【Article/Observer Network Columnist Crown of Tokamak】
Playing 19th-century tricks in the name of modernity is what Dior has been doing lately.
I don't know how you feel after seeing the "Chinese style" propaganda photos in the "Dior and Art" exhibition, but I myself was solid and disgusted to the point of being solid - the expression of the dove, the obedient look, the thin and long eyes with eyeshadow and eyeliner, dirty and greasy hair, Manchu nail covers, cheeks thick enough to block bullets, like a witch holding a handbag holding a potion.
In dior's press release, the definition of this group of photos is "middle school for the body, Western learning for the use."
In other words, greasy hair, thick blush, full nail covers, small freckles on the face, plus a pair of squinting eyes, this is the image of China in Dior's eyes.
This idea is not a problem of Dior's company, it is not even a problem of our time, it is a social problem with a history of hundreds of years, a broad foundation throughout the West, a cultural reflection of the centuries-old colonial history of Western countries. It has a relatively formal name: Orientalism.
"Orientalism" originated
The term Orientalism comes from the Palestinian literary critic Edward Wadie Said, who pointed out very sharply in his book "Orientalism" that the Arab and Middle East regions in the public culture of Western society are not the real Middle East and Arab regions, but the fictional images artificially fabricated by Westerners by virtue of their own imagination and embellished with some cultural symbols imported from the Arab region for the purpose of serving the consumption needs of cultural products in Western society.
This kind of cultural image usually contains extremely strong prejudices, and the main purpose is not to objectively reveal the humanistic customs of a region, but to meet the spiritual needs of Western society that contains curiosity, romance, exoticism and even ugliness, so it must include a large number of false, wrong, distorted and even Zhangguan Li Dai-style cultural symbols piled up.
For a long time, in Sayyid's own words, Western societies understood the Middle East and Arabia as a great desert filled with belly dancers, date palm trees, pyramids, and sphinxes.
Said's words are directed at the Middle East, but for China, they also apply. In fact, the scope of application of the term "Orientalism" is now not limited to the Middle East and the Arab region, but also includes other regions that have been colonized by Western powers, such as East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Africa, South America and other regions.
These areas that have been colonized by Western countries are all victims of Orientalism, and in the stereotypes of the colonizers and their descendants who are full of romance and curiosity about these places, there are extracted cultural fragments, there are preconceived imaginations, and there are more colonizers' exoticism, but there is no truth.
For example, Fu Manchu, this is a typical orientalist fabricated image - two skimmed eight beards, yin and yang strange zombie face, slender eyes, nails longer than fingers, a stomach full of bad water, all day long to calculate all kinds of despicable conspiracies, do things without any lower limits, unscrupulous means, but also full of subversion of Western society tricks. Fu Manchu is a fictional image created entirely by using Orientalism as a narrative technique to meet the psychological needs of white American society in the midst of the wave of Chinese exclusion; and Dior's group of photographs is nothing more than the sudden onset of this old evil disease in the present.
The image of Fu Manchu in film and television works
Another example is the famous Western stage play "Miss Saigon", which is also a typical product of Orientalism. A Vietnamese prostitute, dead set on falling in love with a white man, a white man can abandon her and let her be a prostitute, and a Vietnamese prostitute is not only infinitely tolerant of white men, but also can give him children, raise children alone, give everything they have, and even give up their lives. Although she was abandoned and let down, she did not resent white men at all, and she still considered white men everywhere, and even killed people, and the United States was a paradise that she could never hope for, as long as she could let her children go to the United States, even if she was a ghost, she would be happy.
This intellectual cancer in the West has a long history, as Sayyid commented in his Orientalism that, like all peoples who have been given names such as backwardness, depravity, enlightenment, and sluggishness, the Orientals are examined within a structural framework of biological determinism and moral-political persuasion. Thus, the East is associated with certain peculiar factors in Western society (criminals, lunatics, women, the poor).
Sayyid said this more gently, in layman's terms: How can we reflect the bright and great shores of Western society without describing Eastern society as so dark and depraved? Without using this contrasting narrative of Eastern society turning people into ghosts and Western societies turning ghosts into human beings to describe societies outside the West, how can we satisfy the ubiquitous desires of colonizers and their descendants to manifest?
In the eyes of Western society, the East always means backward, simple, mysterious, with an exotic style, which belongs to the poetry and distance of Western society. Because of backwardness, so the hair is greasy and dirty; because of the quaintness, so he carries two dollars of stalls on his head; because of the mystery, the eyeshadow on his face is thick enough to paint the wall; because of the exotic style, he carries Dior's handbag with a sly face, and looks at it like a thief.
