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amargarone772 · 6 years ago

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Expert Interview: Discussing France’s Political History and Current Events with Professor Elizabeth Carter

https://www.unh.edu/unhtoday/expert/carter-elizabeth

The following interview is an interview conducted with Professor Elizabeth Carter, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of New Hampshire. Carter has been a member of the UNH faculty since 2015, and has received her PhD in political science at the University of California Berkeley as well as her M.P.A from the University of Washington. Her postdoctoral research was done at the Max Planck Institute of the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. Carter’s areas of focus are European politics, political economy, and food politics.

Carter provides insight on France’s history and the Front National Party. She also examines the current refugee crisis, the political system under President Macron, and the yellow vest movement that has been taking over France since last November. Carter discusses the media’s role in Macron’s presidential election, and compares the current day issues of France to those of other European nations and the United States. Carter’s educational background and personal affiliation with France provide her with the ideal qualities to discuss these critical topics.

We also discussed the Front National Party under Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose goal was to protect French identity and defend the fundamental values of our civilization (Betz, 2003, p. 196). In the past, immigrants coming to France were able to assimilate easier because they mainly came from other European nations (Betz, 2003, p. 197). However, most new immigrants came from African, Middle East, and Asians regions and had cultural backgrounds that the Front National claimed would threaten the French culture (Betz, 2003, p. 197).

Interviewer: Ali Margarone, senior Communication student at the University of New Hampshire

Interviewee: Professor Elizabeth Carter, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of New Hampshire

Interview Transcript:

Refugee Crisis

A: What are your opinions on the current refugee crisis?

PC: When I think about the refugee crisis, I first think about Germany and Chancellor Merkel’s response. There is the Syrian refugee crisis that relate to the German history. Angela Merkel is the Chancellor and the leader of the center-right party, the Christian Democrats. She took a pretty contested stance in her party, which was to welcome the refugees with quite open arms. The rhetoric that was said, not by Merkel directly, was other people took in German refugees at our darkest hour, now we can do this and step in to help others. At that time, she was in a Grand Coalition with the Socialist government that would be to the little bit to the left, so she may have been a bit more influenced in some ways by that party. Overall, Germany had a really exceptional stance on integrating migrants. So I think the question is, what is the effect of that in France?

A: Do you mean how is France being affected by what Germany is doing?

PC: Yes. Because it’s not like France is a peaceful place that had good immigrant relations and then there was the refugee crisis in about 2013.

A: In regards to the refugee crisis, do you know exactly what French President Macron’s stances are?

PC: I almost want to say centrist, because I was following the situation that was going on in Calais with the camps being taken apart. He tends to be an ally with Chancellor Merkel, and I think he wants to be the pragmatic centrist. But he also wants people in France to be happy. France has a ton of immigrants, but the thing you hear people talking about in Germany is the Syrians; in France, it’s not. There definitely have been Syrian refugees in France, but again I think its like pressing on the already sensitive spot of the many Muslim immigrants. There’s still an influx of refugees from Tanzania, Algeria, and Sub-Saharan French former colonies. You walk around Paris, and there’s boulevards full of tents, at least 10 sleeping bags on one block. I’ve been going to France for 20 years, and this is something I’ve never seen before. They do often seem to be refugees who have come to France because they think they can get a better life. France has a really strong identity that’s tied to being French and having French values, language, being Catholic but secular. They aren’t open to people, especially Muslim immigrants, who they feel won’t take on the French culture.

A: Some research I’ve done showed that it’s the way you look that greatly affects the way in which you are treated. The French tend to be more accepting of other European refugees rather than those from Africa or the Middle East. Do you think this is true?

PC: I noticed that much more in Germany, who only considered Germans to be those with German blood. France’s take on nationality is that you are French if you are born on French soil; anyone can be French, as its about liberty, equality, and brotherhood. You have to speak French and adopt the liberal values of the French Revolution and the French state today. France’s issue with the hijab was interpreted as Muslim women rejecting French culture. However, when I taught in public school in France, I noticed my students would wear bandanas on their heads to get around the law that banned the hijabs. It was their way of protesting they would not allow France to push this law on them. Even though France has this identity of liberty and equality, they fall short of their ideals. In France, there is no hyphenated identity. If someone referred to themselves as Algerian-French, it’d be considered a threat because it weakens your French-ness. As a result, there are no statistics collected on what the ethnic backgrounds of people in France are because they don’t ask.

