BY JUDITH GABRIEL

 

Orientalist 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, creating an American fantasy that represents the exotic and the erotic.

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” 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.

Appropriately housed in the tiled, arch-encircled rotunda of UCLA’s Powell Library, select items from the collection of Jonathan Friedlander, assistant director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, comprised the display. 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. Many of the images are crassly commercial, some risqué enough to be deemed borderline lewd, while others are grotesquely distorted or lampoonish. At the same time, some reflect the skill of graphic designers who turned out cover art with distinctive beauty, incorporating the graceful lines of the region’s architecture and the exotic images favored by the Art Nouveau artists of an earlier century.

But they are all manifestations of the Orientalist image of the “mysterious East” that runs through American popular culture, notes Friedlander, with the distortions and negative stereotyping that continue to manifest their dangerous ramifications in American political posture today. The emphasis is on American, and Friedlander terms it all “Middle Eastern Americana.”

“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.  “The graphic appeal of the front cover design, racy lyrics and catchy dance melodies made sheet music a popular medium at a time when many Americans were taught to read music and play a musical instrument. And with the advent of mass media, color printing and consumerism, and the dance craze of the 1920s, the four-to six-page pamphlet, often strikingly illustrated, had wide appeal,” Friedlander said.

One song tells the story of “Lena the Queen of Palesteena,” describing a girl from the Bronx:  “She was such a good musician, She got a swell position, to go across the sea to entertain. And so they shipped poor Lena ‘Way out to Palesteena, But now I hear she don’t look the same….” Another song of the era, “Abdul the Bulbul Ameer,” which comes complete with ukulele and Hawaiian guitar chord notations, claims that “The sons of the prophet are hardy and bold, and quite unaccustomed to fear. But all of the most reckless of life or of limb was Abdul the Bulbul Ameer. When they wanted a man to encourage the van or to shout hulla-loo in the rear, or to storm a re-doubt, they straight away sent out for Abdul the Bulbul Ameer.”

Friedlander considers the genre to be an important field for study. “Understanding the sheet music requires additional research, according to Friedlander, which will delve into the cover art as well as background information on illustrators, publishing companies, artists, and songwriters.” Research could also be carried out on LPs in the collection. Fascination with “Arabian Nights” imagery led to the production of more than 50 album covers for the various recordings of the Sheherazade symphonies by Rimsky-Korsakoff and Ravel in the United States in the 1970s-80s. “The symphony is basically the same. So how do you sell it? You vary and hype the images.” And for a plethora of “appropriate” images, you turn to the exotic East

But even scripture has been made a part of the exoticization and lure of the Middle East. “From the early days of the industry, American film makers have exploited Bible stories and their appeal to a God-fearing public.” Many fans of the silver screen’s version of the region came from films such as “Ben Hur” and “The Robe,” but even before that, Americans’ perceptions of the Middle East were being shaped by silent era film star Rudolph Valentino as “The Sheik.”

“The Middle East has been a gold mine for industries and businesses that used the iconography to promote their services and products,” Friedlander said, “including liquor, coffee, tobacco, all popular vices in early 20th century America.”

Cigarette packaging and advertising is prominent in the collection. “One of the first entrepreneurs were the tobacco companies,” according to Friedlander. “From the turn of the century and onward there were numerous brands: Camel, Egyptian Deities, Fatima, Fez, Omar, Pyramid, Salome, and Murad. Middle Eastern iconography was widely and successfully employed to sell tobacco.” The theme may have drawn on an allusion to Turkish tobacco, “but the tobacco was all grown in America.”

It’s been a quarter century since Friedlander himself opened his last pack of Camel cigarettes and laid down smoking for good. But in some way, it was his consumption of nicotine and caffeine that led to his heightened desire to collect this paraphernalia. “I was looking at the images that were used to advertise coffee and tobacco. And one thing led to another, and it began to open my horizons.”

Since then, Friedlander became an inveterate shopper, ever on the lookout for the exotic images he is bent on analyzing. “I’ve collected books and artifacts and fetishes and videos and everything I could find, in antique shops, especially where I started in Stillwater, Minnesota, and in places like Bakersfield, California.” But closer to home, for instance, in a near-by drugstore, he found paperback books like “Sheikh’s Castaway,” and “The Sheikh’s Marriage Bed.”

Friedlander admits he himself was quite seduced by the images over the years. He is fascinated by how Islam and the Middle East are portrayed in popular culture. “It permeates almost every aspect of American life. You can find it everywhere. And when you start collecting it you see how voluminous and powerful it has become.”

Born in Israel, Friedlander grew up in Brooklyn in the 1960s. He came to UCLA in 1972 to do graduate work in modern Egyptian history, but he got an NEH grant to produce a documentary on Arabs in America. Subsequently, he has published works on Arab workers and Iranian exiles in the US. 

“American Orientalism is the other part of the Middle East in America,” he said. “It’s the flip side of the same coin. One way of looking at the Middle East in America is through the perspective of immigration, and the other one through the perspective of popular culture. The collection documents our way of doing business, and how we appropriate images to sell – using Middle Eastern iconography, symbols, themes, and insignias. It’s vulgar in some ways, albeit it’s an historical and contemporary feature of American popular culture.”

Friedlander will keep on adding to the collection, which has now been turned over to the university, where it will be housed at the UCLA Young Research Library. He’s focusing now on completing the on-line database and a forthcoming book, and conducting intensive research into various fields within the collection. “The data base provides easy access to the special collection,” he said. Everything in the archive has been scanned and digitized, providing a rich source of the sounds and images he has amassed. Also included in the Middle Eastern Americana collection are Friedlander’s own photographs depicting architecture, pageantry, and the performing arts – notably the popularization of belly-dancing.

“American Orientalism is undoubtedly our own creation and as such it deserves critical study leading to self reflection,” Friedlander said. With the co-option of the images of the East into so many areas of the popular culture, the impact has never been more chilling. “While academia has debunked Orientalism it is still a profoundly influential force, affecting consumer culture and American foreign policy alike.”

This review appears in Al Jadid, Vol. 11, no. 52 (Summer 2005)
Copyright (c) 2005 by Al Jadid