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Abdulaziz Dino Gidreta
Post-1850 period witnessed the quick rise of photography, as another machinery of cap-
turing and displaying the world. Corbey (1993: 363) notes that the unbiased and true
character of photographic picture was stressed; and photos as unbiased copies of nature
itself. The middle class industrial societies presented themselves honorifically in self-con-
gratulatory studio portraits, hundreds of thousands of photos of their ‘other races’, crimi-
nals, prostitutes, the insane, deviants-functioned in the context of repression (1993: 363).
Exhibitionary complex here implies the combination of material displays together with
posters, photos, videos, on-person appearances, shows, and other more practices.
Oriental, Eurocentric and Exotic Portrayals
Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the
Orient (Said, 1978: 3). Said’s study of the European construction of a stereotypical image
of ‘the Orient’, was far from a reflection on what the Middle East looked like (Hall, 1997:
259). Orientalism was rather the discourse ‘by which European culture was able to man-
age and produce the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically
and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period’ (Said, 1978: 3).
Within the framework of Western hegemony over the Orient, a new object of knowledge
emerged - ‘a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the muse-
um, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological,
biological, linguistic, racial and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for
instances of economic and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural per-
sonalities, national or religious character’ (Said, 1978: 7-8).
Said’s account of Orientalism parallels Foucault’s idea of power/knowledge. Hence, as
to Hall (1997: 60), through different practices of representation including scholarship,
exhibition, literature, and painting, a discourse produces a form of racialized knowledge
of the other deeply implicated in power.
Said intellectualizes ‘power’ in ways which emphasize the similarities between Foucault
and Gramsci’s idea of hegemony. In any society, not totalitarian, then, certain cultural
forms predominate over others; the form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has
identified as hegemony, an indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in
the industrial West (Hall, 1997: 60).
The view of Orientalism has never been far from the idea of Europe which is a collective
notion of identifying Europeans as against all non-Europeans. For Said (1978: 7), the
hegemony of European ideas about the Orient is characterized by reiterating European
superiority over Oriental backwardness.
There have been common attempts of limiting the oriental territory to the Arab-Muslim
world, considering only North African countries into the debates. However, from the char-
