
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‘Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie: Intimacy and Design’ (2006) by
Malu Halasa and Rana Salam gained international exposure due
to its exotic and playful content. The book covers ‘the most outrageous and exuberant lingerie in the world coming from a place you
would probably never expect: Syria’ as per its Amazon synopsis.
Authors Malu Halasa and Rana Salam have brought together a
diverse and dramatic collection of photography and writing,
exposing playful lingerie decorated with everything from birds,
butterlies and feathers to fake scorpions, lowers and fur. Some
lingerie sets emit music; others vibrate or incorporate lights
and may be edible. There were crocheted one-piece body suits,
and costumes inluenced by belly-dancing gear.
In addition to photographs of the lingerie on display, the book
has photographs of lingerie modeled by pale-skinned women,
mostly Eastern European.
The opening words ‘a peek into’ in Joy Lo Dico of UK’s Independent
review of the book highlight its voyeuristic and gazing aspect, even
if it was produced by designers living in close-proximity to the
subject matter (Dico, 2008).
The book digs deep into the working class’s eagerness for sexual
liberation as portrayed by the authors, to the extent that any intimate object found in the souks gets classiied as ‘bizarre, shameless
and anti-Muslim’ (Ibid.). ‘They used to tell me at art school: ‘Look
within your culture’. So I looked and I was in for a big surprise,’
co-author and graphic designer Rana Salam bluntly expresses.
She adds: ‘the point of the book is to go beyond politics, to break
stereotypes and celebrate Middle Eastern sexuality and pleasure.
Call it kitsch, call it whatever you like, but I think this attire is
superb, spontaneous, pure art’.
Halasa and Salam might be aware of how controversial their publication is, but they constantly view it from the western eyes of their
primary audience who’s more interested in that speciic representation of otherness at the current peak of the Syrian war and the
increasing numbers of refugees, years after the actual publishing
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date of book. This is evident when Salam points to the West when
asked about the research: ‘They assume that we are conservative
and have no sex life, this books reveals all. The aim was to provoke
as it covers overlapping relations between design, politics, gender
and sexuality in the Middle East’.
Salam dismisses all arguments about the book’s gullible portrayal
of the social context, the ‘parachute-like’ effect of academics
and designers dropping onto the shabby souks of the working class
and making a design/art object out of their habits, ritual systems
and experiences.
4.2 SIGNIFIERS OF ARAB IDENTITY: THE KAFIYE CASE STUDY
I believe researching Orientalist tendencies starts from a reach
for locality. A culture deinitely extends beyond the physicality of
geography and borders, symbols, ideologies and history to reach
a certain level of maturity mediated in multiple ways, to different
audiences, serving different agendas. Talking about agendas in
that realm is not necessarily an Arab conspiracy theory, but rather
a replica of international dynamics of class and politics.
Identity, class and politics stir a whole debate on the Kaiye as the
strongest symbol to come out of the contemporary Arab World.
From street to politics, traditional garb, trends and catwalks, the
Kaiye transcended form and various functions, to become more
than just a simple item, to morph into a cultural experience.
The survival of the strongest Arab ‘object’ or ‘ideology’?
Hala A. Malak, a design Critic & co-founder of KAFLAB foundation,
has extensively researched the Kaiye. According to her, its strength
is in its power to adapt, evolve and change signiicance while
maintaining a constant design. The challenge and simultaneous
contradictory messages — cool, street, trendy, terrorist, political,
revolutionary, positive and negative — are what makes the Kaiye
out of the ordinary (A.Malak, 2013).
The original design can be traced back to Ancient Mesopotamian
times when woven ishnet-derived pattern — similar in fashion
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to the one recognized today — came as representation of a ishing
culture. Although it gained its name from the city of al-Kufa in
Iraq during the rise of Islam, it is not labeled as Islamic design. It
was adopted and became widespread due to its non-representative
abstract pattern according to A.Malak’s research (Ibid).
Locking the item’s inal coniguration into a Palestinian visual
marker and sign, occurred in the 1960s when symbols of the Palestinian resistance such as Leila Khaled started wearing the headscarf
and leftist parties used a red-and-white version to differentiate
themselves within the wider nationalist movement. President
Yasser Arafat adopted the black and white one as his symbol
and was known never to appear without it.
Thus an icon was born.
Positioned within a nationalistic narrative, just like the Che Guevara
logo, the iconography and graphic symbolism of the Kaiye started
invading political grafiti, art, posters and postcards to mention a
few, as early as the 60s and 70s. It had become the oficial symbol
representing the Palestinian struggle globally. Today, Kaiyes
and their memorabilia are all manufactured in China. It even made
its way to the catwalk, when French Designer Nicholas Ghesquiere
used it in his Fall 2007 line for Balenciaga and it consequently
became a retail hit.
This collective impact drove the researcher to identify the necessity
for Arab designers to join the international dialogue on symbolism
and ownership: ‘If we know that a million Kaiyes are being sold
around the world today, what can we do to bring in our point of
view to the conversation?’
The Kaiye is not the only Orientalist object hijacking its way into
fashion. When Karl Lagerfeld launched the 2015 Chanel cruise
collection in Dubai, one saw every Orientalist symbol one can ever
imagine from prints and harem pants to geometry and metallics.
Heavily present, the kaiye pattern was however the chef-d’oeuvre
of that collection. Lagerfeld, accused of portraying a stereotypical
pre-economic evolution Arab world claimed defensively:
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‘this is my idea of a romantic, modern Orient, a new One Thousand
and One Nights’, without establishing any relevant rationale behind
his use of a heavily political symbol like the Palestinian Kaiye.
On a similar tangent, an article published in ‘Al-Quds Al-Arabi’
entitled: ‘Israel hijacks the Kaiye, Palestine’s symbol and heritage’,
features the continuous cultural distortions exercised by Israel, in
its constant efforts to market the symbol as theirs. Hijacks became
recurrent with Israeli light attendants wearing the Palestinian
dresscode and Israeli designers Gabi Ben-Haim and Amoco Harel
designed a Kaiye with the colors of Israel's lag and the Star of David.
A. Malak warns about the misappropriation of the symbol in her
research’s closing note: ‘It is every young Arab’s responsibility to
conserve the Kaiye and make sure that its misappropriation is
never louder than its message’ (Ibid).
But what becomes ‘the message’ in the absence of a consensus on
what is Arab and a distinct absence of design research in the Arab
world? What becomes the message while Arab identities suffer
from Western inluences - as is the case of Lebanese design? While
heritage is hijacked for political purposes in Palestine? What
becomes the message when a variety of mostly negative stereotypes
prevail all across the Middle East?
Disarming Design: An inclusive design label from
Palestine
Disarming Design From Palestine aims to spread alternative narratives about contemporary Palestine and relect upon the function
of creative practices in situations of conlict. The organization
offers a space of dialogue and information and sheds light on local
producers amongst which is the last Kaiye factory in Al-Khalil:
the Hirbawi Textile Factory.
Due to the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords and the opening of
trade with the outside world, the Hirbawi factory is on the verge
of bankruptcy, but insists on redeining the design elements of the
Kaiye from a Palestinian perspective: the middle pattern, with its
‘wire mesh fence’ design represents the Israeli occupation, while
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the oblong-shaped patterns on the side represent olive leaves, a
symbol of Palestine and peace ("Hirbawi Textiles", 2010).
The collective sells several versions of the Kaiye on its online store,
some of which alter the original design intentionally in a form of
commentary on international appropriation of the item’s symbolic
value, or on mass production processes of the Kaiyes made in
China. One of their recreations is called ‘Made in Palestine’, a scarf
with a Kaiye Pattern formed with fake luxury brand logos proiting
from the lack of copyright infringement regulations, to increase
the value of their products. The item is of course an indicator of
13
14
15
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a class-related discourse, proving once again that economic factors
are primary suspects of appropriation or decontextualization of
political indicators of identity ("Made in Palestine - Disarming
Design From Palestine", n.d.).
As a reaction to the hype around Arab symbols, A.Malak states:
‘Arabs usually wait until the West reintroduces their symbols so
they can jump onboard and talk about it. They became so reactive
and almost apologetic, which made them somehow stereotypical
against themselves and their work’.
Cultural appropriation is a fact. It would be rather naïve to disregard
the effect of design and media in the conscious distortion of
political ideologies and hyper-nationalism. The Kaiye is an example of a living design organism with a high political charge and a
deinite link to class-hierarchies that should not be reduced to
mere aesthetics.
What’s alarming about representation in that sense is the designers’
urge to dismiss a symbol’s value, to mishmash it with many other
connotations of Arabism or most deinitely Orientalism, while the
Palestinian-Israeli conlict prevails on many parallels, one of
which is not armed by weaponry but deinitely loaded by media,
design and propagated communication.
4.3 IDENTITY IN CONFLICT: A FOCUS ON LEBANON
Political and cultural occupation has produced an evident identity
struggle in Arab design manifested in individualism. For instance,
many Egyptians perceive their culture as distinctly local rather
than African or Arab, while Moroccans associate theirs with
bedouin or Amazigh roots.
Lebanon presents a different case of identiication rooted in colonialism and fueled by class hierarchies, presenting varied perceptions
of ‘the self’. I can personally attest to this struggle, as a Lebanese
national who has lived through it and continually goes through a
fractured sense of self-nationalization alongside millions of other
Lebanese residents and expats.
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Years of conlict in a country so small in size, led to a national
identity fracture evident in its disparity with right-wing Christians
passionately identifying their culture to be similar to that of their
colonizers, the French, in direct contrast to the Muslim majority
to whom Lebanese culture is distinctly Arab.
Since the 1950s Lebanon played a pivotal role in the formation
and advancement of design in the Arab region. Beirut fostered the
irst Graphic Design programme in the Middle East introducing
new forms of visual communication, while Lebanese designers
were primary contributors to the development and the rise of the
creative industries in the GCC.
Understanding Lebanon’s design scene: ‘Brilliant Beirut’
Exhibition (2015)
For a rounded view of Lebanon’s design legacy, Brilliant Beirut
showcases star-projects by famous designers and star-chitects
representing their own version of Lebanon, which seems in most
cases European-inluenced in form and aesthetics, miles apart
from a relatively uniied collective memory.
It furthermore documents a western aesthetic applied in a Middle
Eastern context pre, during and post-war, appealing to few but
excluding many. Designed and curated by Rana Salam, Brilliant
Beirut — according to Dubai Design Week — is the irst narrative
to record the development of design in the Lebanese capital since
the nation’s independence seven decades ago. ‘There is a need to
change the world’s perception of the Middle East, and to relect
it in a fresh and engagingly positive light. What better medium to
use than the power of design’, Salam expresses ("brilliant beirut:
seven decades of lebanese design and culture", 2015).
The exhibition credits Beirut for being at the vanguard of design.
Designers working in Beirut have been at the forefront of introducing to the Arab region new techniques, materials and ways of
working. Brilliant Beirut illustrates the timeline of the key players
in Beirut’s design history as follows:
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'1950s: the birth of the republic
The 1950s was a signiicant period in the development of the
Lebanese design culture. Marked by an economic rise, the country
began to establish its own distinct architectural and design style,
with proliic creative activity paving the irst steps toward forming
an aesthetic Lebanese vocabulary.
1960s: Beirut swings too
An economic boom delivered a boost in construction to the city,
resulting in the formation of new companies and in turn, more
branding opportunities. A strong graphic presence was developed
to identify company logos and advertising campaigns, informed by
a European graphic aesthetic. Newly established companies, such
as Middle East Airlines, started a packaging and poster design
culture based on their branding campaigns. Architecturally, during
this era, signiicant structures continued to pierce the city skyline,
such as the multi-use shopping center ‘The Egg’, still present but
disused since the civil war.
