Landscape

Representation:
Prof. Ouchen Maryam
Prof. Mounir Sanhaji
Space is a marker of difference and expressive of both social and cultural
meanings. As some critics have indicated, “space itself becomes a kind of
neutral grid (network) on which cultural difference, historical memory, and
societal organization are inscribed.
The “Arab-land” is positioned in western memory as a place that continues
to connote danger, emptiness, and utter darkness. It tends to be framed
within a fixed image inherited from earlier Western discourses that depict,
for example, the desert, camels, and arched doors as if they are the only
markers of Arab geographical location.
The Arab desert is framed as a “dematerialized landscape” (Lefebvre) where
the Orientalist can insert, modify and mold things, according to the earlier
narratives of such discourses. In other words, space, according to Lefebvre,
is be understood as an abstract space that is subject to transformation and
ordering.
Space does not seem to be fixed and immobile. Rather, it is ever-changing,
meaningful and expressive of social and cultural meanings.
According to Michel Foucault, space and specialization are being politically
oriented and ideologically manipulated. That is to say, space is subject to the
interference of different agents.
This reflects a sort of interlink between space and power. Foucault asserts
that “space is fundamental in any exercise of power”, to control a space
requires having a kind of power, especially the power of knowledge.
Bill Ashcroft et al. assume that “the most formidable ally of economic and
political control had long been the business of ‘knowing’ other peoples.”
The representation of landscape in the colonial discourse determines the
process of differencing that draws a distinction between the Self and the
Other.
The primary concern of colonial discourse lies in the creation of what
Edward Said labeled as an imaginative geography.
Edward Said says:
“I have kept in mind the idea that the earth is in effect our world in which
empty, uninhabited spaces virtually do not exist. Just as none of us is outside
or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from struggle over
geography, that struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only
about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images
and imaginary.” (Said)
The images annexed to the geographical landscape in colonial discourse are
addressed to the description of its natives rather than the place itself. For this
reason, depicting the weather in the desert, for example, as being rough
means that it also refers to the roughness of its dwellers. That is to say, the
aggressive moments faced in the desert makes its people aggressive in the
Western imagination.
Moreover, the representation of landscape is in fact a reproduction of earlier
colonial discourses. Jack Shaheen declares in his The Reel Bad Arabs:
“Obviously, filmmakers did not create the stereotype but inherited and
embellished (refined) Europe’s pre-existing Arab caricatures. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European artists and writers helped
reduce the region to colony. They presented images of desolate deserts,
corrupt palaces and slimy souks inhabited by the cultural “other”— the lazy,
bearded heathen Arab Muslim. The writers’ stereotypical tales were
inhabited with cheating vendors and exotic concubines held hostage in slave
markets.” (Shaheen 7-8)