When it comes to being hired in France, you put your photo on your application. If your name is Mohamed, you will not be hired. While not everyone discriminates and is racist, I have a friend in France who does sales that claims he won’t hire anyone with the name Mohamed because he knows other people are racist and would no longer buy from his company if they saw this. While the issue of discrimination is so prominent, they can’t even diagnose the issue because they have no idea how many people of color or of a certain religion there are in a certain school because they don’t have that data.

History of the Front National Party

A: How do you think France’s history has led up to what is going on now?

PC: That’s everything. So if we want to talk about it, we have to talk about Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Front National Party. The party has now changed names, but we will call it the Front National because that is what the party had been called for decades. Understanding Jean-Marie Le Pen involves understanding his really complicated and long history.

A: This is because he was very racist and said a lot of things about the Holocaust that he claimed didn’t exist and didn’t allow France to take responsibility for it or didn’t think that they should.

PC: Yes, they both he and his daughter Marine Le Pen said some crazy things, and she would argue that her father is crazier. She’s seen as relatively more moderate, but the important thing to keep in mind about Jean-Marie Le Pen is where he came from ideologically, which was a movement called the Poujadist movement that came out of the Algerian War. Algeria is a majority Muslim country in Northern Africa which used to be a part of France. The French considered it to be a French state. The Algerians decided in the 1950s to fight back during Charles de Gaulle’s presidency in France. There was a lot of guerilla tactics and some would even consider terrorist actions because they had limited resources for other ways of fighting. When the Algerians won the war, Jean-Marie Le Pen and other Poujadist members saw Charles de Gaulle as a traitor, that he had stabbed France in the back, that he had let go a part of France. This is when the Front National started. It was more nationalistic than the de Gaulle Party, which was a center-right party. In the beginning, it was pro-European Union, but of course, that changed. It was interesting because the Front National wanted and considered Algeria to be a part of France that was lost, but at the same time, they were very anti-Muslim. This anti-Muslim component and this tension around French relations with the Muslim and Arab world, especially with the Algerians, have always been the cornerstone of the Front National.

If you go to France today and ask people about what’s going on with the far-right movements, you will meet people who are critical of them, especially those in academia. But I’ve been shocked by how many people identify as Fascist, who are blatantly anti-Muslim and even those trying to be liberal will say the problem is we have too many immigrants here. It’s Algerian immigrants and those from other former French colonies in Sub-Saharan and Northern Africa. There is also a huge amount of anti-Semitism in France which continues to be a massive issue that’s been reported on more recently in the press. So this is why the Front National has always been nationalist and anti-immigrant that’s been seen well before the recent crisis. I think at first Jean-Marie Le Pen was seen as kind of a crazy, out-there guy, and then people were really shocked when he made it to the second round of presidential vote in 2002. Jean-Marie Le Pen did make it to the second round in 2002 but then lost to Jacques Chirac by 85% to 15.

A: So is this when the Front National gained my attention worldwide?

PC: Yes. While people in France always knew about this movement, his advancement to the second round really put the Front National on the map globally. Although his daughter Marine has been able to situate herself definitely as a populist, but maybe less provocatively and offensive.

A: Well wasn’t that one of her goals?

PC: Yes, and she’s distanced herself. She kicked her father out of the party.

The Yellow Vest Movement

A: What are your thoughts on the yellow vest movement?

PC: I actually was in France when the gilets Jaunes movement started.

A: Oh wow, so did you see it all happen?

PC: No, the day there were the big riots I went to the London for a day and I came back and met my friend at the train station and he told me you know parts of the city are burning and I thought it was a joke.

A: Yeah, I had friends who were there for spring break and they saw all the riots going on too so it’s definitely still prominent.

PC: The thing with France is whenever the government tries to make a change there’s a mass protest. And this can even be when it comes to trying to change the benefits for the railway workers. The railways will stop. Or whoever the threatened group is will go on strike and then the government will be forced to rescind what they are trying to do. France has a really unique historical structure. France is a historically centralized country, kind of uniquely centralized. There is a lot of power at the presidency and a lot of power in Paris, and people will say the consequence of that is you don’t have very strong intermediary organizations. So in a country like Germany, if you’re trying to make reform, intermediary organizations like employer groups and unions will get together to try and work these out in cooperation with the state. In France, they don’t have those groups. They have weak unions and a strong state, and you would think that the French Unions are strong because they could have so much protest, but actually when unions are weak its because they can’t actually have a voice at the table, and when they don’t get their voice at the table their only weapon is to strike. Striking is a last resort.