16
17
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As Zeina Maasri notes: “during the 15 years of civil war, political
posters illed the streets and charged the walls of cities all over
Lebanon. As the ongoing war formed an intrinsic aspect of everyday
life in Lebanon, the graphic signs and political rhetoric of posters
became a prevalent sight that shaped the cityscape.”
1970s: Arab modernism
The 1967 Arab-Israeli war shook the region, en event that created
a profound impact on the design world. Designers and architects
responded by trying to form a more distinct articulation of
Arab modernity.
1980s: conlict
The decade was dominated by conlict and destruction. However,
as war formed an intrinsic aspect of daily life in Lebanon, Graphic
signage and political posters became a prevalent part of the cityscape. The production of these political posters, without any uniied
aesthetic, formed a highly eclectic series of visuals that dotted the
landscape. Artists and graphic designers were informed by a wide
range of sources, including soviet and Cuban revolutionary posters,
1960s and contemporary pop art, Arabic calligraphy and Iranian art.
1990s: peace and revival
After ifteen years of conlict, peace prevailed in Lebanon. The 1990s
was the decade in which the rebuilding process could begin, where
locals not only attempted to move on from the turmoil of civil war.
Design started re-gaining an advanced position mainly in advertising
promoting the rebuilt city and encouraging investment.
2000: The brave new city
Finally, Beirut returned to a place of peace and prosperity. Lebanese
creatives in the ields of design and architecture started to reform
a distinct aesthetic. Product and graphic designers, such as Nada
Debs and Rana Salam, took up the search for a Lebanese style,
deining an aesthetic through the transformation of everyday
objects into high-end products. Graphically, a new emphasis was
placed on typography, speciically the Arabization of font styles
and branding' (Ibid.).
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Beirut today: evolution, not revolution
Graphic design in the region has continued to be an important
creative facet, attaining a signiicant international reach with
a communication sector mainly serving GCC based clients and
trying to survive the ongoing economic and political crisis.
It is a fact that the design scene in Lebanon is undergoing a certain
class-related monopoly; design education is highly dominated by
private universities of colonial descents and high tuition fees, which
creates an economic vicious cycle extending from universities to the
workplace. That reality highly alters what designers like Salam tend
to report about the city in such curatorial work. Excluding classhierarchies and different communities from the conversation adds
a bias to the exhibition and weakens its representational role.
In parallel, many approaches made by Lebanese designers seem
to share a fascination with vernacular Arabia without necessarily
adopting its roots or adapting it to a proper context. An article
entitled “Street Vernacular Typography in Post-War Beirut”
(Taan, 2004), reiterates the issue and explains the eclectic forms
of the street vernacular, and their role in the postwar scene of Beirut.
The collection of visuals, from political parties to institutes, or
shop signs, is classiied into specimens, as a source for graphic
designers to comprehend.
What is claimed as excluded from the “picture frame” is actually
reframed here: There is an assumption of an “Arab” cultural identity that should be inluenced by this form of heritage (while only
focusing on the Beirut scene). An external “West” is also framed as
a cultural component that inluences local culture, as if they were
distinct components. For Lebanese designers trained or practicing
abroad, the attempt to have an ‘introspective’ look at Arab culture
creates a self-distance, an ‘other’ within itself. There is a strong
afiliation to the Western gaze, estranging the initial culture.
Lebanese designers relect the discussed binaries in different ways,
some of which are explicitly political while others take the easy
way out: aesthetics and visual appeal: ‘the image is everything,
you’ll be drawn to the image itself and then ask about the story.
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It has to be seductive: Graphic Design is the art of seduction’ states
Salam who is eager to change perception through design by strictly
addressing it to an upper class audience: ‘changing perception
starts from a ‘milieu’ of people: ‘those who have more money are
snobbier about their culture’.
Controversy is another recurrent theme in international portrayal
of Lebanese designers; ‘Journalists who consider my work controversial are mostly white European men who ind nudity or sexuality
provoking coming from an Arab, while there’s nothing surprising
about sex and the Arab world’, states Lebanese designer and photographer Tarek Moukaddam during my interview with him for
this paper. During the 2016 Beirut Design Week, he designed
an Oriental-looking pearl-inlayed sex toys collection that stirred
debate about hypersexual self-representation.
Moukaddam explains: ‘it’s about taking an exotic look on ourselves
rather than fanaticizing about others. How could these objects look
like us, represent us, what could they be made of and how would
they be produced?’
Reacting to an exhibition by French-born Lebanese architect
Annabel Karim Kassar, entitled ‘Mezzing in Lebanon’, Salam talks
about accurate depictions of the local street culture: ‘dangerous
inaccuracy might convey a self-colonial image of the country; it is
exactly what the West wants to see as they love when we do ‘exotic’
design: the juice and the lies and the raw meat in the street. Orientalists like to see exoticism’.
Redundant design
While some designers express an extensive reach for cultural
representation, others voice a disdain for those who are completely
invested in commercializing heritage as an artisanal outcome.
Problematic repetitiveness of Oriental objects is a result of a market
dynamic with the Arab Gulf where abstraction and non-human
representation is preferred for religious reasons. These societies
identify with calligraphy and Arabesque as the main visual culture
they grew up to.
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The problem according to Moukaddam is that the quality of such
productions is not up to par: “Why is it okay to use international
motifs but never okay to re-use our own?”
The process however becomes dangerous according to him, when
addressing an international audience aiming to ‘sell’ the region’s
political problems and humanitarian causes to gain exposure.
Self-Orientalism from that angle is not a queue of cliché visual
stimulators but a topical marketing discourse.
While creatives like Moukaddam identify with an Arab heritage,
others refuse to conform; fashion designer Joe Arida draws a strict
line between ‘camels, veils and the very cultivated, sharp, elegant,
powerful people’ who he caters for, while describing his inspiration
as ‘the Mediterranean post-war tropical Beirut that is not necessarily Arab; it’s the mix of palm trees and barbwires’. He would
consequently like to develop that aesthetic as an alternative to the
overly promoted Arabism in design, as a less embellished, less
conservative approach.
This approach could be labeled as ‘memory’ and it is a central
theme in Lebanese graphic design due to the political happenings
of last 40 years in the country. Designer Nada Debs, one of the
pioneer product designers dealing with identity representation
and Arabism, highlights a market demand for ‘memory’: ‘Orientalized design sells more simply because people seek it, for indeed
it’s identity-related but emotionally not politically. People need to
hold on to something, but what really sells is not Orientalism,
it’s precisely, memory’.
Debs’ process entails a minimal rendering of Arabesque ornaments
and geometry. However, using traditional design elements constantly
brings the question of ownership into the discussion. Who owns
these designs, and what are the limits of re-interpretation without
decontextualizing the design elements? Debs states that the geometric patterns widely known for their Islamic connotations are in
fact innate and pre-existing in the universe. This non-human representation of the creator, coincides with Islam’s quest for nonrepresentative art. The designer compares this latter process to
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branding Islam’; in the same way people associate a certain pattern
to a brand respectively. She identiies an emotional need for Arabs
to strengthen their identity especially with current times of political
extremism and racism.
Lebanese creatives have also been invested in the recreation of the
‘other’, who in this case is the Arab world for commercial reasons.
A recent example of such portrayal is Carlo Massoud’s Arab Dolls:
Maya, Zeina, Racha and Yara; an installation of 60 hand-crafted,
black lacquered wood sculptures that, from afar, look like bullets,
but are meant to resemble veiled women (Suqi, 2016).
Massoud who unintentionally joined the ‘hyper-veiling’ parley discussed in the previous section, states: ‘I wanted to show that women
are getting more power in the Middle East, they look like an elegant
female army rising in strength while gaining more rights, I wanted
to represent the veil in a very slick and modern way’. The project
however solidiies a general stereotypical image of Arab women as
veiled, hidden and suppressed, which highly mirrors aspects of
the Orientalist aesthetic without a clariication of the local context;
in reality a highly substantial number of Arab women have public
roles, they are entrepreneurs and leaders in their ield, outspoken
and opinionated, inspirational role models to younger girls. These
women see the veil as part of who they are, a feminine symbol rather
than an oppressive one. This is in direct contrast to Massoud, to
whom the Arab world is one entity, excluding Lebanon – of course.
Projects of such nature generate new questions: how can designers
work on identity without discussing identity politics? And how can
they explore new aspects of representation if they don’t ideologically
discuss a whole history of stereotypical productions? And what is
the responsibility of local design weeks, considering they are a
growing trend across the region?
Design weeks in the Arab region are well versed in a futuristic discourse of design, technology and emerging sub-disciplines with a
small injection of pastiche in certain areas of the Arabia. In a speciic
example of that divergence, Beirut Design Week’s positions design
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as an independent ield that exists beyond aesthetics without necessarily debating cultural identiication or contextual sociopolitical
problems. Other design weeks like Kuwait's Nuqat or the Saudi
design week, for example, beneit from public funding and are thus
conveying a more local facade in communication and programming.
Co-Founder Doreen Toutikian talks about threats of censorship
and a lack of uniied understanding of culture: ‘It’s dificult to knit
a design week to it a city that is not culturally ‘together’ or uniied
in a lot of different ways’, a very telling insight on the contemporary
Lebanese city, its citizens and citizenship.
4.4 DESIGNING AN ALTERNATIVE IDENTITY
To every politically dominant system, an alternative to counteract
and defy its existence and ideologies, while establishing a distinct
take on culture from a leftist perspective in most cases. This is a
premise that is not unique to Lebanon but rather broadens the understanding of citizenship within a socio-political ‘designed’ context.
Jamaa al-Yad (The collective hands - eng.-) is a collective based in
Beirut, identifying its function as ‘a cultural association aiming for
the research, implementation, dissemination, and re-establishment
of various cultural manifestations including but not limited to craft,
design, and art, by focusing on the local, vernacular, indigenous,
and popular, using methodologies and means that ideologically
relect models of collaboration, co-operation, and communality’
("Our underlying principles", n.d.).
The collective is aware of the political friction in issues of representation and restates its mandate accordingly: “We do not imply a
mirrored Orientalism or Modernistic universalism in which East
and West are the same, nor wish to manifest another useless reductive compendium of global graphic agitation; instead we seek to
study local political, economic, and social conditions and their
sensorial manifestation culturally speaking’.
Jamaa al-Yad seeks to empower local designers, craftspeople,
writers, and artists in ways that are of signiicance in terms of
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their own historic modes and practices and their audience.
In addition, the collective produces open source visuals spreading
counter-propaganda on Palestine, cultural identity, fair-trade and
other core issues affected by capitalist manifestations.
Daniel Drennan one of Jamaa al-Yad’s founders talks about a culture of ‘voice’ that the collective strives to put forward rather than
a question of representation, and an aware decision to limit their
work to processes that allow for quick and easy reproduction and
dissemination. Drennan, who taught in many graphic design programmes in Beirut, provides an insightful opinion on representation
and designers: ‘they tend to represent their culture as relected
through a lens of advertising, marketing, branding, and other
aspects of bourgeois self-conception. The truly ‘shaabi’ – a term
meaning ‘popular or vernacular’ – is portrayed disdainfully
and mockingly, and the ‘arrived’ Arab is, as they portray it, at
ease within the sterile world of capitalism and globalization’.
Identity politics in that sense come to full circle with economic
criteria, to form a system of representation that is not strictly visual
or aesthetic, but effectively working within a political agenda of
thought and action.
Drennan concludes with a summary of the roots and dynamics
of cultural identity in design: ‘it is an inherent contradiction.
A designer is functionally working within a paradigm of capitalism,
colonialism, and globalization. The tools of these endeavors cannot
produce a true voice, since they do not see the entirety of the populations of the Arab realm as having a valid right to exist. Being of
and producing for the ‘1 percent’, while claiming to represent the
‘99 percent’ is a failed endeavor from the get-go’.
