Selling Little Egypt: The Commodification of Arab Womanhood

Chapter 3 Selling Little Egypt: The Commodification of Arab Womanhood

  • Publicity & Nostalgia: Publicity sells the past to the future, as noted by John Berger.
  • 1893 Chicago World's Fair: The fair's displays and consumerism had a lasting impact, influencing amusement parks, department stores, and advertising.
  • Orientalist Imagery in Ads: Harem slaves, odalisques, and dancing girls from the fair found their way into advertisements.
    • Example: Omar cigarettes ad used orientalist imagery to sell the "sensuality and mystery of the Orient".
    • The ad features an Ottoman sultan-like figure and a harem beauty in a belly-dance outfit, reinforcing the notion of the Orient as feminized and sexualized.
  • Negotiating Contradictions: Images of odalisques, veiled women, and dancing girls were used to negotiate contradictions in early 20th-century nation-building.
    • Expansionism: Invoked masculinist ideals.
    • Consumerism: Oriented citizens toward leisure and luxury.
    • The Omar ad synthesized these by invoking both pristine space and material wealth.
  • Tobacco as a Lens: Turkish blend cigarettes served as a lens to explore the gendered notion of civilization.
    • Associated with sophistication and civilization, contrasting with backward, primitive others.
    • Cigarette marketing balanced images of the rugged frontier and elite civilization through the veil, harem, and belly dancer.
  • Time Period: The chapter analyzes cigarette advertisements from 1900 to just before the United States entered World War I in 1917.
    • Cigarette smoking was less popular than chewing tobacco and pipe/cigar smoking.
    • Cigarette-smoking white women faced the stigma of hypersexualization.
    • Fatima, Omar, and Murad brands of cigarettes, being Turkish blends, were marketed mostly to elite, white, male customers.
  • Insights from Ads: Advertisements for Turkish blends offer insights into dominant notions of whiteness, civilization, and white femininity.
  • Argument Trajectory: The chapter explores how increased consumerism, aided by new printing and advertising technologies, articulated with U.S. orientalism and gender/race ideologies in tobacco advertising.

Space and Time in Consumerism

  • Commodification: Advertisements combined commodification with printing technologies, collapsing the space between consumer and orientalist image.
  • Shift in Distance: In the transition from world's fairs to mass consumerism, distance and time shifted as orientalist images traveled to spectators.

Selling Distance

  • Frederick Jackson Turner: Turner's pronouncement about the end of the frontier led to a deterritorialized progress narrative.
    • The desire to possess land transitioned into a desire to possess things as consumption became the "driving force of progress."
  • Capitalism & Growth: Capitalism is growth-oriented and technologically/organizationally dynamic, shifting from one stage to another.
    • Growth is measured in increased production and expanded markets.
    • Technologies enabling rapid reach to a mass audience contributed to consumerism.
  • Radical Rupture: Moments of transition in capitalism are experienced as a "radical, total, and violent rupture with the past."
    • This rupture leads to idealization of the pre-industrial past and nostalgia in marketing campaigns.
  • Progress Mutation: The notion of progress mutated in response to consumerism and shifts in U.S. imperialist formations.
  • Dimensions of Space and Time: The completion of the transcontinental railroad and printing technologies shifted the dimensions of space and time.
    • Railroad: Standardized time zones.
    • Printing: Collapsed space between senders and receivers of advertising messages.
  • Annihilating Space: Passenger and cargo trains "annihilated space or distance by reconceiving it as time."
  • Reinstating Boundaries: As spatial and temporal distances collapsed, a desire to reinstate the boundaries of distance increased.
    • Images of the exotic and timeless Orient in marketing schemes sold a sense of distance.
    • Harem girls in tobacco advertisements echoed the legacy of photographs from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.
  • Paradoxical Purpose: Orientalist representations enabled consumers to experience the Orient while reifying the boundaries of space.
    • Representations of the Orient cast harem girls and belly dancers into a liminal zone of timelessness.