The gilets jaunes started because of the proposed gas tax and there is a French culture of striking as a way to try to pressure the government. And it seems they were quite successful; Macron said okay I’m going to postpone this tax, but it was kind of like a snowball got pushed down the hill and people protesting on this movement often go because the scope of this protest has increased because people have been upset about other things for some time.

A: Do you feel the movement is different from how it started?

PC: It is, as it has become much more extreme. In a way, it’s a parallel to Brexit too, which is another thing that started off one way and then morphed into a different kind of movement with different people and different interests in it. I think a lot of people are protesting economic inequality and security more broadly. In France, they usually have really protected workers and strong benefits. And how they have tried to adapt to a changing economy is basically by having more precarious or temporary employment. So a lot of young people today are temps, along with huge levels of unemployment. They no longer have things to count on that older generations once had.

People are sick of this, and who are they blaming? They’re blaming their government, they’re blaming the European Union, they’re blaming globalization. Why are they blaming the European Union? Because European leaders have had a habit of everything time there’s an unpopular change they need to make, they blame it on the EU. There’s been a lot of “I don’t want to do this, but we need to do this for Europe.” And then the net consequence of this is to build up resentment towards the European project. That’s why the Front National that used to be pro-Europe, now take Europe as a scapegoat. They claim that instead of increasing French independence and sovereignty that it’s a threat to it.

MEDIA

A: What’s your opinion on the role of the media in France, in particular to the most recent presidential election?

PC: As far as the role of media in presidential elections, I think one think worth mentioning is Macron created his own party ‘En Marche!’. He had very little political background. How the French elections are structured in time has changed now so that parliament and the president are just a few weeks apart. It used to be staggered by years, and so it would be kind of like what we have in the U.S., it would always be a president that would be of one party, and then the parliament would be of the other because it would be a protest vote and they never get anything done. So, they’ve coordinated these. The president is election first, so Macron was elected with this new party, and then had like six weeks to get together this ticket of new potential parliamentarians and he was very successful with that and they were able to get a number of seats.

A: So do you feel that the media helped him?

PC: I don’t know the details of that but what we can say is that the media is different and nothing has ever happened before like with what happened with Macron in France. So, is that a correlation or a causation? I’m not going to go there and make that judgment, but someone could make a case that it is more than just correlation.

He has positioned himself as a new type of president, but the ways of protest aren’t different. They haven’t worn yellow vests before, but they taking the streets and they’re looting and rioting and they’re doing things that they’ve done quite regularly since the French revolution. But you have a new type of president and an old type of political movement, and they don’t seem to be too persuaded by the actions he’s taking. He’s spent over a hundred hours talking to people, and it sounds to me he is trying to come up with innovative solutions. The thing happening in France is that in every election, people are voting for someone very different. Like okay, we’ll vote for a socialist, we’ll vote for the center-right guy, we’ll vote for the new party. They’re trying to vote for anyone who they think can break their stalemate because they have some kind of institutionalized sick stalemate. And when it comes to kind of their economic sclerosis – that’s a word that’s used to call European political economy in general when there wasn’t any, it was called a Eurosclerosis, which would be a sclerotic economies of Europe after the 1970s – when there was no growth. So I think people are seeing that France has suffered from no growth and keep electing a different type of president thinking he would be able to fix it, but he isn’t able to fix it. They reject the president, then try something else. I think what nobody knows is that when you have institutionalized problems, you can’t just change one office and think everything was going to reform. Most French presidents, with the exception of Hollande, have been trying to move France closer to the market. And the French are trying to, they want to keep what’s considered a uniquely French model in a globalized economy, which is Anglo-Saxon. And the question is can they do it, and Macron thinks that they need to move towards the Anglo-Saxon variant, which means more ‘précarité,’ more precariousness, more people being fired, etc.

Comparing the U.S. and Trump to France

A: Do you think the discrimination and racism Trump tries to ignite within the United States compares at all to what is going on in France?

PC: What’s going on in France right now is different from Trump. It was actually really weird for me to hear Trump use all this anti-immigrant rhetoric because almost everyone here is an immigrant unless you’re Native American. Most of his wives were immigrants, and we don’t have an immigration influx. What Trump is doing is borrowing rhetoric from Europe; Trump tried something and it worked. I actually spoke with someone who was a former member of the Trump administration who claimed Trump isn’t even anti-immigrant. Steven Miller, far-right senior advisor for policy of Trump, is anti-immigrant and has a rhetoric that worked. Trump saw how effective Miller was with his demographic. Trump doesn’t really care about immigration, but he realizes that it is helping him with his base. What he is doing is very similar to what is being done in Europe, the only difference is we don’t have same issues as them. It isn’t people in San Diego on the border supporting Trump, its those in the heartland who are losing their jobs and looking for someone to blame.

