Tuesday, May 10, 2011

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Edward Said, and Explaining My Travels


First off a few successes to report:

1) I successfully finished my colloquial Arabic dia

lect exam on Sunday and my formal fussha Arabic exam today. I studied very hard for both and was very satisfied with the outcome. I am now done with half my academic classes and the other two are PolSci courses, which means blue book exams are in English (Al-hum-du-lila).

2) I successfully woke up at 3 AM this morning

and conference-called into a meeting I was asked to attend about summer employment taking place at 5 to 7 PM PST in Seattle. This summer is going to be great. I then took a nap this afternoon.

3) I had a Skype conference call this evening with my buddies Dave and Matt. We exchanged flight info, booked a hostel in the old city of Istanbul, and made a rough rendezvous plan. In 13 days I will meet them at the edge of Europe. SO EXCITED!!!

Now for the meat of this post (interestingly: Jordanians differentiate between meat and chicken. Meat is meat (basically lamb) and chicken is something else entirely. I don’t know what they think it is):

I want to try in this post to provide a reflection on the forces, which influence the way I represent my experiences abroad. I am keenly aware that I run the risk of being wholly incoherent in my summary of political theory. But heck, I crudely paraphrased Gandhi’s The Practice of Satyagraha to try complicate extra-judicial killings in my last post… so I am just going to run with it. That said, let me at least clearly state my operating thesis and if my argument seems like complete rubbish without the proper citations then you can at least now what I was trying to argue.

So here goes, as I type these words onto a uniquely self-centered media platform, it is tempting to believe that I am in control of the system of representation I have constructed to explain my experiences abroad. However, Orientalism exerts subtle control over my use of social media while abroad. The production of my travel narrative is confined by my subjectivity, and that includes the legacy of orientalist representation that I inherited as part of my occidental intellectual heritage. Or to put it slightly less precisely, considerably more simply, and a whole lot less pretentiously, my upbringing causes me to inaccurately portray my experiences most notably in my facebook albums, but also in this blog.

Edward Said wrote a lot of smart things over his career, but one notable observation was to point out in his seminal work Orientalism that 18th and 19th century travel narratives in the Middle East reproduced the same Orientalist troupes. Early travelers to Egypt for example elevated certain stereotypes (such as the Harem of oppressed women). These tropes became so ingrained in the form of travel writing that one couldn’t write about a cruise down the Nile without writing in orientalist stereotypes. Said convincingly argues that this trend is part of a larger phenomenon, by which the context in which a work is created limits the form in which that work can ultimately take. Whether a 18th century travel story, a French painting of 19th century Arabs, a 1946 National Geographic article comparing the western Israeli settlers to their eastern Palestinian neighbors, or a 2011 facebook album, context functions in the same manner. The pre-existing assumptions about a place or people limit what can be created, and more subtly what Spivak call the subjectivity of the speaker limits what questions can be asked and what is said.

In thinking about this blog it is clear to me that the same forces confine me in my production of social media. When I choose pictures to upload I feel compelled to select images that prove I am in the Middle East. Much as the 18th century writer had to talk about a harem I had to put up a picture of the Dome of the Rock. The Temple Mount is particularly good picture because people instantly attach meaning to the image. The Dome of the Rock functions as a signifier. It is not just a beautiful monument in a disputed site, but a placeholder for all the mystical, exotic, and dangerous things Americans assume the Middle East to be. If I didn’t put up pictures that fit our orientalist assumptions (say if I chose images of me drinking slushies on campus with my friends twice a week) my experience would somehow be less authentic. Or at the very least, people would be less impressed by my travels. What alarms me about being confined by this Orientalist tendency is that to at least to some degree I know that I have exhibited the differences of the places I been, at the expense of accurately representing the similarities. My context and subjectivity, which include a desire to demonstrate the uniqueness of my study abroad experience, leads me to play into expectations of the region.

A more honorable use of social media would contest my society’s assumptions and inherited biases about the Middle East. It would show the similarities between the people here and back home. It would prove that there is nothing particularly wrong, exotic, or scary about a mosque or a woman who chooses to wear a hijab, and it would not lead people to believe that I see camels frequently. Yet, by my own assessment I seem to be failing to transcend my context and convey that through my use of social media.

Therefore, please all me to state a few thing I have perhaps failed to express adequately due to my reliance of the iconography of Orientalism.

1) Jordan is thoroughly modern. It is poor and culturally different from the United States but is also very similar in unexpected ways. People watch Glee everywhere.

2) To think of Jordan and the whole holy land by extension as an ancient or mystical place is to unfairly freeze the people who live here in time. It is unreasonable and inaccurate to see the region through this sort of ossified lens.

3) Prejudiced media coverage in the United States led me to be very scared when I arrived in Amman. This initial discomfort has proven completely unfounded.

4) I feel safer walking the streets here than I did in New York or the Bay Area (Though I attribute the vast majority of the minor discomfort I felt in those cities to my own racism).

5) Jordanians are the nicest people I have ever met. No one has ever linked me as a person to the foreign policy decisions made by my government. I wish that I could say the same thing about Americans blaming Muslims for the acts of a tiny percentage of adherents to Islam.

With Love, Michael

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