Last year I posted the following question[1] on this list: > A lot of work surely went into giving the West positive associations > with Latin America. Perhaps literature professors helped by getting > their students to read Latin American writers.... Perhaps > someone here knows more about the history of that process.
I was asking whether that process, whatever it was, might be repeated for regions that Westerners tend to have negative associations about, like the Arab world. Nobody replied, but I've recently come across an explanation of why Middle East studies (and thus Middle Eastern literature, film, music, etc.) receives very institutional support in the West, compared to other area studies. In Walter Armbrust's introduction to the book _Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond_ (2000) [2], he argues that in the US, the reasons for this discrepancy can be found in national economic interests and in the politics of domestic demographics: > In the past decade those who have written about Latin America, > Africa, or Asia have benefited from institutional investment that is > massive compared to investment in Middle East?oriented > knowledge.... Latin American and Asian markets and, increasingly, > productive capacity are important to the economic future of the > United States.... Of course, the United States has commercial > interests in the Middle East as well. But from a national policy > perspective--regardless of any considerations of such issues as > human rights or sound economic development--U.S. Middle East > policy could not be more successful than it is now.... > > Commercial interest... could still conceivably revive the fortunes > of Middle East studies. But with matters running so smoothly in > the Middle East (from a purely cynical perspective of national > interest), there is little potential for intensification of U.S. commercial > exploitation of the region, hence little incentive for increased > institutional investment in studying it. In Latin America, Asia, > and Africa, where prospects for intensification of commercial > activity are far greater, U.S. institutional investment is > correspondingly higher. Despite all that's happened since the book's publication in the year 2000, Armbrust's main point arguably still stands: in terms of American commercial interests, what matters most in the Middle East is oil, and additional academic knowledge about the region won't improve oil production. Returning to the role of domestic American demographics, Armbrust picks up on the idea (found in Benedict Anderson's _Imagined Communities_) of the census as a colonial tool for forcing people into arbitrary ethnic categories. He argues that as education is increasingly subjected to market forces, the census becomes a means of skewing academic priorities according to those categories: > Over the past decade there have been hundreds of job openings for > the study of American immigrant communities, virtually all of them > structured around U.S. census categories.... Students are increasingly > viewed as paying customers (rather than the products of academic > business) who must be satisfied; because more of the customers are > now of Hispanic, Asian, or African origin, courses must be offered that > are tailored for those markets. The logic of this pattern is hardly free > of national considerations. The groups in question are the most > rapidly growing ethnic populations within the United States. A truly > global analytic framework would demand greater attention to such > places as the Middle East, South and Central Asia, Oceania, and > Europe. But the zones of ambiguity (according to the enumerative > categories of the census) are not necessarily slated for greater > institutional investment. Ben [1] http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0611/msg00018.html [2] http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8k4008kx/?&query=&brand=ucpress # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
