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I& #39;m surprised by the cover image you& #39;ve chosen here. My primary question--perhaps an overly generous one, since it assumes that the problem is merely ignorance--is "what has to happen in art education for people to stop sharing and recreating blatantly racist paintings?" https://twitter.com/forarthistory/status/1245827631909609473">https://twitter.com/forarthis...
People (again, this is the most generous interpretation possible) don& #39;t realise how deeply & inextricably Orientalist thought and imagery is tied to colonial violence, both historically and today.
Images such as this one (Ingres& #39; "Grande Odalisque") furthered curiosity about the "East" and demand for "Eastern" goods and narratives even as they asserted Europeans& #39; right to authoritatively depict, categorise, judge, and rule the "Orient."
Thus--& a lot of people writing about Orientalism get this wrong--it& #39;s not just HOW Orientalists depict the "Orient" (as lush, sensual, exotic, lazy, libidinous, hedonistic, and potentially cruel & depraved), but also the AUTHORITY they project in depicting the "Orient" /at all/.
This authority is what leads into an "academic Orientalism" (Said) that categorises and taxonomises "races" into "natural" categories based on their bodies and the moral qualities that supposedly correspond with or arise from them ("physiological-moral classification").
In other words, the problem isn& #39;t WHAT Orientalists decided that the "Orient" was--it& #39;s that they decided that they GOT to decide, that they had sole right and authority to decide, what the "Orient" was (after artificially dividing "Europe" from the "Orient" in the first place).
Paintings like this one (along with travel narratives and fiction, of which "harem" was a popular genre, & which get more disturbing than I want to get into) played a major part, not only in portraying the Orient as libidinal and depraved, but also in cementing that authority.
These narratives provided justification for the material domination that enabled and inspired their production. They spread a type of curiosity about the "East" that led to more travellers producing more narratives, more soldiers, a greater sense of ownership.
Untangling the relationship between cultural & socio-economic or political hegemony is of course beyond the scope of this thread, but the point is that paintings like this are deeply entangled in histories of domination (even besides just being racist in what they depict).
*Racist and misogynistic--again, narrative depictions of women in harems get extremely gritty, & I can& #39;t believe that they didn& #39;t have real consequences in terms of sexual violence.
Readings, as always: Edward Said, Orientalism (above quotes are from pp. 118-9 of this edition):
https://monoskop.org/images/4/4e/Said_Edward_Orientalism_1979.pdf">https://monoskop.org/images/4/...
https://monoskop.org/images/4/4e/Said_Edward_Orientalism_1979.pdf">https://monoskop.org/images/4/...