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18
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4.5 CONCLUSION
Intersections of cultural identity and design are never free from
charges; it is by basic deinition that design and designers function
within certain market dynamics that dictate their development
and thus affect the establishment of an independent profession
existing beyond capitalist boundaries. Having said that, the end
doesn’t always justify the means in a world where minorities, cultures and human interactions are subject to harmful power relations
that designers should not take part of.
At times when Arab Identity is politically a point of divergence
and conlict, since the ‘debatable’ end of the colonial period, Arab
designers should resort back to their own local contexts, work
‘with’ their communities rather than ‘at’ them to avoid productions
lacking substance and serving no distinct purpose as shown in
many of the previously discussed projects.
Arab design — if ever a profession — must be awakened from within
the cultural attributes of the vernacular while strictly avoiding the
nostalgic trope, condescending class-related dynamics, and the
pinterest-quest for visual fetishism.
25
THE RESILIENT ORIGINAL
JAMAALYAD.ORG
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5. SELF-REPRESENTATION: INTERNATIONAL BENCHMARKING
Altered self-representation is a child of context and colonial history
as previously demonstrated. One must understand the different
manifestations of the identity discourse in different contexts.
Comparing design cultures in that sense, does not intend to produce
classiications, but rather prove that cultural exoticism does not
only apply to projects holding a negative charge and coming from
Arabia; it is rather a phenomenon also present in visual cultures
worldwide, supported by different toolsets and media alliances.
26
This section explores self-representation through selected works
from Turkey as an East/West middle ground, Iran and the notion
of the exilic intellectual, India and an exaggerated depiction of
contrast, and the Netherlands where design takes an advanced
position in the formation of the contemporary Dutch collective
identity, supported by governmental funding and mediated to
the entire world. The below examples serve as illustrations from
different disciplines and don’t necessarily summarize a whole
cultural identity.
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5.1 TURKEY: SUSTAINING A VISUAL CULTURE THROUGH HYBRID
REPRESENTATION
Turkey has been for centuries one of the world’s main colonial
empires which facilitated a cultural exchange and produced a rich
visual legacy. The country’s location inevitably charges its cultural
scene with a political stamp and showcases a polarity between
longing to identify with Europe from one side and radically resorting
to an essentially islamic culture from the other. That polarity,
similar to Lebanon’s visual schizophrenia, disrupts the notion of
‘the local’ and desperately calls for international recognition as a
main criterium for success.
In her paper ‘framing the East: cultural representation in contemporary Turkish product design’ Bahar Emgin discusses an agenda
by Turkish designers generating a national design style in order
to attain and sustain international market success. As a result,
Turkish designers are fusing East and West and focusing on the
value of differentiation (Emgin, 2015).
Emgin starts her research with a link between design and representation: ‘contemporary design discourses are widely built upon an
assumption that links the practice of industrial design to culture,
resulting in the emergence of national design styles such as Scandinavian or Dutch design. These national styles facilitate the utilization
of culture as a means of product innovation and differentiation in
the market. And once the ield is categorized in such a way, these
styles become representative of the speciic culture that they are
considered to belong to, as in the way that American design is associated with “American exuberance” and Scandinavian design with
“powerful social ethic” (Kaygan, 2006)’.
Emerging from the previous idea, Turkish designers use design as
a means of marketing that acts in constructing Turkey as a brand
and Turkish-ness as a quality (Ibid). Following this plotline, exhibitions organized both in Turkey and particularly abroad become
ambassadors of Turkish identity. Despite the attempts to avoid
issues of nationality, such approaches still imply the existence of a
speciic national culture and require reducing it to stereotypes.
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That Turkish method borrows an exotic form to relect locality
while the materials, production techniques and aesthetics of the
designed objects relate to a modern or Western context, qualifying
as a cross-cultural design.
Othering the East
According to Cohen (1985), rituals, being symbolic entities, have
a prominence in the construction of borderlines of a community,
hence the manipulation of these symbols helps intensifying cultural
borders and their expression. Thus all these objects, by transforming
the rituals into a more contemporary practice regarding the changes
in technology, lifestyles and aesthetic understanding, put an emphasis on Turkish-ness by claiming to be symbolic representations
of the Turkish culture.
Utilization of traditional, ritualistic elements of Turkish-ness, such
as the redesign of the traditional tulip-shaped tea glass ‘eastmeets-west’ by Erdem Akan, is another distinctive example of the
utilization of archetypes as deinitive of Eastern tradition. Akan
states that: ‘Maybe no form is as ‘Turkish’ as the tulip-shaped tea
glass. This glass often seems natural and normal to us, until ‘the
foreigner’ once again reminds us of how beautiful and special
this glass is’ (Emgin, 2015).
Turkish designers in that realm are not far from their peer Lebanese
creatives using the same processes of modernization to attain
international exposure.
5.2 INDIA: EXTREME POLARITIES AND MARKET DYNAMICS
Philippe Calia’s ‘Representing the other’ today: contemporary
photography in the light of the postcolonial debate focuses on
India as a starting point to trace a shifting representation which
is dynamic, highly comparable with veiling/unveiling. (Calia, 2011)
India’s photographic archives are remarkably rich, some researchers
have convincingly exposed how much the exotic representation
of the Other its with the imperial objectives of the British administration (Rao, 2000). Interestingly, they also uncovered the existence
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of an original practice of photography, a true ‘Indian eye’ drawing
its inspiration from the local traditions of popular imagery
(Gutman, 1982; Pinney, 1997).
This critical outlook on Western culture and representations, even
though signiicant, does not imply that the fascination for the ‘other’
has vanished. On the contrary, it is still prevalent today in a large
part of Western art, in photography among others, while the artist
in general increasingly tends to consider himself and act as an
ethnographer, relying mainly on assumptions as summarized by
the art critic Hal Foster:
‘First, there is the assumption that the site of artistic transformation
is the site of political transformation, and, more, that this site is
always located elsewhere, in the ield of the other. Second, there
is the assumption that this other is always outside, and, more,
that this alterity is the primary point of subversion of dominant
culture’ (Foster, 1996).
The economy of Indian representation
These assumptions are not only a result of colonization, but are
rather dictated and inluenced by the economic factors of the
‘market’ itself in an era of high consumption. To illustrate his point,
Calia considers the Indian context to be relevant in many ways. On
the one hand, the collective imaginary over this country and civilization is quite intense, being traditionally represented as the land of
fakirs, sadhus and snake charmers but also of beggars and cripples.
On the other hand, India has gained a new image over the past
decade as the land of ITs and call centers. It is now fast becoming
a leading superpower on the global scene, the second Asian giant
after China, resulting a new kind of Western fascination for the
subcontinent mixed with its own fear of being ultimately surpassed
and left out (Calia, 2011).
Of these two stereotypical visions, none is dominating the other in
the present day representation of India. On the contrary, both are
hyperbolized, so that a uniied and unique image of the country
will have to convey a sense of polarization and contrast; an image
that carries the contradiction between the state-of-the art
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technologies of Bangalore and the ‘ilthy slums’ of Bombay. Thereby,
this split paradigm appears inherently emerging from the Orientalist ideology but has — in the case of India — undergone a kind
of displacement, now operating inside the realm of the ‘other’ as
identiied in Calia’s research (Ibid.).
It is then necessary to assess the pervasive inluence of globalization
onto this new economy of representation. The fact that the split
paradigm has been reproduced from within, can easily be put in
perspective with the growing inequalities that globalization generally
entails on the ground (Cohen, 2004). But more importantly, one
should acknowledge the fact that the opening of Indian markets
— including art — to Western irms has stressed the need of representing a ‘new India’ poised to compete with the big superpowers
(Calia, 2011).
The need to ind new ways of representing the ‘other’ has thus led
the photographers to reinvent their practices and reformulate new
means of representation that might in many cases contribute to a
reductive discourse and backire on the artist’s initial objectives.
5.3 IRAN: CONTROVERSIAL REPRESENTATIONS IN EXILE
While India struggles with polar opposites, Iran presents a case of
a visually uniied culture with a distinct focus on tradition. Iranian
design is world-known as an example of cultural relevance, a ield
where local identity still prevails through the famous works of Reza
Abedini, Shahrzad Changalvaee, Iman Radd, Homa Delvaray
and others, without immense alterations or an absurd reach for
the kitsch. These designers established a modern Iranian design
identity rooted in the use of calligraphy, heavy ornamentation
and a ‘responsible’ process of readapting cultural symbols, giving
birth to an identiiable aesthetic that is hard to overlook.
In contrast, other Iranian visual works presented a different point of
view on self-representation, one of which is the highly controversial
Persepolis. Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis is a comingof-age graphic memoir that tells of the author’s experiences growing
up during and in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution in
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Iran, and her exile in Vienna. Persepolis was adapted into a 2007
award-winning ilm of the same name, written and directed by
Satrapi along with Vincent Paronnaud. Overall, the story of both
the ilm and the comic traces the development of Marjane’s own
identity against a complex political and cultural landscape, both
in Iran and in exile.
Satrapi has publicly stated that she wrote Persepolis for a Western
audience, and in light of that comment, some might say the ilm can
be read as an active postcolonial critique of Western representations
of Iran and of people, particularly women, in Islamic countries in
general. Lila Barzegar discusses the intersections of Persepolis with
Orientalism in her critique of Satrapi’s memoir. The latter focuses
on the stereotypes through the symbol of the veil as well as the
depiction of Islam, without the context of the religion or culture,
mimicking classical Orientalist representations.
Barzegar identiies a common pattern: ‘third world women writers
who are commonly criticized as being pro-western have tended to
portray their cultures in a Western light instead of within their own
cultural context, which leads to an account of women that is not
geographically, historically, or culturally grounded. Without a cultural context, and ignoring the voices of the religious female masses,
such portrayals of ‘women’s oppression in Iran’ are inaccurate
and can serve Western political and military agendas’. Needless
to say that without a cultural context, any portrayal of any identity
becomes inevitably biased and that applies to all relations between
signiied and signiier, despite the chosen medium (Barzegar, 2012).
As Masoud Golsorkhi, an Iranian born journalist and editor, puts
it in his 2008 article from The Guardian, ‘A Partial History’, on
representation through the lens of class-hierarchies: ‘it would be
a mistake to imagine Satrapi's story is typical. Her tale, as powerful
and well told as it is, is restricted by one important factor - her
class’. Satrapi’s family was part of an elite upper class; they employed a maid, drove a Cadillac, and she attended a private, foreign
French school. Without discounting her struggle and those whose
story it represents, Golsorkhi believes that this narration cannot
serve as a universal premise for generalization when told from
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a hierarchical minority point of view (Golsorkhi, 2008). The
political timing and release of Satrapi’s graphic memoir is not the
only element that contributes to its commercial success, but some
clever packaging and marketing strategies also strengthened its
reach to a Western audience. The book-covers for the Persepolis
series differ greatly between France and the North American
market. The visuals vary between depictions of horses in war
positions, angry armed men and the lead character in different
interactions with the veil.
28
27
As much as Persepolis received praise from Western media,
Barzegar reports that Iranians and Iranian-Americans were not so
enthusiastic. The Iranian government condemned the animated
ilm, claiming that it was ‘Islamophobic’. Presumably, Persepolis
was not intended as an instrument of U.S. propaganda, though as
Dabashi claimed, it is hard to dismiss that such literary works are
misused by the U.S. administration. It is important to acknowledge
that artistic works can be manipulated and pressed into the service
of ideological campaigns to manufacture consent for imperial
projects. As author Jonas Slaats mentions, our contemporary society
is so sensitive to all things religious, ‘a reporter of such issues has
to keep in mind that he has a big responsibility to report, not to
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distort’. This serves to strengthen the notion that even personal
pursuits must account for the risks of being used against the primary
intentions of their conception. Uninformed design then becomes
an unintended tool in the hand of propaganda (Barzegar, 2012).
