Category Archives: Orientalism

Tabsir Redux: Mocha Musings #3: Turkey and Persia

Coffee, Iran, Lithographs, Orientalist Images, Turkey


Area: 63,800 sq. mi
Population: 4,490,000
Government: Absolute Despotism
Scenes: Merchants Buying Carpets

previous post I began a series on coffee advertising cards with Middle Eastern themes. One of the most colorful collections is that provided by the Arbuckle Coffee Company. In my great, great aunt’s album there were several Middle Eastern and North African nations represented, but from a different series than in the Arbuckle’s 1889 series. The 1889 version of Turkey is shown above, but my aunt’s version of Turkey is decidedly more imaginative:

Continue reading Tabsir Redux: Mocha Musings #3: Turkey and Persia →

Tabsir Redux: Mocha Musings #2: Egypt

Archaeology and Antiquities, Coffee, Egypt, Lithographs, Orientalist Images

previous post I began a series on coffee advertising cards with Middle Eastern themes. One of the most colorful collections is that provided by the Arbuckle Coffee Company. In my great, great aunt’s album there is a card depicting ancient Egypt, which is shown above.

In the 1889 series depicting the nations of the world, Egypt also appears:


Area: 11,000 sq. mi
Population: 6,806,381
Government: Turkish Vice Royalty
Scenes: Date Palm; The Obelisk of Luxor; Cotton Barges on the Nile

[Tabsir Redux is a reposting of earlier posts on the blog, since memories are fickle and some things deserve a second viewing.this post was originally made on March 6, 2010]

Tabsir Redux: Mocha Musings #1: Mecca and Arabia

Coffee, Food and Drink, Orientalism, Orientalist Images, Plants, Yemen

Arbuckles’ Ariosa (air-ee-o-sa) Coffee packages bore a yellow label with the name ARBUCKLES’ in large red letters across the front, beneath which flew a Flying Angel trademark over the words ARIOSA COFFEE in black letters. Shipped all over the country in sturdy wooden crates, one hundred packages to a crate, ARBUCKLES’ ARIOSA COFFEE became so dominant, particularly in the west, that many Cowboys were not aware there was any other kind. Keen marketing minds, the Arbuckle Brothers printed signature coupons on the bags of coffee redeemable for all manner of notions including handkerchiefs, razors, scissors, and wedding rings. To sweeten the deal, each package of ARBUCKLES’ contained a stick of peppermint candy. Due to the demands on chuck wagon cooks to keep a ready supply of hot ARBUCKLES’ on hand around the campfire, the peppermint stick became a means by which the steady coffee supply was ground. Upon hearing the cook’s call, “Who wants the candy?” some of the toughest Cowboys on the trail were known to vie for the opportunity of manning the coffee grinder in exchange for satisfying a sweet tooth.

While sorting through a bevy of late 19th century advertising cards and magazine illustrations collected by my great, great aunt in several yellowing albums, I came across several for the Middle East that were published for Arbuckle’s coffee. Continue reading Tabsir Redux: Mocha Musings #1: Mecca and Arabia →

Poster Orientalism

Algeria, Lebanon, Orientalist Images, Photography, Syria

The most recent (April) issue of IMES (Issues in Middle East Studies), the new digital version of the former bulletin of MESA, features an article by Jonathan Casey on posters and old photographs in the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. Among theses are two early 20th century era French posters on Algeria, as shown above. The poster on the left is a prime example of the Eurocentric colonialist gaze. Not only is the Algerian pressed into service, but he has a proper nuclear family of wife and child. Of course, as the donkey in the background serves to remind, Algeria is a backward country in need of being civilized. The poster on the right needs no ethnographic context; come to Algeria and be as free as the wind, where the Algerians ride their steeds resplendent in flowing robes. This right one could easily serve as a poster for the 1921 Valentino film, The Sheik.

Of the various photographs, the one that struck my attention was of a British soldier named George Mackenzie. This shows the young Lieutenant with his “chums” on the train from Beirut to Damascus. Once again the “Orient” is civilized via the gun. A world war (that did not unfortunately end all wars) that was not caused by anything in the Middle East would change the shape of the region in a dramatic way that is still playing out. To talk of an “Arab Spring,” it is important not to forget the wintry blast that carved up the Ottoman Empire into colonial pieces before oil and the modern state of Israel entered the mix.

