C L O S E R

The power of images – Muslima ads

Posted on May 29th, 2009 by martijn.
Categories: Gender, Kinship & Marriage Issues.

The Dutch province Overijssel has started a new campaign in which it puts the spotlight on the (indeed beautiful) landscape of Overijssel. On the front page of the website it says: See. The landscape is in you. And then below: A beautiful landscape. See, that is what the province Overijssel would like to devote itself to:

Public campaign of Dutch province Overijssel

Now there are more people you can see on that website than the ones on the screenshot above but I would like to have your attention for the girl at the right: the one with the headscarf. Just like the other people she also features in the public campaigns on billboards:

Girl on billboard in Overijssel

And her picture has raised some eyebrows as we can read now in the Dutch newspaper Telegraaf. Their story is based upon a story of the Dutch magazine Elsevier. Someone has put a sticker on the billboard saying: Overijssel…is not Islamic. According to some anonymous complaints at Elsevier the campaign “lacks respect“. “What has Overijssel got to do with Islam? In particular when it concerns the landscape and culture of Overijssel“. According to a spokesperson of the province they received several other negative reactions about the campaign as a result of the girl’s picture on a brochure people received in their mail boxes. ‘We received about twenty critical reactions’ a spokesperson said. ‘We explain these people the persons featuring in this campaign are not models but actual residents of the province. Also the lady with the headscarf lives in Overijssel. Then they understand.’ Earlier, according to Elsevier, also a poster from telephone provider Ben with a Muslim woman with headscarf, was the target of the same action.

I don’t really know how big this anti-islam action really is nor do I know how many companies or local or national institutions use Muslims in their campaigns. It is certainly not the first time that it caused a (minor) debate. Last year the SNS Bank had a campaign in which we would see a woman with a headscarf.

Dutch Arabist Hans Jansen, known for his hostile views and distortions about Islam, complained at the bank stating that the type of headscarf of the woman refers to a non-liberal version of Islam (he also complained about ‘an Arab looking guy with a Muslim extremist beard’ who showed his feet which is ‘a standard insult in the Islamic world’.

Campaign 2008 SNS Bank

In the case of the province of Overijssel the decision to include to Muslim woman has probably to do with sending a message to Muslims and non-Muslims alike that Muslims are part of the local community. In the case of the SNS Bank it is probably about appealing to a wider audience and potential customers. In both cases this might lead to a normalization of Muslims in the public landscape and I think a lot of the complaints against the campaigns are complaints against the normalization of Muslims in the public landscape. Some people don’t want Muslims or Islam to be part of the Dutch culture. Muslims do feature in public campaigns for a long time now but usually related to some exotic (halal) product or to some campaign related to integration of migrants or campaigns designed to promote social cohesion and public safety. The fact that they now appear in other type of (commercial) ads might indeed lead to further normalization. Nevertheless, there is something that troubles me about these ads. And that is in fact the headscarf. I’m not troubled about the fact that some Muslim women wear a headscarf, but I’m troubled about the fact that Muslim women in public campaigns always seems to wear a headscarf. Same thing seems to happen when you search for pictures of “Muslim woman” in Google images. On the first page you only see woman who, in different ways, covered themselves. With three exceptions. One Muslim woman who designs ‘decent garments for Muslim women’ and two models (one miss). This reminds me of something that Lila Abu-Lughod has written about in the Power of images and the danger of pity:

Eurozine – The Muslim woman – Lila Abu-Lughod The power of images and the danger of pity

one of the most distinctive qualities of representations – literary and scholarly – of the Muslim “East” has been their citationary nature. What he meant by this is that later works gain authority by citing earlier ones, referring to each other in an endless chain that has no need for the actualities of the Muslim East. We can see this even today in visual representations of the Muslim woman. I have been collecting such images for years, ones that reveal clearly the citationary quality of images of “the Muslim woman”. The most iconic are those I think of as studies in black and white. One finds, for example, impenetrable Algerian women shrouded in ghostly white in the French colonial postcards from the 1930s that Malek Alloula analyzes in his book, The Colonial Harem.[3] This kind of photography, Alloula argues, was dedicated to making Algerian women accessible, if only symbolically, to French soldiers, tourists, and the people back home. And then one finds in the late 1990s covers of American media, even highbrow, such as the New York Times Magazine or the Chronicle of Higher Education, that similarly depict women whose faces are hidden and bodies covered in white or pale Islamic modest dress. These are women from Jordan or Egypt whose lives and situations are radically unlike those of women in colonial Algeria, and unlike many other women in their own countries. One also finds in Alloula’s book of postcards images of women dressed dramatically in black, with only eyes showing. Again, almost identical images appear on the covers of the New York Times Magazine and even KLM Magazine from 1990 to the present, despite the fact that the articles they are linked to are on different countries: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Yemen. There is an amazing uniformity.