5.4 THE NETHERLANDS: FUNDING ‘IDENTITY’
While identity is an organic construction in many contexts, it can
be a rather ‘designed’ process in others. Many consider the term
‘Dutch Design’ as a marketing idiom that presents no concrete
deinition for an aesthetic that is quite similar to many of its European peers. However, ‘Dutch Design’ was not conceived through
external eyes, but as research indicates, it emerged from within
the policy-making ofices since decades, as in the case of Royal
PTT Nederland and other fully or partially subsidized encounters.
Dutch Design lourished far before the 1990s, explains Rens Holslag,
answering my questions on the evolution of the local design ield:
‘The roots are in the period 1960 – 1975, but the real starting point
is much earlier, precisely in the 1930s with Jean Francois van Royen,
one of the directors of PTT (now KPN) which was a public service
owned by the Dutch government. Van Royen and his successor
Ootje Oxenaar (1970s / 1980s) had an immense inluence on the
development of the ield’.
The Dutch government’s inluence on Design dates back to the
1960s; it was Ootje Oxenaar who designed all the Dutch banknotes
from the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s. He commissioned all stamps
and inluenced companies like Dutch Railways (NS) to hire designers at a time when design managers were often not graphic
designers themselves.
Holslag identiies the emergence of new terms like ‘strategy, eficiency, customer service, etc.’ which started intersecting with the
conviction that a corporate identity was indispensable, leading to
a growth in the volume of Design work in the 1990s.
The term ‘Dutch Design’ started gaining popularity in the late
1980s and was closely associated with a group of Dutch designers
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who enjoyed international acclaim. These included authors and stardesigners like Maarten Baas, Jurgen Bey, Richard Hutten, Hella
Jongerius and Marcel Wanders ("Fact sheet Dutch design - clicknl",
n.d.). Pop deinitions of Dutch design mention minimalism, experimentation, quirkiness and humor to be the fundamental pillars of
the national visual identity while Hugo van den Bos, director of
Dutch graphic design studio Koeweiden Postma describes it as
‘simple and powerful’ ("What is Dutch Design? - Design.nl", 2008).
This process of identity creation and carefully planned selfrepresentation was the result of a long history of public funding
invested in identity, in a process mimicking political monopoly
while combatting mass-production. Dutch Design was funded to
debatably encourage the association of ‘quality’ with ‘Dutchness’.
Netherland’s proile in the ‘Compendium: cultural
policies and trends in Europe (2016)iii
Funding overview
In the Netherlands, the public expenditure for culture is organized
at three levels of government: central government (the state), the
provinces and the municipalities. Providing almost 60% of the
public expenditure for the arts and culture, municipalities are the
most important contributors inancially speaking. The central government is responsible for almost 30% and the provinces for less
than 10% of public expenditure on the arts and culture. The total
government budget in 2017 amounted to EUR 264,4 billion in total.
The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science will receive EUR
33,8 billion (Miljoenennota 2017). Within this ministry, education
and science receive by far the biggest amount.
iii. This profile has been compiled, edited and updated by Ineke van Hamersveld, Boekman Foundation
and Vladimir Bína, Ministry of Education, Culture and Science until 2008. In 2014 the profile was
updated by Lisa van Woersem, Boekman Foundation, in 2015 by Ineke van Hamersveld, Boekman
Foundation and in 2016 by Jack van der Leden, Boekman Foundation. In cooperation with the Ministry
of Education, Culture and Science (including the Netherlands Cultural Heritage Agency) and National
Centre of Expertise for Cultural Education and Amateur Arts (LKCA).
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Creative Industries
Compared to 2010, the structural budget declined by 24% in 2013
(Vinkenburg, 2013) and for the period between 2013 and 2016,
a new cultural fund was created: the Creative Industries Fund NLiv .
The term ‘creative industries’ encompasses a broad range of different
ields, including design, architecture, urban development, landscape
architecture, graphic design, fashion, new media and gaming.
The government aims to stimulate the development of the creative
industries by making the cluster one of its ten “top sectors” in its
“top-sector policy”.
29
iv. Public cultural funds in the field of arts and culture:
- The Performing Arts Fund NL [Fonds voor de Podiumkunsten]
- The Cultural Participation Fund [Fonds voor Cultuurparticipatie]
- The Mondriaan Fund [Mondriaan Fonds]
- The Creative Industries Fund NL [Stimuleringsfonds]
- The Netherlands Film Fund [Nederlands Filmfonds]
- The Dutch Foundation for Literature [Nederlands Letterenfonds]
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Compared to other European countries, the Netherlands has a
high level of cultural participation with 58% of citizens actively
participating in culture, the fourth highest rate according to the
European rankings.
A varied pool of aesthetics
The argument on form and content keeps developing amongst
Dutch designers dating from the famous ‘debate’ by Wim Crouwel
and Jan van Toorn in 1972, while new proposals found their way to
representing an alternative design identity such as Metahaven,
a partnership of Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk, establishing
the idea of the design studio as a kind of nomadic, research-led
think tank, producing speculative politically engaged projects
where the visual form is just as important as any written component
(Poynor, 2014).
‘Dutchness’ is also highly present in many works both seriously
and satirically in the case of Marcel Wanders and Studio Job for
example who both channel moments of nostalgic creations but
do it differently. While Wanders is still representing the age of
design stardom, he tackles aesthetic identity in some of his works
borrowing from the long tradition of ornamented Delft Blue ceramics who are questionably ‘Dutch’, considering the history of
Chinese Ming porcelain. Studio Job stirs away from contemporary
Dutch aesthetics as they reach for Maximalism, detailing and extravagance. Job Smeets identiies their style as ‘New Gothic’ representing a spirit of the renaissance and bridging art and design.
This eclectic pool of a current ‘undeined’ aesthetics and a cut of
public funding made Dutch design a mirror of its own context,
a mixed situation of ethnicities and endeavors. In that sense,
Dutch designers were engaged in identity representation projects
alone and in collaboration with other designers; Yuri Veerman for
example is a multidisciplinary visual artist, who’s invested in the
notion of identity expressed in two of his controversial works.
Veerman asks questions about the relationship between an elusive
idea (crisis, nation or people) and the concrete manifestation
(coin, lag or anthem): ‘If you remix a lag, are there still traces of
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home in each color? If you translate the Dutch anthem into Arabic,
who does it address?’ He tackled subjects in relation to the Muslim
veil and the debate about Dutch communities emerging from foreign
roots. Dutch design has been intersecting with notions of Arabism
in many encounters. While most Arab type designers are taught at
the Royal Academy of the Hague, Dutch designers developed a curiosity around Arab Identity, one of which is Thomas Milo, founder
of Decotype, a studio of linguistic experts and designers of computer
-aided typography who’s invested in traditional Arab scripts
and extending their work to redesigning versions of the Quran.
El-HEMA: a Dutch-Arab identity taking form
In 2007/08 Mediamatic presented a design contest, an exhibition,
workshops and pop-up shops about El HEMA, the famous Dutch
retail store. The contest invited creatives to imagine an Arabic
HEMA store with a series of products for merchandise as well as
typefaces and design productions relecting what it means to be
Arab-Dutch. The project’s outcome was an exhibition with fun,
surprising, touching and sometimes provoking designs with a
satirical undertone:
‘What would an Arabic Hema look like? Halal sausage? Arabic
chocolate letters? Affordable high quality headscarves? 3 Arabic
scarfs (kafia) for the price of 2? Tunics or djellabas? School
notebooks with lining for Arabic, which reads from right to left?
Ali Baba and the 40 shoplifters? Camel milk? Arabic poetry on
duvet covers? Jibril and Jamilah children's champagne? North
African wine? El Hema gave all the answers to these questions’.
States Mediamatic’s website.
It is of course intentional to use Orientalist stereotypes at the forefront of a project satirically discussing cross-cultural integration
and new forms of identity building, but the project failed to give
a counterpart or an explanation of what it really means to be an
Arab living in the Netherlands. The treatment came strictly playful
and lacked a layer of contextual challenges that could’ve pushed
its sociopolitical connotations beyond aesthetics and form.
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5.5 CONCLUSION
The creation of a national cultural identity is a complex process
that is currently in the hands of business consultants and policy
makers. Designers are in most cases responsible of the visual
manifestations of such strategies in city branding examples for
instance but are still producing a large pool of work invested in
nationalism and the recreation of the self and the other.
Whether rooted in nostalgia in the cases of Turkey and England,
reductivist through addressing western eyes in the case of exilic
Iranian creatives or highly subsidized as in the Netherlands,
most identities are lexible matters changing and evolving with
time, funding and political happenings; therefore design must
adequately complement, question and reposition that ongoing
contextual change.
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6. HYPER-NATIONALISM: THE FETISH OF CULTURAL IDENTITY
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6. HYPER-NATIONALISM: THE FETISH OF CULTURAL IDENTITY
While Self-Orientalism relies on using the tools of western perception to represent one’s own culture, ‘hyper-nationalism’ invests
these altered representations in promoting extreme ideologies of
race, identity and in many ways, cultural supremacy at times of
populism and fear.
After globalization and the democratization of several communication disciplines, comes a time of return to localism in politics
and design; the world is politically reaching a climax of racial,
religious and economic biases while resorting to populist aesthetics
seems like the logical approach to campaigning against a threatening
‘other’ accused of altering culture, demographics and safety.
The latest election campaigns around the world presented a tendency to fetishize identity while promoting excessive notions of
nationalism and self-exoticism. The latter is designed by political
strategists in most cases but executed by creatives effectively
contributing to the discourse, and are thus partly responsible of it.
Politicized Representation
Roland Bleiker makes the case that: ‘the inevitable difference
between the represented and its representation is the very location
of politics’ (Bleiker, 2001); political representations (along with
other representations) are necessarily incomplete; their meaning
is not pre-given or intrinsic but shaped by the knowledge and values
of those who create and perceive them as we ‘make sense’ of a
representation by drawing on existing knowledge and aesthetic
values that are ‘deeply embedded and tacitly assumed’.
Bleiker’s focus on context and its political connotations, adding to
the complexity of any exercise of representation. With context as
the main universe within which design operates, comes a need for
designers — as cultural agents — to be aware and responsible for
their direct and indirect contributions to the Orientalist discourse,
the main topic of this paper.
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In the end, what is true and what is false is a matter of interpretation.
The making of ‘the Orient’ is a construct, one that not only relates to
knowledge, but also to historical, cultural, geographical and economic processes. In the end, it all comes down to power relations.
(Ardilso & Hvid & Del Mar & Bayona & Kuhn & Kitchen, 2014)
The following section highlights design examples reforming
conceptions of Hyper-Nationalism, and depicting an aggrandized
image of ‘the self’ in political and non-political contexts, as well as
a controversial reach for appropriating native identities – highly
mirroring Orientalism in intent, process and purpose.
6.1 DESIGNING A NATIONALITY
By the mid-nineteenth century, industrial capitalism had spread
widely, creating new opportunities for the construction of social
and urban identities. Gradually, more people were attracted
towards building imagined communities to belong to and identify
with, leading to the construction of nations.
The shift towards the nation as a key-focus for social identity had
deep political implications, raising new kinds of questions about
where ‘our’ land ended and ‘theirs’ began. (Watson & Bentley, 2007)
When and why is visual communication invested in conveying
extreme nationalism? How is design’s contribution inluencing
a certain political discourse and consequently the communities
affected by it? Such questions cannot be answered without
resorting back to colonial processes of dominance that created,
in most contexts, a shift in cultural identity; Colonizers knew that
language – verbal, ritual or visual – has to be altered for a tighter
control and a longer presence in a certain colony.