Orientalism has a long history, and it originally originated in the ancient Greek period, when many Greek debaters were particularly fond of imagining other countries in the distance, often from the gossip of merchants, soldiers or travelers, and the information was highly distorted.
For example, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus described cotton grown in India in his writings: there is also a kind of fluff that grows on trees, which is more beautiful and of better quality than the hair on sheep. The clothes worn by Indians are obtained from this tree.
There was no cotton in Europe at that time, so Westerners looked at the text and drew this picture of cotton according to Herodotus's description:
Sheep have hair on their bodies, and sheep grow on trees, which is the "cotton tree" imagined by Westerners at that time, a very typical mixture of symbols + imagination.
The peak of Orientalism was the era of european global colonization in the 19th century. In that era, the steam engine and the railway brought great convenience to transportation, radio and postal services greatly accelerated the dissemination of information, and the rapid advancement of basic science greatly improved human understanding of the world, but these achievements were basically monopolized by Western society, and they used these achievements to colonize and expand around the world, and then brought colonial insights back to their homeland.
Therefore, in order to satisfy the curiosity of the local society for the distant world, various social symbols from the colonies were brought back to the mainland, and after some processing, they became Orientalism of various tastes.
For example, the "Cannibal Chieftain of South America", with a face covered in oil paint, naked, tied with two leaves, a feather crown on his head, and then squeaked and screamed to scare the audience, and then lit a fire-breathing performance, with a startled host who shouted at first, and soon made the unknown audience pay a lot of money. In fact, this "cannibal chief" may have been just a farmer hired from North America.
Another example is the "mysterious Persian belly dancer", generally speaking, in the dim light, accompanied by beautiful music, the heavy curtain is slowly pulled up, and a beautiful woman wearing a veil dances on the stage, and the effect of plattering pythons on the body is better. This "Persian dancer" may have been just an unemployed actor in some European theater.
At that time, there were even "human zoos" in Europe, where indigenous peoples from Africa and the Americas were kept in zoos, and they were allowed to simulate the scenes of indigenous life preset by Europeans for Europeans to watch and have fun, and this trick lasted until the 1950s.
An indigenous village at the World Exposition in Liège, Belgium, in 1905. (Source: P. BLANCHARD/Collection Groupe de recherche ACHAC)
In 1958, Belgium, a colonial power known for chopping off black slaves on African plantations, hosted the last "zoo for humanity", when Europe had just finished World War II, and they had the leisure to engage in these indiscriminate actions in addition to post-war reconstruction. Now the headquarters of the European Union is located in Brussels, the capital of Belgium, so every time I hear Europeans read the Scripture of Racial Equality, I think it is funny.
By displaying "Orientalism", we are engaged in ideological colonization
The essence of Orientalism is the cultural reflection of the colonial era and the echo of Eurocentrism at the social level.
If only western countries entertain themselves, after all, only you know how much you spend behind closed doors in your home. But the problem is that since the national liberation and national independence movements in the Third World, the colonization of Western countries can no longer be preserved in traditional forms, so it has retreated into the background and continued to exist in a more indirect and clever form, and ideological colonization has become a relatively hidden way of colonization, and the dumping of cultural products is a mainstream method of ideological colonization.
It should be noted that this orientalist cultural product does not always appear in the ugly image of Dior's group of photos or Fu Manchu in many cases, and its specific form of expression is likely to be more flexible or even more interesting.
For example, some time ago in the movie "Mulan", you will find that the Chinese elements in it are strange and extremely uncoordinated. The Mulan family, as a Soldier of the Northern Wei Dynasty during the Five Hu and Sixteen Kingdoms period, lived in the Fujian Tulou in Lingnan, and the dialogue and behavior of the characters were extremely strange, and it did not look like what happened in China at all.
But this is what the public in Western society needs, the complicated pile of Oriental elements makes them have a strong sense of professionalism, and the completely Westernized writing style and narrative logic make them have a strong sense of substitution. A native Chinese feel awkward to watch, because it was not shot for Chinese at all.
The harm of this kind of cultural product dumping is that the dumping party tries to shape the aesthetic orientation of the audience through its own commercial advantages, guide the audience's way of thinking, make the audience's consumer demand change to a way that is beneficial to the dumping party, and at the same time, through its own demonstration effect, drive more capital and commercial resources to follow up, and finally form a consumer market with its own rules, and obtain monopoly profits by controlling the market discourse.
In the words of the Slovenian sociologist Žižek, it's called: "I know better than you what you like." "This is a postmodern spiritual moral authoritarianism, a seemingly moderate but in fact arbitrary dictatorship of thought." Westerners shout democracy every day, but in their bones, they are more authoritarian than anyone else, and it is not enough for material despotism, and ideology must also be autocratic.
The colonial era has never gone away, and the struggle of Chinese society against it has never ended.
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