As she rightly points out, these images do not in any way reflect the variety of styles (and the meaning of that) of women’s dress. To what extent is that a problem? As Abu-Lughod explains:
Eurozine – The Muslim woman – Lila Abu-Lughod The power of images and the danger of pity

There are several problems with these uniform and ubiquitous images of veiled women. First, they make it hard to think about the Muslim world without thinking about women, creating a seemingly huge divide between “us” and “them” based on the treatment or positions of women. This prevents us from thinking about the connections between our various parts of the world, helping setting up a civilizational divide. Second, they make it hard to appreciate the variety of women’s lives across the Muslim or Middle Eastern worlds – differences of time and place and differences of class and region. Third, they even make it hard for us to appreciate that veiling itself is a complex practice. Let me take a little time over this third point. It is common knowledge that the ultimate sign of the oppression of Afghani women under the Taliban-and-the-terrorists is that they were forced to wear the burqa. Liberals sometimes confess their surprise that even though Afghanistan has been liberated from the Taliban, women do not seem to be throwing off their burqas. Someone like me, who has worked in Muslim regions, asks why this is so surprising. Did we expect that once “free” from the Taliban they would go “back” to belly shirts and blue jeans, or dust off their Chanel suits?

Always using veiled women in public campaigns (no matter how well intended they are) might in fact not lead to normalizing Islam and Muslim women. It does not do any justice to the diversity among these women and in fact sets them apart from other people. This tendency is even stronger because no other women from migrant groups are displayed with a religious symbol. We do occasionally see black women, Hindustani women but only in ethnic and integrations campaigns we may see them with religious symbols (and even then on very rare occasions). Of course, Hindu women or black women are not the focus for the integration debates; its the Muslims. But then only using Muslim women again singles them out as category of people ‘we’ have some issues with and moreover a specific type of Muslim woman: the ones with the headscarf. Are the ones without a headscarf not really Muslim? Or not really modest Muslims? Are these campaign designers not creative enough to come up with something else? They problably designed it knowing/hoping it would appeal? Why would they think that? And in these cases it did appeal in a particular way. What does this mean? Again, the image of the Muslims woman, the way the appear in public and her type of dress in public is one of the battle grounds on which the integration struggle takes place.

3 comments.

Double Dutch

Posted on May 29th, 2009 by martijn.
Categories: Misc. News.

It is 400 years ago that the first Dutch people founded New Amsterdam, the place that is currently known as Manhattan. Interesting is that also the Belgians (source in Dutch) now claim that they were the first settles. The first Dutch colonists crossing the ocean were indeed people from what is now known as Belgium (the modern nation state Belgium exists since 1830) and more in particular the french speaking part of Belgium, from the city of Henegouwen. Two of the most well known people were Joris Rapalje (a last name that has a very negative meaning in Dutch) and Catalina Trico from that part of Belgium. Notwithstanding this countercampaign from the Belgians the Dutch managed to set up several exhibitions and public campaigns celebrating the establishment of New-Amsterdam. Also the American press has some coverage. Russel Shorto who writes for the New York Times magazine has written a book called The Island at the Center of the World on the history of Manhattan’s founding. He argues in this book is that the Dutch founding of Manhattan
Books by Russell Shorto

seeded not only New York’s immigrant culture, but America’s melting pot.

Thank you very much mr. Shorto. He also has written a very positive article in the New York Times:
Going Dutch – How I Learned to Love the European Welfare State. – NYTimes.com

PICTURE ME, IF YOU WILL, as I settle at my desk to begin my workday, and feel free to use a Vermeer image as your template. The pale-yellow light that gives Dutch paintings their special glow suffuses the room. The interior is simple, with high walls and beams across the ceiling. The view through the windows of the 17th-century house in which I have my apartment is of similarly gabled buildings lining the other side of one of Amsterdam’s oldest canals. Only instead of a plump maid or a raffish soldier at the center of the canvas, you should substitute a sleep-rumpled writer squinting at a laptop.

