CHAPTER 3 “IckITY-ACKITY OPEN SESAme” Learning about the Middle East in Images Özlem Sensoy Simon Fraser University I’m gonna go where the desert sun is/Go where I know the fun is Go where the harem girls dance/Go where there’s love and romance Out on the burning sands, in some caravan/I’ll find adventure, while I can To say the least, go on, go east young man Go east young man, go east young man/You’ll feel like a sheik, so rich and grand With dancing girls at your command/Go eat and drink and feast, go east young man —“Go East, Young Man,” © Performed2010 by Elvis Presley in the 1965 film, Harum IAP Scarum1 INTRODUCTION I remember when I first saw Harum Scarum. I was in my mid-teens. It was a SaturdayAll afternoon. rights Having completed all my homework,reserved I was ready to Critical Global Perspectives, pages 39–55 Copyright © 2010 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. 39 40 Ö. SENSOY settle in for a Saturday afternoon matinee. I know it was a Saturday because the local television station used to run classic movies on Saturdays at 2:00 p.m. Fred and Ginger, Abbott and Costello, Lucy, and Elvis were familiar faces Saturday afternoons on Channel 12. This chapter is about “Elvis” and pop culture in general; but above all else, it is about the politics of visuals. How we (as an audience) look at, gaze upon, get familiar with, and learn about cultural and social others through visual representations. It deserves stating that schools are not the only places where knowledge about social groups is canonized and disseminated. Working from a familiar “expanding horizons” model in the standard Social (Studies) Education curriculum, students begin by studying themselves and their families, then their com- munities, city, province, state, region, nation, and (finally, when they are ready) the world. While most canonized knowledge about the world is indeed transmitted formally in school curricula (most often explicitly via the Social Education/ Social Sciences), in this chapter I consider whether the school curricula are as powerful, as enduring, as organized and canonized about the world as are the societal, media-based curricula. This suggestion is not new. Schol- ars in fields such as critical multicultural education (Banks, 1996; Cortés, 2001; Gay, 2000), cultural studies (Hall, 1997; Kellner, 1995), and critical pedagogy (Giroux, 1999; Steinberg & Kincheloe, 1997) have indicated how significant an educator about racial, ethnic, and other diversities popular culture and mass media can be, functioning as both a curriculum (reinforc- ing normative representations) as well as a “teaching machine” (Giroux, 1997), or a “cultural pedagogy” (Steinberg & Kincheloe, 1997) that is not simply a reflection of, but a producer of, culture. This conceptualization of popular culture demands that we move away from the commonsense tendencies among teachers, educators, and par- ents to dismiss cartoons, movies, and other popular culture texts as “just” entertainment, and instead apply criticisms that we might of any educative text. And given the overwhelming power of mainstream corporate media to circulate their messages in a manner, format, and consistency that class- room texts rarely enjoy, media texts may in fact demand closer scrutiny than any other curricula with which students engage. Kellner and Share (2005) argue that, “[t]here is expanding recognition that media representations ©help construct 2010 our images and understanding ofIAP the world” (p. 370). In © 2010 IAP this chapter, I argue that by the time students “get to” studying the world (usually in upper elementary, and at length at the secondary levels), they have already received a lifetime of media-based schooling about the world. I considerAll the examplerights of the Middle East, andreserved trace just how such a cul- All rights reserved tural pedagogy can occur. “Ickity-Ackity Open Sesame” 41 TV TEACHER Despite the fact that I was born in the Middle East, Western-produced pop- ular culture, and television in particular, had already organized the way I viewed the Middle East. I was schooled by cartoons like Bugs Bunny in Ali Baba Bunny (1957) in which the bumbling diaper- and turban-wearing oaf Hassan, charged with guarding the gems of a nondescript Sultan, is easily tricked by a wish-granting Genie (Bugs in disguise) so he and Daffy can escape (Daffy with the riches, of course). Bugs’s “ickity-ackity, hocus-pocus” karate/Genie dance is of special note. Then there was Mighty Mouse in Aladdin’s Lamp (1947) and The Sultan’s Birthday (1944). The Sultan’s Birthday is another case of a bumbling oaf—this time a Sultan rather than a slave— who has more wealth than brains, a big belly, and a small sword. He gorges in a lavish birthday celebration, in which the belly-dancing seductress is his grand gift. She is, of course, also the grand prize the black cat marauders capture, and must be saved by our hero, Mighty Mouse. Even the buildings in the Middle East sway hypnotically. It is