Citations:

“Xenophobia, Identity Politics and Exclusionary Populism in Western Europe.” Socialist Register 2003: Fighting Identities: Race, Religion and Ethno-Nationalism, by Hertz-Georg Betz, Merlin Press, 2003.

https://www.unh.edu/unhtoday/expert/carter-elizabeth

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infantisimo · 4 years ago

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Delhi is currently divided into nine districts. The smallest district in population terms is central Delhi, with a population of close to 600,000 (it was more than 580,000 in 2011). The second smallest in terms of population is north Delhi, with approximately 900,000 people (it was 887,978 in 2011). In 2011, the population of the largest district of Delhi, the north-west, was 3,656,539, six times the population of all of Delhi in 1941. Comparing this to the population of Delhi at the time of the 2011 census, which was 16,787,941, there has been an 18-fold increase in less than 80 years.

Delhi was a very different city in 1947. The city of Shahjahanabad, also known as Dehli or Dilli, was enclosed within a high wall. To the north was Civil Lines and the Mall Road, extending to the Kingsway camp, where the 1911 Darbar was held to commemorate the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary as Emperor and Empress of India. To the south and detached from the city of Shahjahan was new Delhi; to the west and just outside the city wall was Paharganj, Qarol Bagh and Sadar Bazar and to the east was the Jamuna river across which was the old settlement of Shahdara. The rest was degraded forests, rocks jutting out of the ground, ancient villages interspersed with agricultural land and the ruins of old cities, Tughlaqabad, Purana Quila, Bijay Mandal and Siri.

Delhi had seen riots on an unprecedented scale and according to Gyanendra Pandey’s accounts of violence in the city, between 20-25 thousand Muslims were killed. More than 330,000 Muslims had left Delhi for Pakistan and the population of the city had declined by almost 350,000 by the time the riots ended. The total population of the city would have gone down to about 570,000 before it began to grow rapidly; so rapidly that by 1951, within four years of Partition, it had risen to 1,744,072, a little more than a million in four years, or a quarter of a million every year. Meanwhile, the population of Muslims in the city declined from 33.22% in 1941 to 5.33% in 1951.

This is the scale of change that the city saw in the wake of freedom. The breakneck speed at which the city is growing currently was triggered by the arrival of refugees in tens of thousands from Punjab, Sindh and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).

Initially, the refugees headed for Delhi but there was little space and a lot of resistance as they were outsiders. The Hindu population did not want homeless people moving into their neighbourhood and the Muslims who had chosen to stay back were fearful of the refugees – most of the new arrivals had suffered and had lost members of their families to the killings in Punjab, many were looking for revenge and the Muslims in the city who had seen much killing were afraid. So a joint delegation of senior citizens of the city went to meet Mahatma Gandhi, who asked Jawaharlal Nehru to talk to the home minister and ensure that people are not settled in the old city without the consent of the local residents. So the new arrivals began to be moved out to newer areas. In any case, the old city, despite having lost almost one-third of its earlier residents, could not have accommodated this massive influx of close to a million and it is then that Delhi began to grow in every direction.

People occupied all available spaces; tented accommodations came up in old forts, in deserted mosques, in ruined medieval structures, open fields and under the abysmal shade provided by the arches of the wall that ran around Shahjahanabad. Very soon, Mehr Chand Khanna was appointed the minister for rehabilitation and all kind of schemes were hastily put together to find accommodation, start schools, find jobs, process claims of compensation and to find missing people, out of which many were young girls and women.

Agricultural lands began to be acquired and hectic construction began – initially to throw together makeshift arrangements and then to build more permanent structures. Those with property papers had an advantage; those that had no documents ran from pillar to post, begging for a roof over their heads. Cramped accommodations came up at newly created residential areas thrown up virtually overnight in Lajpat Nagar, Amar Colony, B.K. Dutt Colony. Rajendra Nagar, Malviya Nagar, Ramesh Nagar, Tilak Nagar and Hari Nagar Ashram.

The bulk of the Sindhis, poor peasants and petty traders had just walked across from Karachi, Thatta, Tharparkar, Umarkot and Sukkur into Rajasthan and Gujarat and settled there. Many were later moved into Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. Many, especially the poor, had no papers and had to fend for themselves for decades, eking out a living in thatched shelters thrown up in inhospitable patches on the ridge near Bhuli Bhatiyari and other such locations.