Today most nations are going through turbulences; dictatorships
are falling in the Arab region, leaving countries and communities
in transition and displacement, while democracy is reformed
under populist regimes in the most proclaimed liberal countries.
Change is building new identities and reshaping old ones.
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However, to carry out this construction of national identity, the
state must embody certain common content and have the power
to institutionalize it. In addition, there is a need for media support,
channels of material culture through which to broadcast speeches
of nationality such as public architecture, monuments, statues,
cockades, uniforms, tickets, lags, coats-of-arms, school books
and propaganda campaigns (Guerrini, 2009). The formed images
and objects provide a sense of national belonging and social signiicance powered by the governing system. In his article Rethinking
image, identity and design, Sebastian Guerrini states: ‘if we accept
that there is no identity without its image we can think that the
construction of nationality is the result of an act of design, the
design of identity, understood as a political action of the irst level’.
Under this framework, Guerrini highlights the importance of discovering the mechanisms and resources used by states to construct
national identity from the design of images, as this will help the
designer to expand the options and know the effects of his design
process (Ibid.).
Different disciplines take part in designing and promoting nationalism as explained earlier, but it’s graphic design that directly deals
with the creation of meaningful symbols.
Symbols of nationalism are depicted in lags, works of art, national
anthems, architecture, currency, postage stamps, passports, and
many other forms of media. These symbols reinforce a national
consciousness and inspire loyalty. An iconic example would be the
lag of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) with
two images evoking the working class - the hammer (industry)
and the sickle (agriculture) which became an omnipresent symbol
of socialism around the world. (Webster & Garcia, n.d.)
Iconography in the European Union
A study entitled How is nationalism symbolized by Gerald Webster
and Antoni Luna Garcia, analyzes important symbolism in the Euro
Bank notesv and coins. When the new European currency was
adopted in 2002, there was a need to design a currency that represented the union without conlicting with individual nations (Ibid.).
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The case study reports that the currency designers ultimately chose
to use national symbols only in the coins, while creating a uniied
design for the banknotes. The adopted design used unidentiied
bridges and windows from different architectural moments.
These symbols are generic, in that they cannot be identiied with
any particular country and yet are recognizable for almost all the
countries in Europe.
Moreover, the ‘David Report’ published in 2011, identiies a loss
of identity amidst a confused nature of urban context, which is in
a state of lux and rapid change and an alarming lack of a creative
DNA. Carlson states: ‘the net result is an erosion of the remaining
authentic sources, but also the creation of a ‘cultural time lag’ which
has been generated by a convergence of trans-cultural fusions, hybridization, and of recurrent cultural cross referencing’ (Carlson, 2011).
He recognizes a return to ‘Cultural Fundamentalism’, which has
been prompted by a reconsideration of the roots of national design
in Europe, led by Dutch, and then by Flemish and Scandinavian
Design though in some cases it’s correlated with notions of cultural
nostalgia and design anthropology. The same fundamentalist
process is also gaining momentum in China and India with a reach
to old techniques, crafts and symbols in design productions (Ibid.).
Whether intended as a form of cultural uniication or reaching for
a nostalgic identity, design has been a driving engine behind national
symbols and the ideologies that they withhold and project. Once
funded and controlled by the public sector, designing national
cultures has been undergoing a movement from political ritual to
commercial ritual, where the market rather than the state has
become the key reference point for national identity. Robert Foster,
professor of anthropology and visual and cultural studies, predicts
that the result will the weakening of the collective identity, while
v. The EU designed the notes and coins of their new euro currency so as to express a sense of cooperation,
communication, and openness. The euro coins also display symbols promoting the idea of unity among
several European states (the bridges) and the openness of the process (the windows). But notice how
the design of the coins left some space to maintain national representation and symbols. Each euro coin
has one side that symbolizes the member State that issued the coin. For example, a -2euro coin issued in
Spain includes the portrait of King Juan Carlos 1 de Borbon y Borbon, King of Spain. The euro coins can
be used in any of the EU member States, no matter where the coin was issued.
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becoming one identity amongst others available in the global
marketplace. (Foster, 1999). This sheds light on the power of the
market to generate meanings, when citizens are acting as consumers
in a process that gives even more lead to design, being a commercial
tool by deinition.
Designers are not only agents of national symbols but also creators
of other artifacts with less oficial value, yet take a rather high
importance in popular culture and tourism. Such objects are
collected as identity symbols by tourists and present an exoticized
self-perception that could in many cases, reduce a certain culture
to a series of clichés and stereotypes. The case of the Netherlands
represented by clogs, windmills, cheese, weed and sex objects is a
brief illustration of Hyper-Nationalism, which, while generating
substantial revenue, would still require large amounts of money
to counteract. Both processes — stereotyping and counteracting
the stereotypes — are design-centric.
Designing propaganda goes a long way in history; how did Europe
make use of visual makers at times of war and instability? And
what type of identities emerged leading to a populist discourse in
contexts like the Netherlands and the United states?
6.2 DESIGNING POLITICAL PROPAGANDA
Graphic design has been historically a main player in political propaganda, served to rally the troupes and give the masses numerous
sets of emblems that symbolize their national pride and glorify
their leaders. Several cases of political branding present themselves
consolidating problematic ideologies through memorable graphics
made by designers and spread by vernacular cultures. A painfully
dominant example is Hitler, who produced Germany's most
famous trademark.
It might be politically incorrect or even reductivist to represent
nations by the symbols of their darkest eras, but propaganda
design has been a key player in forming the collective memory of
a certain society and it thus constitutes an effective section of its
identity. Designers and Hitler thought the same way about logos.
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Jeremy Aynsley, in his book Graphic Design in Germany 18901945, quotes the expressionist painter Johannes Molzahn:
‘No organization can exist and expand for long unless it uses such
a device’. Hitler had got there irst, writing in Mein Kampf of the
importance of an emblem to spark interest in a movement. Of the
Nazi lag and armbands, he boasted, ‘I myself put down a inal form;
a red lag with a black swastika in a white disc, where in red we see
the movement's social thinking, in white the nationalist, in the
swastika the ight for the victory of Aryan man’. In 1935 the pages
of Graphic News were illed with adverts for the new versions of the
Gothic-looking, traditionally German, Fraktur style of typography.
It was the style that ‘synchronized with the German language’. The
readers of Graphic News were told that ‘not only through its content,
but also by its design’, print must play its part in ‘raising the cultural
level of the German people’. (Aynsley, 2000).
The Netherlands
Not far from Germany, Daniel van der Velden, co-owner of
‘Metahaven’, a studio for design and research in the Netherlands,
presents a hypothesis in his essay published by NRC Handelsblad
in 2009, stating that design is everywhere and that the gap between
the left-wing inner-city elite and the more conservative suburban
dwellers is smaller than is generally recognized.
Van der Velden points to the way populist right wing politicians
like Pim Fortuyn, Geert Wilders and Rita Verdonk have designed
and packaged their positions as proof of his central thesis. While in
the past, extreme right-wingers and neo-Nazis looked and sounded
scary, this trio of populists wraps their ‘nationalistic and racist
policies’, states Van der Velden, in well designed and cleverly positioned campaigns that make the essence of their convictions feel
more palatable. For example Rita Verdonk calls her party, Trots
op NL (proud of Holland), and her logo is a medieval shield with
strips of red, white, blue and orange. She also produced an image
of a soccer ball with an orange map of Holland on it, drawing on
the patriotic (that spills into nationalistic) sense of unity with
relation to soccer (Kennedy, 2009).
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‘The way that these populists have designed themselves is obviously
not political, it’s managerial, which has very effectively tapped
into Holland’s depoliticized public. The populist right can be
distinguished from the extreme right by having a more designed
sense of legitimacy, and a sneakier use of the media’. States Van
der Velden in an interview for design.nl.
He furthermore talks about new links between design and politics
in post-war Holland. That era was distinguished by modernism
with people like Wim Crouwel and Willem Sandberg designing
as if to declare their faith in the public aspect of Dutch society,
which contributed to what Dutch people identify with as a visual
identity. Der Velden states: ‘Crouwel’s work in particular was very
systematic, which communicated a reliability that people could
trust and believe in’ (Ibid.)
Researcher and curator Michel Van Dartel acknowledges the links
between Dutch nationalism and Dutch design in an interview
about problematic manifestations of ‘Dutchness’. He states: ‘the
problem with nationalism is not taking pride in some quality that
is typically associated with some people living under a certain
nation, but in generalizing it to basically all qualities and completely ignoring the big differences or variety amongst the people
that are bound by a nation. Nationalism is a claim to something
that does not exist; no individual or group exhaustively represents
‘Dutchness’ in its completeness, for instance. If such a thing even
exists, no individual or subgroup could ever claim the identity’.
Van Dartel does not see a direct inluence of one on the other but
rather a similar tendency in the way they brand themselves, by
taking an identity that actually belongs to a much bigger and more
varied group and claiming to represent it.
However, examples of nationalist identity representation in design
extend to electoral campaigns where the process of ‘othering’
and cultural nostalgia started to take precedence in the last few
years, especially in countries like the United States.
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The United States
After Shepard Fairey’s iconic ‘Hope’ poster supporting Obama’s
campaign became the most memorable image of the 2008 elections,
an appetite for discussions around contemporary propaganda
work has emerged, contrasting between branding budgets spent on
electoral campaigns and the publicly-sourced visuals that could, in
many occasions, surpass the success of commissioned design work.
31
33
33
While most candidates follow the same design traditions each
election cycle, slight changes in design are more likely to happen
when a candidate falls outside the political norm, one example
being the look behind President Obama’s 2008 campaign, and the
creation of a distinct brand (visually impactful and conveniently
adaptable) that many of this year’s contenders—like Bernie Sanders
—have taken cues from. (Chapman, 2016)
Hyper-Nationalism in the US elections was always there in different
mediums and applications. Trump's campaign ‘make america
great again’ was not the only designed communication outcome
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with hyper-nationalistic tendencies. There has been a lot of similar
approaches that succeeded in reaching out to people. Design was not
the only agent, as it takes more than good design to affect people.
What is clear however is that while Hilary Clinton's campaign was
much better than Trump’s, people still identiied and voted for
what they felt represented their own sets of beliefs and wishes.
To elaborate further, Donald Trump is an unconventional character
and relected his out-of-ordinary personality in the work designed
around his brand. He borrowed from old American visuals while
Clinton poured time and money into a meticulously prepared campaign that had the risk of feeling sterile and rehearsed.
Bernie Sanders on the other hand appeared closer to his voters
because he didn’t stand behind a wall of brand guidelines but
counted on public sourcing and a vernacular feel all across his
communication. In this case, the candidate borrowed from the
aesthetics of marches and street movements to connect to a
bigger crowd, on a personal level.
Things have clearly changed, although much of the propagandaintended design work remains the same without necessarily adapting to people’s needs. Pentagram's Micheal Bierut, who himself
built the Hilary brand, acknowledged that Trump as opponent did
not win in spite of his terrible design work, but most probably,
because of it (Bierut, 2017).
What do people want and what represents them, their nation and
identity? They clearly do not identify with norms anymore and don’t
necessarily react to nor notice a well-kerned logo with great typographic parameters. The American elections proved that people
want to contribute, to feel included in the aesthetic, to take part of
the design because ‘identity’ is collective and should therefore
stay as such.
Lindsay Ballant identiies this phenomenon as an ‘authenticity gap’,
explaining that today’s campaigns cannot solely rely on calculated
branding tactics that pretend to ‘speak people’s language’ but are
rather in need of a stronger identity-binder (Ballant, 2016).
