Orient and Occident - there are many stereotypes associated with these terms. Dr Rima Chahine uses advertising posters to find out exactly what they look like.
Dr Rima Chahine can still remember the day she came to Germany from Syria. It was a Sunday, the city was quiet, almost nobody was out and about. "The Germans live in isolation, everyone just for themselves - this cliché in my head seemed to be confirmed immediately," she says today. On the other hand, she was confronted with many stereotypes during her time in Germany when she introduced herself as Syrian. "People asked, for example, whether we have camels on the streets or whether I shouldn't wear a headscarf."
Where do stereotypes come from, how do they develop and how do they change? In the 15 years she has been living in Germany, Chahine has not only dealt with this question in her everyday life, but also academically. After completing a degree in Visual Communication in Damascus, she went on to complete a doctorate at the Institute of Art and Visual Culture in Oldenburg. Even then, she analysed stereotypes on Western advertising posters. In her post-doctoral project at the Historical Stereotype Research Centre of the Institute of History and the Institute of Art and Visual Culture, she is now also looking at Arabic posters.
Prejudices with painful consequences
"It is not unusual for us to differentiate ourselves from others and have stereotypes of them in our heads, and this helps us to orientate ourselves in the world," explains Chahine. This happens, for example, when statements are made about "the Orient", which includes many different countries and cultures. If these generalisations are emotionally charged, they are stereotypes, she continues. And this is still often the case today when talking about the Arab world in Europe and North America.
The work "Orientalism" by the American literary theorist Edward Said is groundbreaking in this context. Published in 1978, it continues to shape academic research to this day. According to Said, Europeans have for centuries portrayed Arabs as mysterious and exotic, but also as intellectually inferior. An idea with painful consequences, as this image of the "Orient" contributed significantly to colonisation and exploitation.
From oriental carpets to oil derricks
It is no coincidence that Chahine primarily analyses posters in her research: "Stereotypes appear particularly frequently here because simple, emotionally charged messages are suitable for reaching a target audience quickly," she explains. In her research, including at the "Institute du monde arabe" in Paris and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, she has already examined over a hundred posters from the years 1945 to 2001. These were mainly advertisements for airlines, cinema films or exhibitions. In the 1950s and 1960s, she observed, many European posters featured motifs straight out of the Arabian Nights: men with turbans, deserts with camels, oriental carpets and picturesque minarets. From the 1970s onwards, modernist elements such as oil derricks and aeroplanes were added to this fairytale atmosphere on many posters by European travel companies. They promised a trip to a romanticised world that nevertheless met the demands of modern holidaymakers.
Belly dancers between "Orient" and "Occident"
Illustrators and designers could have drawn a more realistic picture in the truest sense of the word: Chahine's research revealed that most of them had either grown up in the Arab world or had lived there for a long time. Against their better judgement, they reproduced clichés to meet the expectations of Western audiences.
Western clichés were even adopted for the Arab audience: Chahine compared the depiction of belly dancers on US cinema posters with original photos of Egyptian belly dancers: An originally ankle-length skirt became a transparent veil in the USA, a top with sleeves became a bikini top. This image eventually caught on even in the Arab world - the US-American eroticised depiction could also be found on cinema posters there.
With the rise of political Islamic movements in the 1970s, the image of the "oriental" woman began to change: More and more frequently, the veil appeared on Western posters as a symbol of oppression. This development intensified after 11 September 2001, although Chahine does not focus on its effects in her habilitation. She says: "9/11 marked the beginning of a new chapter in the mutual perception of Western and Arab culture, about which a separate book needs to be written."