Hindus and Sikhs arrived from the NWFP, from Dera Ghazi Khan, Dera Ismail Khan, Peshawar, Kohat, Chinyot and elsewhere. The Peshawari salwar kameez and the uniquely Afghan male headgear with its golden peak was not an uncommon site in the streets of Delhi till the mid-1960s. They found shelter in far flung areas and built thatched huts in localities like Nabi Kareem. They moved into refugee camps at Kingsway, Hudson Line, Outram Lines and Reeds Lines, the last being the site of the Khalsa College in Delhi University today. Some were later shifted to Haqeeqat Nagar. They started building houses on the lands allotted to refugees and on the ones acquired from land sharks. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a few moved to Mukherjee Nagar, while others were allotted houses in Rajinder Nagar and Inderpuri, a settlement that came up on agricultural land acquired from villagers of Dus-Ghara. A large population of Sikhs had settled in Inderpuri. In 1984, their houses were looted and burnt. Killings too took place, allegedly at the behest of those who lived not too far away.

Patel Nagar and Rajinder Nagar came up on land acquired from the villagers of Shadipur, Khampur and the surrounding villages and became home to large populations of Hindus and Sikhs and also of people from the NWFP. Many from the frontier province later established Kohat Enclave and Derawal Nagar, while some chose to live in Jangpura and Bhogal that has had an old association with Muslim Pathans, probably because of its proximity to the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin. Many settled down in Lajpat Nagar, Amar Colony, Malviya Nagar, Bhogal, Jungpura, Tilak Nagar, Ramesh Nagar and Bali Nagar. Rajouri Garden gradually turned into the quintessential Punjabi locality with their own subset of dialects, their own block-level festivities and shops specialising in region specific snacks and Punjabi street food. But these are processes that are going on, changes rapidly being overrun by the new arrivals from east Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, from Ballia, Begusarai, Katihar, Darbhanga, Saharsa, Muzaffarpur, Chhapra, Ranchi and Dhanbad.

The story of the rise of the Punjabi diaspora from the mid 1950s and its gradual eclipse beginning with the dawn of the 21st century is the next big story in the life of the perpetual city. Meanwhile, the process of amalgamation of cultures, lifestyles, food, music and attire that has defined Delhi for a thousand years continues unabated.

#dilli

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kw-artsleuth · 5 years ago

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Outsiders Looking In: Europe and “The Orient”

What do a Felix Bonfils photograph, an oil painting by Jean Leon Gerome and a lithograph engraved by Ingres have in common? All of these artworks were created in the 19th century by French artists, portray scenes and people from the Middle East and are in the collection at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Mia). However, if we dig a little deeper we may find some surprising connections. Cultural and political interactions between France and The East during the later half of the 19th century would influence how people and places were depicted by artists who traveled to l’orient (the Orient). In 1830 France captured Algiers, which began the colonization of North Africa and an influx of writers and artists to this “new” colony. The word “Orient”, which means “East”, was used describe the large regions of North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Most Europeans did not make distinctions between the people of these regions and ignored the many cultural, ethnic, social and political variations. Orientalism was/is a system used by the West to maintain imperial and cultural superiority over the East by portraying them as uncultured, unchanging, and uncivilized people. This East stood as a symbol of everything that Europeans perceived to be lesser and this helped to support colonial occupation and oppression. Orientalist ideas are present in the artwork of this period, as we will explore in artworks at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (mia).

Figure 1

Sans titre, femme voilée

1870-1879

Félix Bonfils

Albumen print

8 13/16 x 6 5/8 in.

Mia

81.77.47

The development of Photography was especially important to the spread of images of the Middle East. For the first time, Europeans could see with clarity the “exotic wonders” of the Orient. This not only applied to the monuments and landscapes, but also the people. Felix Bonfil’s 1870’s albumin print, Sans titre, femme voilée (Untitled, Veiled Woman)(Fig. 1), is indicative of the types of photographs being taken at this time. The woman in the photograph is completely obscured by cloth as she stands in front of a plain background. She appears to hold her veil from underneath the garment. Unlike commonly worn hijabs or niqabs, the cloth underneath her veil completely obscures her face; she is simply the veiled woman. The woman makes us ask questions: Who is she? What does she look like? This photograph conforms to the narrative of the exotic and mysterious East. Europeans were less interested in realistic depictions of the people who lived there and there everyday lives. They wanted to see something new, something mysterious, something that conformed to their own fantasies about the Orient.

