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 02 03 13 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—. 14 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. 15 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? 16 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 20 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 21 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- 22 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 23 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 26 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. 27 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 28 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. 29 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 30 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). 31 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 32 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 33 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3 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. 34 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3 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. 35 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3 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. 36 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3 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. 37 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3 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.). 38 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3 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). 39 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3 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 40 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3 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? 41 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3 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 42 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 3 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 46 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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- 47 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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 48 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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). 49 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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 50 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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. 51 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 ‘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 52 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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 53 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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: 54 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 ‘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 55 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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 56 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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. 57 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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: 58 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 '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 59 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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.). 60 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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. 61 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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. 62 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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 63 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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 64 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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 65 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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’. 66 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 18 19 20 67 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 21 22 23 24 68 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 4 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 72 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 5 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. 73 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 5 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. 74 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 5 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 75 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 5 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 76 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 5 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 77 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 5 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 78 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 5 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 79 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 5 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 80 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 5 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). 81 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 5 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] 82 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 5 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 83 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 5 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. 84 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 5 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. 30 6. HYPER-NATIONALISM: THE FETISH OF CULTURAL IDENTITY 88 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 6 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. 89 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 6 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. 90 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 6 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.). 91 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 6 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. 92 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 6 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. 93 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 6 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). 94 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 6 ‘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. 95 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 6 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 96 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 6 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). 97 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 6 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 98 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 6 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 99 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 6 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. 100 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 6 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 101 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 6 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). 102 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 6 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. 103 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 6 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 106 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 7 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, 107 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 7 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.” 108 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 7 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. 109 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 7 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 42 39 43 40 44 45 41 46 47 50 48 51 49 52 53 54 55 56 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. 58 8. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS 128 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 8 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. 