The Commodity Complex

  • Little Egypt: Little Egypt's transition from the Midway fairgrounds to the amusement industry reflected the shift into a consumerist era.
  • Commodity Complex: World's fairs, amusement parks, department stores, and the advertising industry formed the basis of the "commodity complex."
    • These structures signaled a shift from colonialist to neocolonialist forms of power.
  • Paradigm of Consumer Spectacle: Amusement parks and world expositions helped cultivate a new paradigm of consumer spectacle that would inform the advertising industry.
  • Walter Benjamin: World exhibitions are sites of pilgrimages to the commodity fetish.
  • Guy Debord: The "society of the spectacle" mediates human relationships through image and representation; the commodity spectacle alienates consumers while animating commodities.
  • Logic of Surveillance: World's fairs were organized according to a logic of surveillance.
    • Fairgoers observed material progress and subjugated others displayed in ethnographic villages.

Fabrications of Authenticity

  • Structure of Feeling: The commodity spectacle and imperialist expansion led to feelings of isolation, detachment, and separation from agrarian origins.
  • Manufacturing the Experience of the Real:Fabrications of authenticity were meant to quell anxieties related to the progress narrative.
  • 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis: Boasted a replica of Ottoman Jerusalem as a central exhibit.
    • The inclusion of Jerusalem served as a counterpoint to the dominant narrative of progress through expansion.
  • Counterpoint: The Jerusalem exhibit served to buttress a U.S. notion of progress by serving as the symbolic site of origin for that progress.
  • Burke Long: Argued that the Fair offered reassuring staged and reassuring images of a vigorous United States enthroned as the vanguard of civilization, democratic liberty, and cultural progress. And she was heir to God's blessings bestowed on the world through ancient Jerusalem.
  • Progress Investment: Through the modality of civilization the Middle East represents the timeless origins of western civilization, the architects of U.S. nation-building could invest in the notion of progress, while simultaneously projecting the image of a pristine and mythical past.
  • Purpose: Highlighting the proliferating progress of a growing U.S. nation by The presence of the Holy Land, in replica form at the 1904 Fair.

Rise of the Advertising Industry

  • Fabricating Authenticity: Orientalist representations lent themselves to fabricating authenticity through advertising.
  • Missing from Western Culture: The Orient provided an imagined space in which the innocence of origins could be reclaimed.
    • Leach suggests that "Orientalism … symbolized a feeling of something missing from Western culture itself."
  • Nostalgic Desire: The appeal of the Orient was actually a nostalgic desire for a constantly receding natural and innocent past.
  • P. T. Barnum: Built a "fabulous Oriental villa," called Iranistan, as a "gigantic advertisement for his work" in 1846.
  • Advertising and the Circus: Advertising was associated with the outrageous flare of the circus.
  • Function of Orientalist Advertisements: Orientalist advertisements manufactured notions of the "real," which could speak to the collective experience of alienation and isolation.
  • Technology & Progress: The advertising industry was invested in presenting a sober conception of technology's influence on progress.
  • Chicago Pneumatic Tool Co. Ad (1901): Juxtaposed oriental magic with the magic of industrialization.
    • The ad reveals that these ancient civilizations are not able to compete with the new advanced "magic" of modernization and a patronizing representation of "oriental" magic, which conflates Middle and Far eastern cultures.
  • Rationalized Progress: The antiquated precursor to western civilization is the notion of the East as romantic and fantastical as well as the notion of the East and both serve the purpose of rationalizing progress.
  • Printing Industry: The advertising industry's relationship to technological progress can be measured largely in terms of the rise of printing.
  • Collapsing the Space: The development of printing technologies succeeded in delivering advertising images to the masses, process of consumerism changed the dimensions of spectacle by collapsing the space between the consumer and the product.
  • Normalizing Force: Advertising is able to unify the disparate set of onlookers, but it does so by organizing a diffused collective around one normalizing force.
  • Distance Reinforcement: The ability of the advertising message to meet the consumer “halfway” by bringing the spectacle to her or him reinforces the “desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly,” and emphasizes the disorienting nature of space-temporal shifts.

Tensions in Modes of Production

  • Simultaneous Desire: The tension between bringing things closer and holding them apart is influenced by the transition in modes of production.

  • Conflicting Feeling: A Conflict feeling between a simpler past and a progressive future (Country vs City) stimulates a overwhelming shift toward consumerism.

  • Raymond Williams: On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved center: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation.

  • American Identity: On one hand , a nation-al theory and masculinist ideal of western expansion promoted an American identity rooted in the ideals of rugged individualism.