A Rich Look at the Kurds, #1

Archaeology and Antiquities, Iraq, Orientalism, Travel

Old travel books never cease to delight me. While century-and-more books used to be available mainly in rare book collections of major libraries, the magic of archive.org brings digital life to the genre. Take, for example, the travel account of Claudius James Rich, whose 1820 trip from Baghdad, where he was posted as a British diplomat, to Kurdistan is a fascinating account of the Kurdish area almost two centuries ago. Born on March 28, 1787 near Dijon in Burgundy, the lad grew up in Bristol, England. He was tutored in Greek and Latin, but at the age of eight or nine he saw a book in Arabic and his appetite was whetted. By the age of fifteen, he had made great progress in Arabic, Hebrew, Syria, Persian and Turkish. Rich came of age when “Oriental Studies” carried no stigma. In 1804 he made his way through Malta and Italy to Istanbul and Egypt.

Like Burton, who would follow, Rich dressed as a Mameluke and left Egypt for Palestine and Syria. In Damascus he visited the Great Mosque. Then on he trekked to Aleppo and Baghdad before continuing on his way to India, where he arrived in 1807. A year later he married and set off to be the British Resident in Baghdad. He was an avid collector of manuscripts, many of which ended up in the British Library, coins and antiquities. He was one of the first Englishmen to describe the ruins of Babylon. His health began to deteriorate in 1813 and by 1821 he died of cholera in Shiraz.

Among the people he met in Kurdistan were important members of the Jaff family, as he describes below:

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Art not for art’s sake

Gender and Sexuality, Orientalist Art, Orientalist Images


Gérôme’s “The Slave Market,” left; Inanna in Damascus by Sundus Abdul Hadi, Iraqi artist, right

Before Edward Said revitalized the term “Orientalism” in his seminal 1978 book of the same title, the major use of the term was for a genre of Western art, centering on exotic depictions of an imagined or at least embellished beyond the real “Orient.” The Gérôme painting of “The Snake Charmer” of the paperback version perfectly captured the prejudicial element that Said rightly exposed in much of the literature and academic writing about the Middle East and Islam. Such a biased representation cannot be glossed as mere “art for art’s sake,” if indeed art is ever really only for “art’s sake.” I recently came across a painting by Sundus Abdul Hadi, an Iraqi female artist, that responds aesthetically to another famous Orientalist painting by Gérôme; these are the two images juxtaposed above. There is nothing inaccurate in either painting. Selling female slaves was a lucrative trade throughout the Islamic era and current sexcapades by wealthy Arab sheikhs are well known.

The response painting is a brilliant counter to Gérôme. Both highlight the exploitation of women as sex slaves, either in the older legal and literal sense or the modern illegal but still practiced nonsense. It is possible to look at either picture and focus on the naked body of a woman on display. This is the voyeur’s gaze, which is often the prime motive for creating as well as viewing such a work of art. But when placed side by side with the modern response painting, the very fact that the woman is still only an object for purchase overrides a one-directional voyeurism. This is not simply a scene of the imagination, but a reality that has outlived the 19th century Orientalist genre and indeed is hardly unique to a genre exposing the bodies of Oriental women. Continue reading Art not for art’s sake →

Less than Desirable Review of “Desiring Arabs”

Gender and Sexuality, Literature, Orientalism

Joseph Massad: an Occidentalist’s Other Subjects/Victims

by S. Taha, The Arab Leftist

Joseph Massad, an associate professor at Columbia University and a now prominent figure in the US academic field of Middle Eastern studies, came to acquire his status through a hotly debated and highly acclaimed book, Desiring Arabs. Massad, who claims to be the disciple of another foundational academic figure from Columbia, Edward Said, seeks to complete his patron’s Foucauldian project on Orientalism. Said, who strikes me as a much more modest, engaged and consistent intellectual than his self-styled “disciple”, is best known for his critical study of “Orientalism,” which looks into the representation and construction of the “East/Orient” as Other to the Western/European self, a construction that, as Said had shown, was deeply engaged with the process of modern imperial expansion and colonialism. This process of domination was what both produced the European “will to know” the subject “Other” and enabled its realization “in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control.” However, while employing Michel Foucault’s analytical grid of power/knowledge and his methods of discourse analysis, Said’s project remains incompletely Foucauldian, since it does not probe into the effects of the colonial discursive regime of power/knowledge on the formation of the modern Arab subjects who languished under it for centuries. Therein, Massad makes his academic intervention and contribution, armed with Foucault’s conceptual tools to investigate sexual identities and subjects as effects and products of colonial power. Such territory of “subject formation” under colonialism, which Massad has ventured into is indeed an extremely slippery and delicate one, fraught with questions of agency and subjectivity, since it is not only an investigation into the workings of colonial power, but rather into the very subjectivity and the very being of those whom power represents and brings into its domain and universe of discourse. It is an investigation into the relationship between Western and non-Western, between colonizer and colonized with all that an interrogative representation of such relationship might, adverdantly and inadverdantly, entail about the truths, histories and identities of the two sides of the imperial divide. Continue reading Less than Desirable Review of “Desiring Arabs” →