Collection of Orientalist Imagery Reveals Roots of American Views of Middle East

The imagery has long been appropriated for use in American film posters, cigarette packs, pulp fiction and popular music: scantily clad harem girls, tyrannical despots and turbaned mystics have personified an imagined Middle East in the popular culture.

Hundreds of objects reflecting that imagined realm has just wrapped up its first run at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Seducing America: Selling the Middle Eastern Mystique," an exhibit of Middle Eastern-inspired ephemera, is about to be launched as an extensive on-line data base complete with music samples, selected film clips and a comprehensive assortment of "Middle Eastern Americana". There are artifacts such as sheet music, souvenirs, book jackets and consumer goods, many bearing Middle Eastern insignias, and the accompanying advertisements which range from the crass to the cartoonish.

Objects included comic books from the 1930s, pulp fiction book covers with titles such as "Desert Madness" and "Spicy Adventures," video games such as "The Prince of Persia," vintage sheet music for songs including "The Sheik of Araby" and "Rebecca Came Back from Mecca," photos of topless women on the covers of CDs, fierce warriors on the covers of DVDs, "Turkish" tobacco products, Egyptomania films, and various and sundry consumer items such as Palmolive beauty products, Ben Hur flour, Sheik condoms - and a couple of Shriner fezzes.

The graphics and objects reflected the many images - some lurid, some diabolically savage, and others strikingly beautiful - that the mysterious East has provided for the imaginations of advertising artists and commercial and packagers, all to hawk the wares of popular culture.

But they are all manifestations of the Orientalist image of the "mysterious East" that runs through American popular culture, notes Jonathan Friedlander, assistant director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, with the distortions and negative stereotyping that continue to manifest their dangerous ramifications in American political posture today.

"What is the appeal of this iconography in the United States? The answer is complex," Friedlander told Al Jadid. "Back in the 1920s, the mysterious Middle East represented freedom from the rigid morality of the preceding era, and so it was a popular icon on sheet music for fox trots and waltzes.” Sheet music was a popular medium at the time. Americans bought new songs up with the same enthusiasm that today's music fans snap up CDs.

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