Felix Bonfils’ photographs were widely shared throughout Europe and his “costume studies” were used by artists as models for their paintings. Although this photograph may have been taken in his studio in Beirut, it most likely was not taken by Bonfils. It would have been considered inappropriate for a Muslim woman to have her picture taken by a man. Therefore, it is more probable that Bonfils wife, Marie-Lydie Cabanis, took this photograph and all other photographs of women in the studio. Orientalist art, and photography especially, gives the illusion of authenticity. What we don’t see is the elaborate staging that went into these photographs. It was a very artificial process; clothing and props were often added and the subjects were perfectly posed. Bonfils’ costume studies were a part of a larger European movement to document The East through art, which allowed them to control the narrative. This photograph assumes that this woman would have commonly worn this garment and that her existence was relegated to obscurity and shadow. We now understand that this was simply not true, women did have power in Middle Eastern and African societies. The Veiled Woman was not defined by her anonymity, as this photograph would suggest.

Figure 2

Odalisque

1825

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Lithograph

11 x 13 3/4 in.

Mia

P.11,022

In the 1825 lithograph by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (Fig. 2), we see a woman depicted with almost no clothing at all. This print is a faithful re-creation of Ingres’ popular 1814 oil painting, Grande Odalisque (Fig. 3). Lithography uses a stone or metal plate that is then drawn on and pressed onto paper, creating a print. This allowed for the mass production and circulation of images. Ingres published this and other original artworks of his in 'Album Lithographique' in 1826. The word “odalisque” is a French word that refers to a female slave or concubine. In Odalisque, we see a female reclined on a bed, her only clothing consists of a headdress. She has fine jewelry on her wrist and a peacock fan in her hand, which she drapes across her body. Although her back is turned to us, she makes eye contact with the viewer. The whole room is filled with drapery and in the bottom left-hand corner we see a hookah and an incense burner.

Figure 3

La Grande Odalisque

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

1814

Oil Painting

H. 0.91 m; W. 1.62 m

Louvre

R.F. 1158

The myth of the female slave in the harem, although completely unfounded, was a common subject of 19th century artists. This myth allowed Europe to maintain a position of moral superiority over the Orient. They could justify their involvement in this region as an ethical necessity and a civilizing force. There was another, far simpler, reason for the proliferation of this type of imagery, which had to do with its primary audience. French culture at this time, was becoming increasingly moralistic, and any attempts at female nudity in art kept to the categories of myth and legend. Depictions of the harem and nudity within it were considered acceptable because of the geographic and cultural difference that France perceived between The West and The East. The exotic stereotypes are all present in Odalisque, available for the consumption of a European audience. The reality of harem life was much more bland than the fantasy. Nudity was rare in the harem because this was the place where wives raised their children, not a brothel. Ingres, as in the case of most artists, would have never seen the inside of a harem. Odalisque presents to us the narrative of the exotic East, which fulfilled Europe’s desire for sexualized material while maintaining a moral and ethical distance.

Figure 4

The Carpet Merchant

c. 1887

Jean-Léon Gérôme

Oil on canvas

33 7/8 x 27 1/16 in.

Mia

70.40

Jean-Leon Gerome’s paintings were, and continue to be, celebrated for their vibrant colors and hyper-realistic scenes. One of Mia’s more famous holdings is The Carpet Merchant (Fig. 4), which Gerome painted in 1887 after one of his many trips to the Middle East. Two years prior, in 1855, he had visited The Court of the Rug Market in Cairo. On the surface this painting may seem like a faithful re-creation of an event that Gerome actually witnessed, but in reality Gerome took liberties when depicting Oriental scenes. He was more concerned with creating locations that evoked the unchanging “otherness” of the Orient, rather than those that were realistic.

The Carpet Merchant depicts the sale of elaborate carpets in a large interior room. The merchant gestures towards a prospective buyer, as a group of richly clothed men stand around him, admiring his wares. Carpets lay strewn on the floor in the foreground, while the background is completely consumed by a large, ornate red and green carpet. The many different styles of dress and turbans on display seem to come right out of Bonfils’ costume studies. This painting reveals another aspect of Orientalism; consumerism. Europeans were avid consumers of Oriental goods, even going so far as to dress in Oriental clothing. Carpets, fine jewelry, and furniture were just some of the imports that became available in popular marketplaces such as London. It even became popular to furnish your apartment and wardrobe in the style of the Middle East and live your life in the guise of an Oriental. Of course, what we see in Gerome’s painting is a spectacle of imagination.