But not everyone is happy about this article. For example Dutch Heleen Mees, who lives and works in New York, wrote a letter to the editor:
Letters to the Editor – Going Dutch? Not So Fast – NYTimes.com

In his essay “Warming to the European way” (May 2), Russell Shorto sounds the praises of the Dutch welfare state. However, the Dutch welfare state isn’t as beneficial to low-skilled immigrants as it is to high-skilled workers like Mr. Shorto. In fact, it has suffocated the large group of non-Western immigrants who came to the Netherlands over the past decades to seek their fortune.

This little controversy has reached a few Dutch blogs by now:”>Obama Obama » Hollands Glorie potverdorie

Denk nu niet dat de VS ineens vol zijn van Nederland. Het stuk was (voorzover ik kon nagaan) niet op het televisienieuws. En het conservatisme mag dan krimpen, het is niet verdwenen. Dus zo goed als Nederland wordt bewonderd in dit land, zo goed wordt erop neergekeken.

And also a conservative Dutch man living in the US:
DUTCH WELFARE STATE: “THE TIMES” PRAISES; THE DUTCH FLEE

But Shorto does not describe in detail issues that are well worth talking about: welfare state overreach, the Dutch approach towards multiculturalism and the Dutch approach towards crime. All three are highly relevant to understanding a growing sense of disillusionment in Dutch society and a rising enthusiasm for emigration.

But also beyond the Dutch blogosphere there has been some attention, for example by one of my favorite writeres Ezra Klein:
EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect

Tax quibbles aside, Russell Shorto’s explanation of how he stopped worrying and learned to love the European welfare state is nicely done. The answer is pretty simple: He started to like the welfare state when he began to receive its services. This, incidentally, is the sort of thing that conservatives worry about quite publicly in the United States. When Ben Nelson says he’ll oppose the public plan because “at the end of the day, the public plan wins the game,” he’s gesturing towards this point.

Now it is not up to me to decide who is wrong and why so. More interesting is what these articles together reveal about contemporary Dutch society. Is it a coincidence almost all reactions focus on the welfare state, crime, political intolerance and multiculturalism? These are, certainly not only from an American perspective, the most important issues that divide Dutch society nowadays, in particular political parties and opinion leaders. In particular multiculturalism, tolerance and more specifically Islam have been major fault lines in Dutch society starting from the 1990s onwards but with increasing speed and intensity from 9/11 and the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004 in such a way that it can only be characterized as an Islam neuroticism; a situation wherein a society has an enduring tendency to experience and express emotional states (such as anxiety, anger, depression) in everything (remotely) related to Islam and/or Muslims and whereby ordinary situations appear as threatening and demanding immediate, quick and hard reactions. A neuroticism sometimes fed by political and religious elites but also abound on the internet on weblogs and webfora.

Also interesting of course is that both the Dutch and Belgians want to celebrate the event of establishing New Amsterdam. Of coursre understandable because New York is probably one of the most interesting, well known cities carrying a lot of symbolic value. Who doesn’t want to be the founder of that? For both the US and the Netherlands (ok and Belgium too) it seems to have become an event celebrating their self-proclaimed image of progress, pioneership, entrepeneurship, tolerance and (delusions of) grandeur. But is there also some attention for the negative aspects of our past? Except in the book The Forgotten History written by Dutch historian Geert Mak and Russell Shorto, there is not a lot of attention in the program for issues such as slave trade and the relationships with the native Americans. Also in the Dutch coverage of this event I have seen no reference to those issue yet. Yes, it seems that both the slaves and the native Americans were better off with the Dutch than with the English, but that does not mean we are fully exonerated. At one point the Native Americans were seen as ‘obstacles to European settlement‘ resulting in some brutal campaigns against the Native Americans. And what about buying a piece of land for 60 guilders in goods (beads, buttons and other trinkets) from people that did not realize that the transaction was for permanent possession (since the concept of alienable real estate was unfamiliar) of the land and even if they knew that, it in no way reflected the value of the goods that the Native Americans received. Moreover the deal was closed with the Canarsee tribe who hunted on the land but did have no rights on the island (the Weckquaesgeeks who did live there, were not consulted). The Dutch (and later English) colonists built the city’s local economy around supplying ships for the trade in slaves and in what slaves produced. Slaves did a lot of work in creating a major port city, they built Fort Amsterdam (Battery Park) and cut the road we now know as Broadway. I don’t want to spoil the party, but could we please consider taking this into account as well. Or, if this already done and I couldn’t find it, let me know.

Ow and this also Double Dutch (with Malcom McLaren, yes the one and only)

3 comments.