For more on the Charlie Hebdo shootings, check out this article/ timeline from the BBC.
For more on Sattouf, read this New Yorker profile.
At the same time that The Arab of the Future is immensely popular in France and, now, after its translation into English, in America, a number of critics have worried that the comics portray the Arab world in a negative light, trafficking in stereotypes about Arab physical and cultural difference. What do you think? Does Sattouf's work skate too close to caricature? Should a personal work about a group of individuals have to answer to critics about how it represents the larger groups to which these individuals belong? How does it differ from the memoir works we've read over the course of the semester?
How does Sattouf draw the differences between Arab characters and French characters and between his father and mother? What about the differences between France, Libya, and Syria? French and Arab children?
How do the recent events in France (both the terrorist attack at the concert and the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices) affect our reading of the graphic narrative?
As early as 2005/6, debates over the representation of the prophet Muhammed rocked Denmark, and, soon, the rest of Europe. Why are comics becoming such a flashpoint for debates about race, representation, and censorship in recent years?
After reading "The Arab of the Future" it seems that Riad and his family struggled with their culture identity in particular his father and himself. Riad's father seemed to be in a constant internal struggle with himself as to rather he agreed or disagreed with what was going on it the world around him. He had made a good living for his family however it seemed he was obligated to his culture.
ReplyDeleteRiad was a child, and I feel that children have the most honest interpretations of things. I do not believe the depictions were "racist" but there is no denying they depict certain stereotypes of the people he encountered. Riad didn't identify with any of the children around him, he felt too intelligent for the French children and not as aggressive as the Syrians.
He depicted the people in each country very similarly as over the top caricatures of the actual people. Describing their scent, their attitudes, their personalities.I can see how Arabic people would be upset by their depiction in this particular work because of the often extreme nature of their actions in this story.
I feel like Sattouf can represent himself however he sees himself.. if it is in a slightly racy stereotypical way. Similar to how Speigelman represented himself as jew as a mouse.. As a half middle eastern personal, I can definitely visual identify with the stereotypes and get it often from others.
ReplyDeleteI am not saying I agree or disagree with the "racist" comments about the drawings. They are what they are... It is how he sees himself and his culture.
His art strings along through every race and does not just touch on racism of his own culture, but the stereotypes of others- this is not necessarily a bad thing.
Sattouf’s work is deep enough that caricatured and negative or stereotypical depictions are not troublesome. Well, they are troubling, but Sattouf’s work speaks to the instability and absurdity of those sorts of depictions. First, should a personal work have to answer to critics? If that personal work is published, then it has most definitely crossed a line into public scrutiny. Once entered into the marketplace of ideas, folks should feel free to do with it what they please. Those readings, when done by critics, are then published and also scrutinized – so there’s no problem there. I’d completely get rid of notions of should and only concern myself with could. There’s no rulebook for what objects can be implicated in what conversations, have at it. If the tofu sticks to the wall, if the conversation seems fruitful, then by all means have it.
ReplyDeleteMaking use of negative stereotypes in a process of appropriation is a common thread throughout the texts we’ve read this semester. Spiegelman addresses these issues in his conversations with Francois and in scenes where he questions his depiction of his father. Satrapi’s parents are exceptional but a depiction of them as free-thinking or progressive requires counterbalancing them against a backwards Iranian populous and government. Yang’s American Born Chinese also engages in negative stereotype for “positive” gains, recreating identities and ideas about those identities and their relationship to history (of ideas, of identities, of generations attempting to deal with similar issues).
France, Libya, and Syria are each differentiated by color. Color also comes up in ideas about race. Abu Riad wants to associate with yellowness while Gaddafi imagines the future to be that of the black man. Abu Riad is linked to blackness by Riad’s mother, an argument which is based on the silliness of phenotype as a means to knowledge about a person. What’s important in Riad mother’s argument is that the black gorilla man is also a doctor. His profession is another potential signifier which conflicts with an attempt to wholly rationalize a person by color. Color throughout the text seems to reflect that inherent conflict. It cannot represent only one thing, so it is TV propaganda and TV shows, and yelling and cursing, but sometimes not yelling and cursing, and howling dogs and toy guns, but always in the background. Because his work contains this instability it complicates earnest attempts to use those systems as rationalizations. The “systems of rationalization” under attack include ideas about gender, child-rearing, religion, nationalism, how to get along in a new country, what sort of work is important or meaningful, how fathers and sons should relate, how families should interact. That’s too many systems, systems should be broad, but length of a list of that type shows that a person is expected to make a number of often conflicting decisions and participate in a number of different realms, that means single system of logic will fail to encompass the breadth, the reality, of a thing under scrutiny.
DeleteWhy are comics becoming a flashpoint for debates about race, representation, and censorship? Are visual representations more important now then previously? Hmm. I’m sure visual culture has always been wrapped up in power relations and therefore folks were likely talking about it. But what about the growth and availability of images? It seems objects have greater reach then in previous era. That means these objects are more powerful and groups perhaps more interested in managing them. What effect do acts of terrorism have on reading and participating in these debates? Terrorism might be aligned with the children who killed that dog, or didn’t go to school, but that would also mean involving terrorism to an extent with Riad absence from school, but that’s opposed by his revulsion to the killing. Terrorism is sort of behavior related to restricted access to other forms of change, but so is art. So all these boundaries are slippery, I think this indicates again an inherent inability to come to a complete understanding of a thing. Thinking in that sort of way implies accepting some sort of pluralism, which separates art from typical terror, the creation of art’s terror doesn’t entail the material destruction of another person or thing – I think that’s generally a nice way to go about navigating the marketplace of ideas. The other nice thing about plurality, and coming to an understanding of plurality through art, is that it can help address issues which might be the root causes of destructive terror.