These surprising connections between artworks from entirely different mediums shows us how common Orientalist thought was during the 19th Century. The legacy of Orientalism continues to have effects on how Westerners perceive Middle Eastern countries and vice-versa. Contemporary Middle Eastern artists are still grappling with the consequences of this ideology in their art. These artists create work that conveys the complex, dynamic, and culturally rich place that the The East is, as a counterpoint to these static depictions by Orientalist artists.

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cleopatrarps · 6 years ago

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U.S. candidate loses race to lead U.N. migration agency

GENEVA (Reuters) – Ken Isaacs, the U.S. nominee to lead the U.N. migration agency, was knocked out of the race on Friday after coming third behind Portugal’s Antonio Vitorino and Costa Rica’s Laura Thompson in a secret ballot of member states in Geneva, delegates said.

Ken Isaacs, U.S. candidate for Director general of the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration (IOM) is pictured in this photo released by U.S. Mission Geneva, in Geneva, Switzerland, June 28 2018. U.S. Mission Geneva/Handout via REUTERS

After four rounds of voting, Vitorino, a former European Commissioner and Portuguese deputy prime minister, was declared the winner by acclamation, and will lead the International Organization for Migration for a five-year term.

Isaacs, vice president of U.S. evangelical charity Samaritan’s Purse, had caused controversy after being forced to apologize for tweets and social media posts in which he disparaged Muslims.

The leadership race comes at a crucial time for global migration politics, as U.S. President Donald Trump attracts criticism for his “zero tolerance” policy on the Mexican border and the European Union struggles to find unity on how to deal with the influx of mainly African migrants across the Mediterranean.

The job has traditionally gone to an American, but before the election some diplomats predicted that the changing status of IOM, which joined the U.N. family in 2016, and the wide-open election might cause governments to challenge that assumption.

The White House had strongly backed Isaacs, despite U.S. withdrawal from other international bodies and agreements, such as the U.N. Human Rights Council.

“The choice of who will be the new director of the International Organization for Migration will be extremely important for U.N. action in respect of migration,” Elspeth Guild, a migration expert and law professor at Queen Mary University of London, told Reuters earlier this week.

“And I think that it will also be terribly important in seeking to resolve and perhaps take some of the sting out of some the migration politics that are perturbing international relations at the moment.”

Keith Harper, who served as U.S. human rights ambassador under President Barack Obama, said in a tweet that Isaacs’ rejection was “yet another sign that U.S. power, authority and prestige has been so dramatically diminished”.

The election continued after Isaacs dropped out, with the winner needing two-thirds of the votes.

Delegates said the first three rounds were led by Vitorino. Thompson, currently deputy head of IOM, came second, while Isaacs’ share of the vote shrank in each successive round.

During the 1990s, Vitorino was a minister in the Portuguese government of Antonio Guterres, now U.N. Secretary General.

Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Catherine Evans and Alison Williams

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party-hard-or-die · 6 years ago

Text

U.S. candidate loses race to lead U.N. migration agency

Isaacs, vice president of U.S. evangelical charity Samaritan’s Purse, had caused controversy after being forced to apologize for tweets and social media posts in which he disparaged Muslims.

The White House had strongly backed Isaacs, despite U.S. withdrawal from other international bodies and agreements, such as the U.N. Human Rights Council.

The election continued after Isaacs dropped out, with the winner needing two-thirds of the votes.

Delegates said the first three rounds were led by Vitorino. Thompson, currently deputy head of IOM, came second, while Isaacs’ share of the vote shrank in each successive round.

During the 1990s, Vitorino was a minister in the Portuguese government of Antonio Guterres, now U.N. Secretary General.

Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Catherine Evans and Alison Williams

The post U.S. candidate loses race to lead U.N. migration agency appeared first on World The News.

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dragnews · 6 years ago

Text

U.S. candidate loses race to lead U.N. migration agency

Isaacs, vice president of U.S. evangelical charity Samaritan’s Purse, had caused controversy after being forced to apologize for tweets and social media posts in which he disparaged Muslims.

The White House had strongly backed Isaacs, despite U.S. withdrawal from other international bodies and agreements, such as the U.N. Human Rights Council.

The election continued after Isaacs dropped out, with the winner needing two-thirds of the votes.