129 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 8 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? 130 IDENTITY REPRESENTATION: SELF-ORIENTALISM AND HYPER-NATIONALISM IN ARAB* DESIGN — CHAPTER 8 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. 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The commercial construction of “new nations”. Journal of Material Culture, 4. Ghannoushi, S. (2011). The propagation of neo-Orientalism. Aljazeera.com. Retrieved from http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011 /01/201112611591745716.html Goldziher, I. (1971). Muslim studies. Albany: State University of New York Press. Guerrini, S. (2009). International branding | Rethinking Image, Identity & Design | Sebastian Guerrini. Sebastianguerrini.com. Retrieved from http:// www.sebastianguerrini.com/features/international-branding/ Gutman, J. (1982) Through Indian Eyes. 19th and Early 20th Century Photography from India. New York: Oxford University Press. Halasa, M., & Salam, R. (2008). The secret life of Syrian lingerie. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Hamdy, B., & Karl, D. (2012). Walls of freedom. Berlin: From Here to Fame. Hirbawi Textiles. (2010). Kuiyahirbawi.com. Retrieved from http://www. kuiyahirbawi.com/1.html Hollis, R. (2000). Arts: Graphic design in Nazi Germany. the Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/dec/18/artsfeatures2 Horne, A. (1987). A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962. New York: New York Review Books. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham: Duke University press. Kabbani, R. (1986). Europe’s Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule. Houndmills: The Macmillan Press Ltd. Kaygan, H. (2006). Evaluation of products through the concept of national design: a case study on Art-Decor magazine. M.Sc thesis, Middle East Technical University. Kennedy, G. (2009). The Relationship Between Design and Populist Politics. Design.nl. Retrieved from http://design.nl/item the_relationship_ between_design_and_populist_politics Khalil, J. (2015). Here’s How The Arabic Script Is Getting A New Life. BuzzFeed. Retrieved from https://www.buzzfeed.com/jahdkhalil/heres-how-thearabic-script-is-getting-a-new-life?utm_term=.tdQqJ0G4P#.sqE4rqwYy Khatib, L. (2006). Filming the Modern Middle East. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Kokko, A. (2013). Escaped from the Harem, Trapped in the Orient. Al-Raida, (Issue 138-139-140). Retrieved from http://alraidajournal.com/index. php/ALRJ/article/view/97/0 Laranjo, F. (2014). Critical Graphic Design: Critical of What?. Design Observer. Retrieved from http://designobserver.com/feature/critical-graphicdesign-critical-of-what/38416 Lupton, E. & Miller, A. (1996). Low and high: design in everyday life. In Design writing research. London: Phaidon. Macmaster, N., & Lewis, T. (1998). Orientalism: from unveiling to hyperveiling. Journal Of European Studies, 28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/004724419 802800109 Made in Palestine - Disarming Design From Palestine. Disarming Design From Palestine. Retrieved from http://www.disarmingdesign.com/product/ made-in-palestine/ Max Weber (1958). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Mediamatic. (2007). El-Hema. Retrieved from https://www.mediamatic.net/en/ page/1639/el-hema. Nylander, L. (2015). Cultural Appropriation Fashion Spring 2016 Runway Trend. Reinery29.com. Retrieved from http://www.reinery29.com/racismfashion-industry-cultural-appropriation Oliveira, P., & Abdulla, D. (2016). Decolonising Design. Decolonisingdesign.com. Retrieved from http://www.decolonisingdesign.com Osman, L. (2006). (Alter)ing Self-Representation: Alternating between the Global and the Local, Arabic Calligraphy as case study. In Wonderground International Design Research Society Conference. Lisbon. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/6600939/_Alter_ing_SelfRepresentation_Alternating_between_the_Global_and_the_Local_ Arabic_Calligraphy_as_case_study Our underlying principles. Jamaalyad.org. Retrieved from http://jamaalyad.org/ docs/docs_manifesto/ Patel, Z. (2016). how to appreciate a culture without appropriating it. i-D. Retrieved from https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/how-to-appreciate-aculture-without-appropriating-it Philo, G., & Berry, M. (2004). Bad news from Israel. London: Pluto Press. Pinney, C. (1997). Camera Indica. The Social Life of Indian Photographs. London: Reaktion Books. Poynor, R. (2014). The fall and rise of Dutch design. Creative Bloq. Retrieved from http://www.creativebloq.com/graphic-design/fall-and-rise-dutchdesign-21410643 Poynor, R. (2005). Where Are the Design Critics?. Design Observer. Retrieved from http://designobserver.com/feature/where-are-the-designcritics/3767 Prado, L., & Oliveira, P. (2014). Cheat Sheet for a Non (or Less) Colonialist Speculative Design. Medium. Retrieved from https://medium. com/a-parede/cheat-sheet-for-a-non-or-less-colonialist-speculativedesign-9a6b4ae3c465 Prado, L., & Oliveira, P. (2014). Questioning the “critical” in Speculative & Critical Design. Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/a-parede/ questioning-the-critical-in-speculative-critical-design-5a355cac2ca4 Rao, S. (2000). Imperial imaginary: Photography and the invention of the British raj in India. Visual Communication Quarterly, 7(4), 10-16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15551390009363443 Rosenblatt, N. (2009). Orientalism in American Popular Culture. Penn History Review, 16(2). Retrieved from http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=phr Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Satrapi, M. (2007). The complete Persepolis. New York: Pantheon Books. Shohat, E., & Stam, R. (1994). Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London: Routledge. Sisler, V. (2008). Digital Arabs: Representation in video games. European Journal Of Cultural Studies, 11(2), 203-220. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/15675494 07088333 Suqi, R. (2016). The Thriving Designers Who Dominate Beirut’s Flourishing Scene. Nytimes.com. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/ style/the-thriving-designers-of-beirut.html?_r=0 Taan, Y. (2004). Street vernacular typography in post-war Beirut. In Bad Type: Third annual Friends of St Bride conference, October 18 20, 2004, St Bride Library. Retrieved from http://stbride.org/friends/conference/ badtype/index.html Vinkenburg, B. (2013). Trendbreuk in rijksuitgaven kunst en cultuur [Trend breaks in public cultural expenditure]. In: Boekman 95. Watson, G., & Bentley, I. (2007). Identity by Design. Oxford: Elsevier Ltd. Webster, G & Garcia, A.L. (n.d.). National Identity case study: How is national identity symbolized? Washington: AAG Center for Global Geography Education. What is Dutch Design? - Design.nl. (2008). Design.nl. Retrieved from http://design.nl/item/what_is_dutch_design Wright, J. (1942). Map Makers Are Human: Comments on the Subjective in Maps. Geographical Review, 32(4), 527. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/209994 Young, J. (2010). Cultural Appropriation and the Arts. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. 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 http://www.disarmingdesign.com/product/made-in-palestine/ 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:// https-//www.loc.gov/exhibits/music-and-animation/aladdin/Assets/ ma0052_enlarge Figure 06: Horizon Pictures. (1962). Lawrence of Arabia French poster. Retrieved from http://retromovieposter.com/poster/lawrence-of-arabia-french/ Figure 07: Courrier International. (2007). Dialogue of the deaf. Retrieved from http://www.courrierinternational.com/magazine/2007/848-islamoccident-dialogues-de-sourds Figure 08: American Dad!. (2005). Stan of Arabia. Retrieved from http://www. dailymotion.com/video/x3hj43a_american-dad-s01e13-stan-of-arabiapart-2_fun Figure 09: Yamamoto, E. (1969). A thousand and one nights. Retrieved from http://themovielist.net/movielist/movie/85398/One-Thousand-andOne-Nights;jsessionid=jw3jzbw37za1jckmtved74ln 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. Retrieved from https://www.kunsthal.nl/en/plan-your-visit/ exhibitions/syrian-lingerie/ Figure 12: Salam, Rana. The Honeymoon Cushion. Retrieved from 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. Retrieved from http://www.francemaghreb2.fr/enquete-sur-letrangemort-de-yasser-arafat/ 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