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Ballant compares between Clinton’s and Sanders’ approach: ‘Hillary’s
visual campaign is carefully constructed, disciplined, and scripted
while Sanders’ campaign is building a larger movement. It builds
from the bottom up, which means it’s messy, it’s spontaneous, it’s
reactive, it’s organic, it’s unscripted. It isn’t clean and tidy. It isn’t
‘good design’. But that’s what makes it, in a word, authentic’ (Ibid.).
The American elections are one of many examples on the changing
aspect of visual communication in today’s world. Being ‘American’
in 2016, proved that national identity is not only a political construct,
but a strongly ‘designed’ one. But what happens when the exaggerated cultural reportage starts invading areas that aren’t necessarily
local? And what are the limits after which identity representation
becomes a problematic supremacist discourse?
6.3 ARAB-NATIONALISM TAKING NEW FORMS
As a focal context of this paper, the Arab region presents varied
approaches conveying nationalism in cultural productions, both
in commercial and vernacular visual cultures. Anthony Downey’s
book ‘Future Imperfect researching Contemporary Art Practices
and Cultural Institutions in the Middle East’, highlights the fact
that the political pressure placed upon, and simultaneous neglect
of, cultural production has been intensiied by the relative absence
of private sector funding and lack of legislation over the last
decades of political instability (Downey, 2016).
Investing in National pride
Funding as a main drive behind any construction or representation
of identity, has heavily altered the region’s cultural sectors; where
policies and budgets co-exist, in the United Arab Emirates, for
example, it is arguable that projects are more preoccupied with
mediating a prosperous image of the nation or mimicking cultural
institutions existing in western contexts rather than addressing
urgent socio-political matters such as racial hierarchies, discrimination, ownership and the working conditions affecting low-income
construction workers populating the ‘hidden’ slums of Dubai.
Future Imperfect identiies an unprecedented level of investment
in scale, scope and long-term ambitions, made by the United
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Arab Emirates. The development of Saadiyat Island (Arabic for
“Happiness Island”) in Abu Dhabi, when complete, will be the
location of the world’s largest cultural district and will feature
the latest installment of the Guggenheim Museum, alongside an
outpost of the Louvre, a Zaha Hadid RA-designed performing arts
center, and a New York University campus (Ibid.). However, the
research acknowledges a common notion of a hierarchical ladder
of priorities where design and culture come at the lower end for
other areas in the Arab region at a time when Iraq continues to
crumble as a viable state, with Libya seemingly not far behind, as
Syria enters the sixth year of an infernal civil war (with apparently
no prospect of resolution), as the so-called “migrant” or “refugee”
crisis has reached rampant proportions.
Downey states: ‘all this talk of cultural institutions, artistic production and critical practices might seem ill-timed or even, for some,
distasteful. When confronted with the dire state of cultural institutions in the region and the struggles practitioners now face, the
weary response that support for culture and its ediices is not only
relative but needs to be relegated in favor of social, economic
and political institutions is nevertheless both disingenuous
and short-sighted’ (Ibid.).
With public policy-making and creative sectors working in opposite
directions, the Arab world will keep producing design and art that
speaks volumes about identity but is in most cases tailored for
western audiences and institutions wanting to feature ‘the exotic’.
Projects related to the refugee crisis, sexual oppression and religious
extremism are the strongest prospects to international funding
and exposure, which creates a highly ictional representation of
reality, or the different realities in different Arab countries. If at
one point ‘sex’ used to sell, it is now war, Islamism and oppression
taking precedence and constructing the new Orient.
Reporting in times of crisis
Since 2010 and starting from Tunisia, a series of demonstrations
fueled across the Middle East and North Africa and became known
as the ‘Arab Spring’, ‘the Arab Awakening’ or ‘Arab Uprisings’,
developing into years of turbulences and coups in Egypt and an
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on-going war in Syria. Designers around the globe decided to take
part in the happenings especially when Syrian refugees escaped
their country into different parts of the world. In that context,
numerous works have been reporting on the violent news of the
Arab region through different media and initiatives, two of which
convey notions of Hyper-Nationalism from a critical standpoint:
‘Simba, the last prince of Ba’ath country’ (2012) by Foundland
collective and ‘Walls of freedoms’ (2014) by Basma Hamdy
and Don Stone Karl with Egypt as context.
Simba, the last prince of Ba’ath country’ (2012)
Foundland Collective was formed in 2009 by South African Lauren
Alexander and Syrian Ghalia Elsrakbi and is today based between
Amsterdam and Cairo. The platform shares research through art,
design, writing, education and multidisciplinary collaboration on
political themes including channels of representation.
‘Simba, the last prince of Ba’ath country’ was developed from a
carefully selected set of propaganda images gathered by Foundland
from Facebook, but originally created and distributed by the anonymous Photoshop makers of the Syrian Electronic army. Their
process traced propaganda images and found their original googleimage sources, using a simple image pixel search. The publication
strived to formulate an impression, curiosity and understanding for
the myth created by the ‘enemy’, being pro-Assad regime supporters,
and simultaneously uncovers the complex and surprising use
and re-appropriation of found, digital imagery speculating about
what this might mean for the production of political imagination
(Alexander & Elsrakbi, 2012).
Social networking sites were completely banned in Syria until the
fall of Mubarak in Egypt, when they were made almost entirely
accessible to all. The strategic opening up of social networking
channels on the Internet meant that the government was suddenly
able to spy on its citizens in a way that they had never been able
to do in the past. The result is a massive polarized amount of
reportages from both Syrian opponents.
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A large amount of the imagery created online, and distributed
through such proiles, is carefully orchestrated by groups like the
‘Syrian Electronic Army’ who were publicly thanked in a speech
by Bashar Al-Assad. Great attention is given to the creation of
image propaganda, especially with the aid of digital manipulation
softwares, innovating a nationalistic visual language with themes
around religion, superpower, victory and metaphysical creatures.
In the case of Syria, groups of political activists ‘designed’ the
Hyper-Nationalistic discourse even if they were both endorsed
and hacked by the regime; such modes of representation depict
a radical shift in the construction of a national identity free from
professional design and direct governmental subsidies (Ibid.).
‘Walls of freedoms’ (2014)
Emerging from the need to document temporary political graphics
at times of unrest in Egypt, ‘Walls of freedom’ presents an example
of design as a tool commemorating times of violence, censorship
and extensive street movements. It is a powerful portrayal of the
irst three years of the Egyptian revolution that began on January
25, 2011 providing a new angle of Arab nationalism that breaks
the ties between identity and a single political leader, giving the
lead to the masses. While positioning the book in the context of
a research on propaganda rather than a strictly visual essay, the
authors claim: ‘The book was created in close collaboration with
artists on the frontlines of the battle, and it documents how they
converted the streets into a dynamic newspaper of the people,
providing a much needed alternative to the propaganda-fueled
media. Walls of Freedom contextualizes the grafiti in the historical,
socio-political, and cultural backgrounds that have shaped this art
of the revolution’ (Hamdy & Karl, 2012).
The project’s importance in the identity discourse lies in the fact
that a big amount of its visuals only survived for a very short time
and were then abolished and removed by the Egyptian army. The
role of the designer-author in this case was crucial in the keeping
track of such symbols, drawings and statements in times of conlict.
‘Walls of Freedom’ might hold a charge of fetishizing an uprising
that suffered many stages of unrest, violence and two severe
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coups during a very critical period in the Egyptian history. While
the excessive nationalistic trope could have been avoided for a
better journalistic reportage and a deeper contextualization, it is
important to acknowledge that documentation is the founding
stone of the reformed national identity after a political shift.
Writing history is currently in the hands of multiple disciplines,
within which design ‘could’ serve as an engine as well as a media
channel. In that light, how can designers report on nationalim
and borrow from identity without appropriating it?
6.4 FROM HYPER-NATIONALISM TO CULTURAL APPROPRIATION
There has been a lot of debate over cultural appropriation in the
last few years and especially in popular culture and fashion design.
Briely, cultural appropriation is the adoption or use of the elements
of one culture by members of another culture. (Young, 2010).
According to critics of the practice, cultural (mis)appropriation
differs from assimilation, or cultural exchange in that the ‘appropriation’ or ‘misappropriation’ refers to the adoption of these cultural
elements in a colonial manner: elements are copied from a minority
culture by members of a dominant culture, and these elements are
used outside of their original cultural context — sometimes even
against the expressly stated wishes of representatives of the
originating culture.
Problematic examples of the latter-mentioned process often distort
the original meaning of a certain symbol to exotic fashionable port
-rayals. Designers however, defend such accusations by calling it
‘inspiration’ while dismissing the political, racial and discriminative
aspect that a certain cultural symbol might entail.
Online media made it harder for creatives to hide their inspiration
at times when everyone has a voice and consequently a bigger reach.
Pop culture in the last few years has been invested in cultural appropriation in many ways; in their music video ‘Weekend’, Coldplay
and Beyonce fetishized an Indian community for a primarily white
market and Katy Perry had made a habit of it: picking and mixing
from geisha history, the African American community, and ancient
Egyptian culture across various videos and performances (Patel, 2016).
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Writer Zoya Patel asks ‘How to appreciate a culture without appropriating it?’ in her article published by Vice. She talks about a failed
attempt at meaningfully engaging with the represented cultures’
source of inspiration: ‘here lies the problem with taking inluence
from a culture that is not your own: how do we balance the harms
of cultural appropriation against harmless intentions?’ (Ibid.).
If appropriation is one of the creative devices of colonialism,
judging creative work becomes bound to interrogate the artist’s
intentions and tracking his level of engagement with communities’
main subject for his work. ‘When distinguishing between harmful
cultural appropriation, and the oft-problematic, but well-intended
cultural appreciation, we look at engagement’, states Patel using
fashion house Hermès who in 2011 released a collection of saris
designed in collaboration with Kolkata-based designer, Sunita
Kumar. The brand used the partnership as a chance to learn from
individuals who identify with the culture and respectfully engage
with it through artistic expression (Ibid.).
34
It is crucial for any cultural producer, whether designer or not, to
acknowledge the history behind certain symbols. A lot of cultural
products go far beyond fashion into a heritage of war, slavery
and resistance and are therefore withholding a deep meaning to
the communities who preserved them for a long time.
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Fashion in 2017 still portrays Africa as one country and women
of color as ‘primitive, tribal, spiritual yet regal’, as per Valentino’s
deinition of their collection inspiration for Spring/Summer 2016.
Lynette Nylander of Reinery29 calls things by their name in her
statement: ‘fashion is not mindful at all, taking other people’s
stories without giving them a chance to tell them. Instead of using
beading, fringing, and fabrics that reference a country, why don't
fashion houses collaborate with people from there, even send
production of their garments straight to the source? Because of
cost, mostly — but the price tags these garments end up with seem
hefty enough to make anything possible’ (Nylander, 2015).
Visual communication falls into the identity representation trap
quite often as well. Air France, One of Europe's largest airlines
faced social media rage against its advertising campaign ‘France
is in the air’, accused of racism. While the company claims ‘mixing
heritage and modernity’ critics like Asian-American activist Jenn
Fang, called the campaign ‘fetishistically Orientalist’ with twelve
visuals depicting twelve iconic destinations while representing
Africa as a country, instead of a continent (Fang, 2014).
The campaign showcases white women wearing stereotypical
racial and cultural drag to depict all the exotic non-Westernized
countries: a dragon-lady representing Pekin, a veiled woman in
gold and excessive makeup in the desert for Dubai, a parrot-like
face for brazil and a white woman with colored features and a
turban for Dakar. Such productions are not only alarming for the
identity representation discourse, but indirectly convey the hypernationalistic mindset of the dominant culture.
