Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S. (review)

In Imagining Arab Womanhood, Amira Jarmakani uses semiotics to analyze representations of Arab women and constructions of Arab femininity in US popular culture from a cultural studies perspective. Her main objects of analysis—early nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings, the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, early twentieth-century tobacco advertisements, and contemporary representations of Arab womanhood in US media—are well-chosen. As Jarmakani shows in a well-organized series of analyses and discussions, these representations of Arab womanhood are essentialized constructions that perpetuate a dominant US "progress narrative" (70) and "discourse of liberation" (162), the latter being particularly relevant to our post-9/11 moment. Jarmakani is careful to note that such images are not necessarily consciously constructed; rather, they are implicated in "the complicated network of power dynamics that determine the conditions of [their] creation" (49). As a woman of Arab descent, Jarmakani's personal experiences with stereotyped representations of Arab womanhood in the United States inform her agenda in this book: to illuminate the "complex conditions that impact Arab and Arab American women's lives" (xii), and to expose the reductionist thinking behind popular images of Arab womanhood.

In the introduction, Jarmakani situates her discussion within the context of US-Middle East relations going back more than a century. She explains that, well before 9/11, stereotyped representations of Arab womanhood were circulating in US popular culture, ranging from the exotic, mysterious, and sensual on the one hand to the trapped, disempowered, and mute on the other. The recent proliferation of images of veiled women, she argues, has tended to perpetuate myths about Arab women, myths that are anchored in false claims of historical accuracy. With her argument thus framed, Jarmakani proceeds to analyze representations of Arab womanhood from different contexts and periods, demonstrating how the myths they generate serve the interests of a dominant US ideology of cultural and political supremacy.

The first chapter anchors its discussion of the fine arts display at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair in an explication of French Orientalist painting, from which many of the World's Fair images drew. In her analysis of works by Delacroix, Ingres, and Gérôme, Jarmakani argues that the window they purportedly opened onto the mysterious, previously restricted Middle Eastern harem reinforced a vision of Arab cultural inferiority that justified French colonialism. She regards a similar ideology of cultural superiority at work in the paintings exhibited at the fair by the French-trained US artist John Singer Sargent, such as his Study of an Egyptian Girl. With its nude female subject marked as "other," Sargent's painting harkens back to Ingres's nudes and shows similarity between French colonialist ideals and the expansionist ideals of the United States during the late-nineteenth century.

Building upon her argument that the Chicago World's Fair contributed to a larger "progress narrative" that served US cultural and political interests (81), in the second chapter Jarmakani analyzes another exhibit—belly dancers and belly dancing. She argues that the perceived sexual nature of the dance at once fascinated and repulsed audiences at the fair, setting up a dichotomy between the "modernity" of the United States and the inaccessible past from which this "backward" and alien cultural practice emerged. Jarmakani refers to the production of such cultural estrangement as "enfreakment" (66), suggesting that the belly dancers served to reassure US fairgoers of their relative progress and development in both moral and economic terms.

The third chapter turns to early twentieth-century tobacco advertisements, considering images of Arab women in relation to representations of nature and suggesting that both reflect a nostalgic longing for a mythic past. Images of dancing or reclining Arab women, reproducing the exoticizing gaze of the French Orientalist paintings discussed earlier, often appeared in early twentieth-century tobacco advertisements against the backdrop of a generic "Middle East." Jarmakani claims that such images, representing the plenitude of a lost...