  • Tension Inherent: Advance of technology and increased urbanization had succeeded in progressively “civilizing” the nation away from its rugged roots. This was a tension inherent to the concept of progress, which inevitably moved away from the agrarian ideals of individualism so important to dominant notions of American identity.

  • Deflect the Tension: Orientalist images of Arab womanhood (feminized figures of laziness and decadence) served as foils for U.S. masculinist rugged individualism and emblems of the primitive East served to highlight advancement of U.S. civilization.

  • Richness Threat: This richness in the expansion threatens to dull the rugged edge of U.S. individualism.

  • Cultural Mythologies: The U. S. masculinist hero would be softened by the loss of space associated with the myths of “frontier” and “Wild West,” so the cultural mythologies of veils, harems, and belly dancers in early-twentieth-century tobacco advertisements reflected these conflicting desires that goes through prism of agricultural and manufactured abundance.

  • Anxieties Capitalization: Advertisers were able to capitalize on the anxieties of a nation nestled uneasily in the matrix of turbulent social processes such as modernization, expansionism, and consumerism framing and manipulating images of the fertile soil, of the efficient machine, and of the luxury of material abundance with this.

  • Popular Notions: For many reasons the tobacco industry stood at the matrix of popular notions of progress and abundance, as both the producer of a luxury product and as an increasingly influential and burgeoning business in the United States, standing poised to co-opt and commodify the readily available imagery of orientalist themes.

Smoking to the Setting Sun: Advertising Tobacco

  • American Tobacco Company Booklet: In a promotional booklet published by the American Tobacco Company, entitled The American Tobacco Story, by way of its link to the fabled hero-discoverer, Christopher Columbus the story of tobacco is woven into the origin myth of the Americas.
  • Ella Shohat and Robert Stam Note: The Columbus story is Crucial to Eurocentrism; it establishes a narrative whereby white European explorers and newcomers act as “Adams in the virgin land” of the Americas, thereby colonizing the land through the logic of colonization as a civilizing mission.
  • Construction in Booklet: Indigenous peoples giving Columbus tobacco creates Eurocentrism and Naivete.
  • Native Significance: They show and tell the settler colonialists how to survive in the New World.
  • American Indians Construction: Justifying domination and colonization through Feminizing territories,rendering indigenous people into objectified landscape, Logic of the civilizing mission parallels the oriental production of knowledge.
  • Visual Vocab: Orientalist imagery provides the visual vocabulary through which tobacco advertisers sought to articulate the tropes of superior U.S. progress and civilization in the midst of the turmoil of expansionism and consumerism.
  • White Settlers: White settlers developed the sophisticated practice of smoking cigarettes, as a more advanced form of consuming tobacco with sophistication and is the message from Americans
  • Cigarette's Role: Complicated role in the articulation of US nationhood in relation to civilization is the Cigarettes are gendered,raced,classed,and sexualized.
  • The Result: They are rich symbols to manipulate. At the turn of the century, during the period in which the advertisements I analyze here were produced, Turkish blend cigarettes were cultivated as signifiers of decadence, sophistication, and superiority.
  • Symbol Manipulation: Potent markers of elite status,eroticism, masculinity,and whiteness used to investigate larger notions of civilization, progress, and expansionism as they cohered in images of Arab womanhood.

Selling Cigarettes

  • Overcoming Challenges: Early 20th century tobacco companies sought to position cigarettes as a luxury, convincing the public.
  • Potency in Imagery: To do so by relying on the potent imagery of abundance (earth and machine) in relations to prosperity from an American progress perspective
  • Association: Images easily translated to emphasizing cigarettes as luxury
  • American Themes: Representations of Arab women served by way of opposition to highlight the frontier and rugged individualism.
    • Blend: Bright, Barley, Turkish is blend of cigarettes
    • Origin: Flavors depend on the soil and the method of drying
    • Domination: Bright and Barley dominated the market in Mid- Late 1900s
    • Flood: Straight Turkish cigarettes started to flood the American market
    • Turkish Blend Cigarettes:Top-selling Turkish blend Cigarette Brands, produced by Liggett & Myers
  • Relation Value: (Turkish blends and orientalist theming) Relationship wasn’t a simple correlation/metonymic.
  • Percents of Blends: 60 Domestic and 40 Turkish tobacco typically consisted blends.
  • Numbers/Brands: *The Turkish/Orient relation had *35* brands with Orient references as a brand name from the year 1892 and 1933. Of that 15 had Egypt.
  • Images: This proves that the Images of the veil, belly dancers, and women were clear Metaphoric marketing importance in the US.