It is easy to throw the term ‘cultural appropriation’ around in
design, as Jenni Avins wrote for Quartz: ‘we have to stop guarding
cultures and subcultures in efforts to preserve them. It is naïve,
paternalistic and counterproductive’ (Avins, 2015), but that doesn’t
justify the creative bubble within which designers function, alienating their work from the social contexts and cultural identities
who they draw inspiration from.
7. THE PROJECT
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7. THE PROJECT
7.1 SUBJECTIVE MAPPING
Throughout this research, different manifestations of cultural
identity took form and served multiple political, social and aesthetic
purposes. It is evident that the discourse is always skewed. It is
not solely a visual exercise but a heavily politicized discussion that
bears charges and begs for a responsible, fair representation of
minorities and lower class communities in post-colonial contexts.
A culture is represented through different vehicles, one of which
is mapping, serving as a functional tool for navigation and as an
effective way to represent data and trace identity narratives in its
subjective manifestations.
Like bombers and submarines, maps are indispensable instruments
of war. In the light of the information they provide, momentous
strategic decisions are being made today (Wright, 1942). It is a fact
that maps were drawn by men and are currently generated by
technology, still every map is a relection partly of objective realities
and partly of subjective elements conveying notions of hierarchy
and power. Maps hold unparalleled storytelling potentials and can
help forming collective opinion and build public morale without
ever being free from political charges like any other form of design.
Every map is an abstraction, and the designer decides what to exclude and what to include, what is irrelevant and what is important.
Examples of subjective mapping date back to the ‘Nolli map of
Rome’ (1748) by Italian architect and surveyor Giambattista Nolli.
The map is a phenomenal achievement of technical work and of
detail and precision but it also incorporates some subjective design
choices, like the orientation of east to magnetic north while illustrating the importance of igure-ground in cartographic design.
Moreover, Dada and Surrealist counter-maps were exemplary
aesthetic documents, but their alterations and formal decisions
made them both pedagogical and political. In evoking the
dynamics of nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism,
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Dada and Surrealist counter-maps worked to indict the attentive
viewer. Their effect, according to Fredric Jameson, was ‘to endow
the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place
in the global system’ (Jameson, 1991).
Guy Debord and Asger Jorn’s Situationist maps continued the
production of counter-maps, disregarding the representation of an
actual, precise, or correct layout but rather represented an imaginary
in relation to the complexities we inhabit and notions of ‘drifting’
through the city in the case of Debord’s ‘Psychogeographic
guide of Paris’ (1955).
Another award-winning project in subjective mapping, is ‘the
subjective Atlas’ by Dutch designer Annelys de Vet with its
Palestinian edition (2007), the most famous to date. The Atlas is
made by a group of Palestinian artists, photographers and designers
who mapped ‘their’ Palestine, forming a picture of the occupied
territories that differs from the images the public generally receives
through the mass media.
Decades after the oficial end of colonization in many countries
around the world, maps, cultures and human rituals are still heavily
inluenced by the colonizer, using his tools for self-representation
in what Fanonvi identiies as ‘the colonized mind’.
If maps symbolize space, power and politics, how would they be
transformed when changing perspective vis-à-vis identity representation? How would the dominant culture of past-colonizers be
represented through the eyes of the colonized? What would maps
look like if we reverse the gaze and use the tools of ethnic minorities?
vi. Fanon’s study of psychology and sociology led him to the further conclusion that colonized people
perpetuate their condition by striving to emulate the culture and ideas of their oppressors. He wrote,
“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but
from our minds as well.”
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7.2 VISUAL EXPERIMENTS
Creating a ‘reversed gaze’ started through several experiments in
subverting symbols of national identities belonging to the main
past empires of the world by altering money, lags, stamps as well
as symbolic visuals and everyday objects. The exercise depicted
political nuances but risked falling into the quick-consumption
nature of today’s online propaganda. In parallel, a teaser video was
created by collecting main works from art, design and pop-culture
conveying problematic Orientalist and Self-Orientalist depictions
along with an annex documenting the visual essay.
A deeper research into functional visual queues used in urban
contexts lead the project into subverting city maps and recreating
them through different criteria; new cities were formed by visualizing small units inside the main cities and giving them an
independent existence within new borders.
7.3 MAPPING IDENTITY: REVERSING CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONvi
The project’s objective is to stir a debate on design and identity
representation: how are designers contributing to the political
discourse of power, hegemony and appropriation through their
attempts to represent a culture, a city or a certain cause? What
criteria should we set to position our work in the proper context
while avoiding alteration or dismissal?
v. Pitfalls of Representation
Whether representing or self-representing culture and nationalism, there are warning signs that must be
heeded. Linda Martín Alcoff, professor of Philosophy and published author, reflected on ‘The problem of
speaking for others’. She argues that the practice of privilege*d persons speaking for or on behalf of less
privileged persons has actually resulted (in many cases) in increasing or reinforcing the oppression of the
group spoken for.
One must ask: “If I do'›t speak for those less privileged than myself, am I abandoning my political
responsibility to speak out against oppression, a responsibility incurred by the very fact of my privilege?”
Alcoff considers representations to have very real material effects, as well as material origins, but they are
always mediated in complex ways by discourse, power, and location.
* On Privilege
To be privileged here will mean to be in a more favorable, mobile, and dominant position vis-a-vis the
structures of power/knowledge in a society. The term privilege here is not meant to include positions of
discursive power achieved through merit but those achieved by virtue of having the dominant gender,
race, class, or sexuality.
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Altering the mapping perspective by reversing representation is a
political statement contributing to the identity discourse that should
be undertaken by designers and journalists, primary audiences
of the project.
Technical process
The mapping process was facilitated by Google maps, which became
our everyday companion in navigation and wayinding. Maps provided by Google do not convey accurate realities but rather ones
rooted in our digital perception of the world and the services we
interact with and beneit from, landmarks thus become highly
biased, made by both laymen and professional online marketers.
Less accurate but more accessible, the landmarks were found
through several attempts at collecting as much data as possible, in
different languages and language-combinations. Using Google's
technology helped produce a video edit complementing the work;
different landmarks were virtually 'visited' through Google Street
view and a compilation was created as a sort of digital intervention
highlighting the new borders formed by the project.
‘Mapping Identity: reversing cultural representation’
portrays three different cities (Amsterdam, Paris and London)
using landmarks belonging to their respective colonies, creating
smaller systems of identity representation in post-colonial contexts.
35. Subverted flags of London
38
36. Subverted flags of Paris
37. Subverted flags of Amsterdam
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43
40
44
45
41
46
47
50
48
51
49
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53
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NO DESIGNER SHOULD ROB COMMUNITIES
OUT OF THEIR OWN EXPERIENCES,
THEIR COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND YEARS
OF RESISTANCE UNDER THE PREMISE
OF AESTHETICS, FASHION AND ABSURD
EXPERIMENTATION.
57
DESIGNERS SHOULD RETHINK THE COLONIAL
ANGLE FROM WHICH THEY PERCEIVE DISTANT
COMMUNITIES, WHILE THE IMPORTANCE
REMAINS FOR THE LOCAL TO RESIST, CORRECT,
CUSTOMIZE, COLLABORATE, PRESERVE AND
SUSTAIN ITSELF, AWAY FROM PARACHUTED
CREATIVES AND FUNDED EXOTIC GAZING.
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8. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
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8. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
8.1 ANALYSIS
Through the different case studies, interviews and features,
a nostalgic pattern of self-representation is noticeably conveyed
in Arab visual productions. In the analyzed cases, Orientalism
is not the only suspect when complex socioeconomic criteria
intersect with the designer's need for producing a problematic yet inancially beneicial - image of the self.
Reductive design is the main result of such productions that keep
disregarding the fact that the Arab world – an ideological construct
of twenty-two countries with several religions, a multitude of
ethnic and linguistic groups, and hundreds of years of history –
cannot be reduced to a set of predeined images, mimicking
colonial tendencies.
Power, funding and design education are the main agents behind
the conception of such altered dynamics allowing for a whole market
to form around an erotic gaze and an evocative trope of nationalism.
Self-Orientalism becomes problematic when reaching a tipping
point related to intentions and class hierarchies. In that light, it is
very hard to look away form design education; creatives who
attended elitist design programmes in the Arab region, are mostly
invested in gazing into the 'exotic world' of lower class communities,
appropriating their visual language and offering it to the bourgeois,
in a very literal process of shameless visual translation.
Tracing examples of self-representation in different contexts
highlights a common attribute affecting cultural productions:
colonial ties. In contexts like Turkey, Lebanon and India, imperial
inluences prevail and alter the country’s self-perception, resulting
in works that showcase exaggerated realities like war, poverty
and nostalgia. In contrast, the strong impact of funding helped
advance and promote design in the Netherlands, for example,
where the creative industries represent a crucial aspect of Dutch
nationalism and collective memory.
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Two examples highlight ‘locality’ differently; Iran presents an
example of cultural relevance through the lens of design but a
skewed representation in the case of creatives in exile, reporting
through western eyes. The United states stretches locality to its
limits, using identity to highlight populist politics and promote
a fear of other cultures.
Since identity is a contextual construct by excellence, it becomes
necessary for any designer to closely examine the culture before
indulging in any act of creative appropriation or representation.
The research proves that designers are not presenting enough
involvement in social constructs, but tend to resort to aesthetics
in their reportages. In the absence of a uniied collective memory
and at times of high political distortions, it is important to prioritize
social insights over visual matters: dismissing the social struggles
of a region in its design productions, becomes then a charge of
agenda and bias. Design is never alien to context.
The omnipresent theme in this investigation is the absence of
research, leading designers to easily dismiss contextual attributes
into the cliché. The result is an identity fetish dominating creative
productions and political propaganda campaigns and presenting
an urgent need to reposition the creative discourse within
new parameters.
As a result, the need for criticism and authorship becomes inevitable
for the progress of design in the Arab region’s present challenges
of land, language and visuals legacies.
8.2 RECOMMENDATIONS
When design embraces a collaborative process, criticism results in
the intersection of vision, strategy, technology and people. It can
then become a corrective step in the creative process, that allows
different ways of thinking to reach common ground. If acting
as a wedge in the creative process, can feedback read just usage
and mitigate risks? And is it a practice that would be effective?
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Criticism in context
In his essay ‘Where are the design critics’, Rick Poynor advocates the
importance of criticism in a return to its roots of self-representation
and larger ideological purposes. In its social transformative role,
critiquing and questioning the prevalent status quo, historically
limited complacency and affected change or readjustment as needed.
With an abusive role as porte-parole for retail and capitalism,
design loses objectivity and is reduced to a visual loudspeaker in
markets over-saturated with noise (Poynor, 2005).
While the case can be made for its function within capitalist pursuits,
design is undeniably an inluencer and is largely used to segment
cultural denomination, as people label minimalism with Dutch
culture or ornate with Middle Eastern. It is therefore imperative
to hold it accountable by challenging and questioning. But can this
be done visually? While Poynor doesn't discount critique through
visual means, he is a proponent of prose, without which, he feels
no real change will be forthcoming.
Change, according to Francisco Laranjo, is imperative if critical
design is to remain relevant. He cautions against automatic celebratory praise of works classiied as critical graphic design ‘…a design
work is not instantly critical just because of the intentions of the
designer, or the pressing issue being researched…’. Laranjo’s
essay mentions design researcher Ramia Mazé who suggests three
possible forms of criticality in design. The irst deining a critical
attitude toward a designer’s own practice. The second is ‘criticality
within a community of practice or discipline,’ and trying to challenge
or change traditions and paradigms. In the third kind of criticality,
designers address pressing issues in society (Laranjo, 2014).
