I don't know how I get myself into these messes, but I've got to go to London twice in the next three days on top of my regrettably overambitious workload this weekend. Eep. With all of that on my plate, I haven't had time to prepare a costume in keeping with an Orientalism theme. The suggestion is to come as 'your favorite Orientalist or Orientalized, colonist or colonized, subject or object of the Gaze,' and thanks to shortsighted college students around the United States (and Prince Harry), I've ruled out:
- any easily caricatured racial or ethnic minority
- victims of hate crimes, terrorist attacks, or ethnic violence
- Nazis
- Steve Irwin
(Preemptively, I'm also going to rule out Cecil Rhodes.) I was thinking of going as an anthropologist, since a lot of us spent the early 1900s traipsing around the Global South in various shades of khaki and I'm currently knee-deep in one of Sherry Ortner's articles on Orientalism and mountaineering in Tibet, but a) that's a cop out and b) I don't own a pith helmet. I spend all of my time nowadays thinking about the colonized Other, and now it's go time and I'm completely drawing a blank. I wish Laura Mulvey had some kind of Bat Signal I could flash in the air for suggestions.
2 comments:
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/I/ingres/ingres_grand_odalisque.jpg.html
And if the Ingres suggestion from ming doesn't cut it, Ryan, you can always fall back on the very popular late 19th-century images created by Gerome, another French artist fond of the Oriental other...just Google image search and there should be a panoply to choose from
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