The Luxury of Tobacco

  • Opulence: Advertisers sought to position Turkish blend cigarettes as luxury products and associated with images of opulence.
  • Revisitations: US advertising images revisit and reinterpret representations of harem girls found in the typical poses of reclining odalisque and belly dancer for their sultan masters from the European understanding of the Ottoman Empire.
  • Transparency in Brands: Represented by a Transparently veiled woman which is branded as Fatima in the brand of the cigarette.
  • Features: Wears a regal a jewel Studded headdress, stares gently, looks mysteriously to audience.
  • Fatima's Image: The ad Replicates to show US and Western European ideals while oriental props is incorporated
  • Sex Appeal: Transgression of a barrier/Highlights sex and further eroticizes transparency of the veil.
  • Religion: the image of the oriental is sometimes cast as familiar and different, in addition to the religious symbols of Maltese cross(symbol of Christian origin) and crescent and star symbolizes Islamic religion.

Guise of Orientalism

  • (Literal Sense): The salient feature of the Fatima advertisement is its veiled representation of female sexuality and white aesthetic ideals, like eroticized nudes and belly dancing figures.
  • Sexual Message: The message invites customers to imagine himself being singularly selected to avail pleasure that Fatima offers.
  • Mimicry to French Orientalized Paintings: The style in erotic image in white feminine ideals like French orientalist paintings uses, through incorporated orientalist elements, eroticized image for Femininity.
  • Liggett & Myers goal(polite society): Cast Pruriences (Having or Encouraging an Excessive Interest in Sexual Matters) onto an orientalized setting, and deployed simultaneously tropes of civilization and the lure of erotic fantasy
  • Superiority and Civilization: The US is the pinacle/Superior to Progress and that's why The Fatima links US Society to that with the advertising of such superior and the cultivation of the advertisement , with award - winning status at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and the message appeal the costumer to assume they are astute( Civilized) and civilized customer. It is the selling point.
  • Chicago's logic: Chicago's World fair organized the display like Scientific racism; arranged these ethnic groups from least to most evolved.
  • Natural Elements: European travel writer sought out natural elements of distant and exotic lands as relief from technological cities like the expression of this face on the consumer of Fatima brand cigarettes in the ad from the white elite social standing member, holding pamphlet - trip to Orient.
  • Fatima Brand Transports: Through power of Turkish blend can they go to Distant and Exotic Lands.
  • The Logic Scientific Racism: People/Colonized lands as more primitive so built in Commodity Racism(disseminating message through consumer product ads and extending ideology to literate.

Murad Cigarette's Racism

  • The racist brand of cigaretter, Murad is exemplified by commodity shifting to commodity racism from S.Anargyros and before the American Tobacco CO., with an image that has the Orient offered up both opposite and balancing to Progress and had worldly customer.
  • Multiple Ottoman emperor brand name to resemble representations found in french painting engaging with dominant stereotypes of the Ottomans to be closely the image and setting of herams and turkish baths. In order to, the central is in the image and she is gazing at her in a way and how it is reflected off a racialized setting
  • That she gazes means the project of imperialism is a benevolent mission due to domestic ideas, like attending to self beauty
  • Also, an emblem re iterates and it naturizes in scene how racial and gender hierarchy is aspects made in civilization.
    The Murand ad parallels in french orientalism using proplization

Harem Girls

  • Blending Agrarian and Decadent: Omar blends that understanding and Ottoman of the decadent and opulent, shows the way an agrarian/ land based merge in theme.
  • US Adaptations: frontier-as-virgin. This creates Availability ,so the sexuality and sexualization and makes the scene exotic so the Omar and Beautiful are bounded to this.
  • Subservient Role: Omar represents a peculiar soft image sultan, making Genie like representation rather than tyrannical for this.
    French and Classic, that depart from French iteritization.
  • In French paintings which the dance of french also has those theme of a belly dancer and the image of the ad of Omar can be closed connect to US, but also more closed when success by customers.
    Buy Omar , You also can have like indulgence