important not to write off these kinds of representations as relics of a racist past, or as mere cartoons—just harmless fun. These characters and plots are intimately connected to mainstream narratives about good versus evil, industriousness versus sloth, modernity versus backwardness, intelli- gence versus stupidity. And the manner in which these particular character- types are cast reflects how characteristics (such as industriousness versus sloth) are thought to be distributed among particular cultural, racial, and ethnic groups in a globally situated visual and discursive vocabulary. It is easy to add to this list of pop culture representations of the Middle East (Shaheen, 2001). Think back to I Dream of Jeannie (1965–1970), popular movies such as Harum Scarum (1965), Midnight Express (1978), and Not Without my Daughter (1991), not to mention the endless news coverage of the Palestinian “ter- ror” group the PLO, and the continuing discourses about a tribal, backward, terror-seeking region—all this prior to September 11, 2001. The power of this early education was such that I, as a Turkish-acculturat- ed-Sunni-Muslim-immigrant-ESL-Canadian, reliably avoided any discussion of the Middle East or Islam. Whenever the topic of the Middle East or of Islam comes up, even today, I participate through a fog of nervous antici- pation, waiting for that moment when questions about the oppression of women, or the impoverished societies of the region, or backwardness of its © 2010 IAP ©people inevitably 2010 arise, and I have to answer for “myIAP people.” Most recently, I was at a dinner party when a well-meaning professor from another uni- versity boldly declared that she saw more diversity among the evangelical Christian community than there likely existed in all of Islam. All rights reserved ThisAll background rightsis important, because as authoritative reserved as academic lit- erature can be, I want to argue that the media-based curriculum is an even 42 Ö. SENSOY more powerful teaching machine about cultural and social others. What causes my anxiety, nervousness, and avoidance of these topics today is more a response to the informal, media-derived knowledge about the Middle East and Islam than it is about any school-based knowledge. Furthermore, I believe that the same visual vocabulary, and the ideas about the Middle East that it represents, is found in both media and school curricula. And thus by studying the visual representations of the Middle East, we are learning about the way knowledge about the Middle East is canonized in general. In subtle ways, students “learn about physical appearances, gender dif- ferences and relations, meanings of race, experiences of different ethnic groups, the existence of different religions and belief systems, myriad varia- tions of cultural practices, intergroup conflict and cooperation, and the multitude of languages spoken within the United States and around the world” via a media-based curriculum (Cortés, 2001, p. 19). If we apply the ideas of media-derived education, as expressed by the scholars discussed thus far, to the Islamic Middle East in particular, we can extract some very compelling histories about the ways in which those of us who may not have any personal relationships with people from that region have been edu- cated to look upon, think about, and understand those who are (or are assumed to be) from there. What is the relationship between Elvis educating the belly dancers of the fictional Middle Eastern country of Lunarkand, Jeannie serving her White Master in I Dream of Jeannie, Bugs’s hocus pocus Genie worshipped by the stupid Hassan, and the countless, nameless veiled women standing around in nondescript corners of World History textbooks, as well as the countless men bending and leaning in ritualistic movements of prayer? How are the images of the Middle East imagined by the West? For the remainder of this chapter, I examine the ways in which the societal curriculum about Muslim women has historically been organized, and extract out the elements of popular knowledge this curriculum has reinforced. From there, I examine several principles relevant to issues of representation in regards to cultural others and that may be useful for educators teaching/researching about cultural differences. WHO IS THE MIDDLE EASTERN WOMAN? ©If I were to 2010say to you: I am about to show you picturesIAP of Muslim women, © 2010 IAP what would you expect to see? Take a moment to think about it.… Is she alone, or in a group? Is she speaking, or silent? Active, or passive? What is she wearing? What, if anything, is she doing? Does she work? Do you see herAll driving a car? rightsReading a book? If so, what isreserved she reading? Richard Dyer All rights reserved (2002) has written extensively about the relationship between visuality, ste- “Ickity-Ackity Open Sesame” 43 reotypes, and the relations between how groups are represented and how that representation produces, as well as re-produces, certain ideas about them.