Delegates said the first three rounds were led by Vitorino. Thompson, currently deputy head of IOM, came second, while Isaacs’ share of the vote shrank in each successive round.

During the 1990s, Vitorino was a minister in the Portuguese government of Antonio Guterres, now U.N. Secretary General.

Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Catherine Evans and Alison Williams

The post U.S. candidate loses race to lead U.N. migration agency appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2KrfzQL via Today News

#Daily News #Daily World News #Daily Business News #Daily Sports News #World The News

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stopkingobama · 7 years ago

Text

16 Years After 9/11, Government Lacks Answers in Combating Terrorism

Photo source: Pixabay, geralt, CC0 Public Domain, https://pixabay.com/en/world-trade-center-wtc-new-york-city-2699805/

The United States and allies seem to lack a clear strategy for toppling the terrorist threat 16 years after the worst terrorist attack in American history, experts say.

Since the 9/11 attacks, there have been another 97 terrorist plots against the United States, and the bulk of those 15 successful attacks happened in the last six years, according to a database maintained by The Heritage Foundation.

A total of 27 of the overall plots came from the Islamic State, David Inserra, a homeland security policy analyst for The Heritage Foundation, said Friday during a panel.

“The variable explaining this is ISIS,” Inserra said, explaining the uptick in attacks in recent years. “Something changed, ISIS occurred.”

For example, Inserra noted the largest attack since 9/11 was the mass shooting killing 49 at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando last year by an Islamic State-inspired attacker.

Terrorism itself has changed since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York, after two hijacked planes crashed into the towers. Another plane crashed into the Pentagon. Heroic passengers aboard a fourth plane thwarted another attack by forcing the crash of a hijacked plane in a Pennsylvania field.

The 9/11 attack was carried out by al-Qaeda, which has diminished, while the Islamic State has risen, as have other terrorist groups such as al-Shabab and Boko Haram in Africa.

About 70 Americans sought to support al-Shabab either financially or in traveling to fight with them, said Joshua Meservey, senior policy analyst for Africa and the Middle East at The Heritage Foundation.

“These groups are motivated by ideology and there isn’t much the U.S. can do to affect that,” Meservey said about the African terror groups.

There are five key questions the “smartest people on the planet” haven’t come to a consensus on regarding how to combat Islamic terrorism in the post-9/11 world, said Mary R. Habeck, an adjunct professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

“Looking around the world, what country can honestly say they have defeated Islamist terrorism? The answer is none of them,” Habeck said.

Those questions are

1. Who is the enemy?

2. How should we combat the enemy?

3. What is the relationship between the enemy and Islam?

4. What is the objective in war?

5. What will winning look like?

For instance, global leaders aren’t clear if the enemy is the ideology of jihadists and extremists broadly or more narrowly specific terrorist groups such as the Islamic State, she said.

Regarding combatting the problem: Is this a counterterrorism matter, that we, as Habeck said, “can just sit back and drone them to death”? Or, she asked, does the United States act alone, or insist on an international coalition?

Considering Islam, Habeck said fewer than 1 percent of Muslims and an even smaller number of of the religion’s clerics subscribe to the radical views.

Regarding the objective, Habeck asked, does the United States keep itself safe or also its allies? Does the country want to win the war—as in destroying the enemy and discrediting its ideology? Or, will the United States just manage a conflict?

As for the final question regarding victory, Habeck asked: Does that mean no terrorist attacks? Does it mean just a few terrorist attacks? Does it mean al-Qaeda and ISIS no longer exist, while other groups could continue?

During a question-and-answer portion of the panel, someone asked why terrorism became such a problem.

“Broadly, it has been the failure of nearly every single regime in the Middle East to create successful societies,” Habeck said. “The government have too often been corrupt or lacked any moral sense at all.”

She was speaking even of the more secular dictators whose rules prompted the religious-backed revolutions that overthrew their governments, such as the Shah of Iran and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, both considered somewhat pro-Western leaders who were overthrown.

Europeans were somewhat naïve about the terror threat in the past, but have since become almost numb to minor attacks, said Robin Simcox, a Margaret Thatcher fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

He said that knife attacks have become common enough to rarely get headlines, while vehicles and trucks have “so far got a 100 percent success rate.”

Further, Germany has seen skyrocketing attacks since the influx of Syrians into the country after the refugee crisis.

“The terrorism threat in Europe has metastasized just in the last few years,” Simcox said.

Report by Fred Lucas. Originally published at The Daily Signal.

#9/11 #Terrorism

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americanlibertypac · 7 years ago