In practice, the three modes of criticality often overlap, intersect
and inluence each other. Laranjo’s ‘Critical Graphic Design:
Critical of what’ essay also cites the means, effects and especially
the quality of these critical works as up for debate in public forums
to maintain and secure the substantial function of design within
self-representation and identity, to avoid the risk of becoming
obsolete and irrelevant (Ibid.).
131
IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 8
What research clearly shows, is the intrinsic need for accountability
through critical design, especially in recognition of the discipline’s
impact on social and political representation or misrepresentation
thereof. Luiza Prado, and Pedro Oliviera’s article ‘Cheat Sheet
For a Non- (or Less-) Colonialist Speculative Design’ clearly
acknowledges that the ‘challenge lies well beyond ‘representation’
or the danger of tropes and tokenism (Prado & Oliveira, 2014).
Notwithstanding, speculative and critical design projects and publications are still letting plenty of ‘narrow assumptions’ sneak in,
and they will only continue to reinforce the status quo of colonialism
and imperialism rather than effectively challenging it’. Their
solution, while seemingly simplistic at irst glance, encourages an
introspective critique based on a set of 8 anchors they believe will
positively contribute ‘…to not only speculative and critical design
projects becoming more powerful in their line of questioning, but
also avoiding the mishaps it sets itself up so boldly to criticize’ (Ibid.).
The article closes with the advice to ‘…know where you come from
and know where your privileges are…’ which implies that truthful
identity representation can only come from a didactic and autocritical place.
A second article entitled ‘Questioning the ‘critical’ in speculative
and critical design (2014)’, a self-proclaimed ‘rant on the blind
privilege that permeates most speculative design projects’ strips
bare all shortcoming of such projects while touting their necessity.
‘…We do believe that design is a powerful language, one that it is
perfectly positioned to provide relevant social and cultural critique,
and that envisioning near future scenarios might just help us
relect on the paths we want to take as a society. In order to truly
achieve these goals, however, critical design needs to be held
accountable for its political and social positions; it urgently needs
to escape its narrow northern European middle class conines; it
needs to talk about social change (...). It can only earn its ‘critical’
name once it leaves its own comfort zone and start looking beyond
privilege, for real’ (Ibid.).
132
IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 8
Designers thrive when they have a working concept of what moves
people, a context that allows them to shape their ideas by considering what people covet and use, and somewhere to focus all
their creative energy. Research can provide the fuel for new ideas
as it is invaluable in learning people’s behavior, understanding
and analyzing what is culture, deining context and setting focus
to minimize bias.
8.3 CONCLUSION
Design literature has neglected to develop a detailed understanding
of how individuals make design attributions, and why individual
differences play such an important role in the changing dynamics
of representation and cognitive formation of design attributions.
In his article ‘Rethinking Image, Identity and Design’ published
by Icograda, Sebastian Guerrini posits that “… since there is no
identity without material references, the national idea or the
idea of the nation setting will be comprised of both, the natural
and cultural aspects of each country in only one representation
(...), which will relect some elements of contact between them.
In other words, that representation might well be seen as part of
the resources that make the social bond linking all the members
of any nation at a certain moment in history, become visible”
(Guerrini, u.d.).
Is a fully didactic visual pursuit of self-representation even possible
or is it always eschewed and fragmented? I believe it is a blend of
both. If collective identity is accepted as intermingled discourses
belonging to each of us, and if individual identity is taken as a set
of identifying markers, we are likely to ind that the discourses
people identify with, are the ones that structure their identities in
general terms, and their national identity in particular.
Consequently, we can’t escape the fact that we are affected by this
collective identity, which in turn affects the parameters of the
individual identity presently as well as the matrix where the new
generations will develop.
133
IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 8
This demonstrates that design, suspect of alteration, is not completely guilty. Visual makers might in many cases be a victim of
media bias and market dynamics strengthening the stereotypical
polarity between East and West.
Therefore, it becomes evident that identity is a designed construct
falling on a grayscale of accuracy; while there are no completely
accurate instructions for how to represent a culture through the
lens of design, one must admit that ‘grayness’ is not a valid excuse
for misrepresentation, at times when visual communication can play
a pivotal role in changing perceptions of race, space and reshape the
world’s understanding of the self and the other. Should we deine
the nation as a whole, or as a set of fragments and relations?
Guerrini talks of opportunity and I agree. We are, at present, facing
the possibility of using the power of images, design and words to
relect concepts, ideas and communicate who we are or who the
‘other’ is through them.
Can representation of any kind be fully neutral or truthful? While
neutrality might be a lofty goal, truthfulness can certainly be a
premise from which we interpret, but truth in that context is not
always devoid of emotion. It is colored by the way we think
and perceive the world around us. While meaning and sense can
be set as objectives by diversifying or modifying myths, prejudices
and the information about a nation and its people, it will invariably
be affected by personal experience or thought synapses that will
rear their own expression in what we appose on screen or paper.
Positive self-awareness has to be fostered on the part of the designers
who can then gain an important leverage: By being aware of how
we interpret, we can consciously retrace our steps and possibly
inluence our visual outcomes to embrace collective relection
regarding what binds people together, who they are and how to
translate them visually into a more contextualized representation.
I do believe it is the age of possibilities and exchange, however,
no designer should rob communities out of their own experiences,
their collective memory and years of resistance, under the premise
of aesthetics, fashion and absurd experimentation.
134
IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 8
Designers should rethink the colonial angle from which they
perceive distant communities, while the importance remains for
the local to resist, correct, customize, collaborate, preserve and
sustain itself, away from parachuted creatives and funded exotic
gazing. In fact, they need to go beyond rethinking and into an
investigative stance, one detached from preconceptions and open
to learning and reinterpreting.
Backed by a strong sense of self-awareness and fallibility, designers
can and should be open to self and relective critique to elevate their
work, push the boundaries and join a universal discourse that could
certainly use more divergent thinking.
59
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9.1 IMAGE INDEX
Figure 01: Keserwany, M., & Keserwany, N. (2012). Aal Jamal bi wasat Beirut.
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6MVWwtGvSM
Figure 02: Salam, R. (2015). Rana Salam for boubess group - Image ©
designboom. Retrieved from http://www.designboom.com/design/
dubai-design-week-brilliant-beirut-lebanon-dubai-design-district-ranasalam-11-03-2015/
Figure 03: Disarming Design. Made in Palestine Kaiye. Retrieved from
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Figure 04: Gérôme, J. (1870). Moorish Bath. Retrieved from http://http-//mfas3.
s3.amazonaws.com/objects/SC121962
Figure 05: Walt Disney. (1992). Aladdin movie poster. Retrieved from http://
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ma0052_enlarge
Figure 06: Horizon Pictures. (1962). Lawrence of Arabia French poster. Retrieved
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Figure 07: Courrier International. (2007). Dialogue of the deaf. Retrieved from
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Figure 08: American Dad!. (2005). Stan of Arabia. Retrieved from http://www.
dailymotion.com/video/x3hj43a_american-dad-s01e13-stan-of-arabiapart-2_fun
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Figure 10: Camel Cigarettes. http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_web/images/
tobacco_ads/psy_exploits/nerves/large/nerves_17.jpg.
Figure 11: Chronicle Books Publishers. (2008). The Secret Life Of Syrian Lingerie.
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exhibitions/syrian-lingerie/
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https://mishmaoul-2.myshopify.com/collections/cushions-60x40/
products/copy-of-shaher-el-asal-yellow?variant=233191160
Figure 13: France Maghreb. (2014). Former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.
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Figure 14: Disarming Design. Made in Palestine Kaiye. Retrieved from
http://www.disarmingdesign.com/product/made-in-palestine/
Figure 15: Mashable. (2017). Topshop Scarf playsuit. Retrieved from
http://mashable.com/2017/04/06/topshop-palestinian-kefiyehscarf/#p5WIZmL8f5qa
Figure 16 & 17: Salam, R. (2015).Brilliant Beirut Exhibition. Image © designboom.
Retrieved from http://www.designboom.com/design/dubai-designweek-brilliant-beirut-lebanon-dubai-design-district-ranasalam-11-03-2015/
Figure 18: Moukaddem, T. (2016). Oriental Fantasies adult kit. Retrieved from
https://www.instagram.com/p/BF3BC_Yy-7e/
Figure 19: Salam, R. (2008). The Secret Life Of Syrian Lingerie. Retrieved from
http://ranasalam.com/uploads/portfolio/5.jpg
Figure 20: Farouki, Z. (2016). The Ghotrah. Retrieved from http://www.zimbio.
com/pictures/grH1dDurDSV/Zaid+Farouki+Presentation+Dubai+FFW
D+Spring/fcVT-sik06P
Figure 21: Massoud, C. (2014). Brass Dolls. Retrieved from
https://www.carlomassoud.com/brass-dolls
Figure 22: Debs, N. (2016). Carved back wooden chair by Nada Debs. Retrieved
from http://trendesignmagazine.com/en/2016/01/sculptural-wood/
Figure 23: Arida, J. (2016). La Terre Est Folle Abaya collection. Retrieved from
http://www.laterreestfolle.com/abayas
Figure 24: Brilliant Beirut Exhibition. (2015). A 1960s poster by MEA showing
their light route to kuwait. Image © designboom. Retrieved from
http://www.designboom.com/design/dubai-design-week-brilliantbeirut-lebanon-dubai-design-district-rana-salam-11-03-2015/
Figure 25: Jamaa Al Yad. (2015). Kufiyeh Poster. Retrieved from
http://jamaalyad.org/prjt/prjt-kufiyeh/
Figure 26: Akan, E. (2011). Istanbul Alphabet. Retrieved from
https://simpletreats.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/maybe-design/
Figure 27: Satrapi, M. (2000). Persepolis French edition covers. Retrieved from
https://booknode.com/persepolis_015762/covers#gallery-11
Figure 28: Satrapi, M. (2003). Persepolis.
Figure 29: Monitor creatieve industrie 2016. (2017). Stichting iMMovator.
Figure 30: Mediamatic. (2008). El Hema Poster. Retrieved from:
https://www.mediamatic.net/nl/page/24537/poster-el-hema-rotterdam
Figure 31: Somodevilla, C & Getty Images (2016). The Trump campaign. Retrieved
from https://www.fastcodesign.com/3066599/the-worst-design-of2016-was-also-the-most-effective
Figure 32: Dilts, C. (2016). Bernie Sanders Campaign. Retrieved from
https://www.instagram.com/p/3KK81-Awyd/
Figure 33: Fairy, S. (2008). Obama Hope Poster. Retrieved from: http://www.
aaronakins.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Obama_Hope_
Poster1.jpg
Figure 34: Sanchez, S. (2014). Air France's ‘France is in the air’ print campaign by
BETC Paris. Retrieved from http://creativity-online.com/work/airfrance-france-is-in-the-air/34501Retrieved from
Figure 35 till 58: Gebrael, I. (2017). Mapping Identity: reversing cultural
representation project maps and components.
Figure 59: Moukaddem, T. (2013). Orientalist group shot. Retrieved form:
https://www.instagram.com/p/4ltjONy-4i/
Figure 60: Keserwany, M., & Keserwany, N. (2012). Aal Jamal bi wasat Beirut.
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6MVWwtGvS
9.2 INTERVIEWSVII (2016/2017)
Abdulla, Dana (UK)
A.Malak, Hala (US)
Arida, Joe (LB)
Debs, Nada (LB)
Drennan, Daniel (US)
Farouki, Zaid (UAE)
Holslag, Rens (NL)
Massoud, Carlo (LB)
Moukaddem, Tarek (LB)
Salam, Rana (LB)
Toutikian, Doreen (LB)
Van Dartel, Michel (NL)
vii. Recordings and transcripts available upon request.
60