Media in Motion by Elisabeth Eide Kaarina Nikunen

Author:Elisabeth Eide, Kaarina Nikunen [Elisabeth Eide, Kaarina Nikunen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Emigration & Immigration, Popular Culture, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781409404460
Google: 29OangEACAAJ
Publisher: Ashgate
Published: 2011-01-15T03:22:12+00:00

East Asians as a Visual Orientalist Spectacle

So finally, how do we contextualize the contemporary Swedish images of East Asians in general, and the two analysed themes in particular? First, the representations seem to be well in line with the general Western images of East Asians, perhaps with the exceptions of the predominance of East Asian children and women being depicted. In other words, Sweden shares the Western referent system of Orientalist images in spite of having no colonial past in East Asia and only a small East Asian resident minority; therefore, consistency and continuity dominate over change and transformation when it comes to imagining East Asians even in Sweden, considering that a full-fledged Orientalist imagery related to East Asia is able to remain in the public culture of Sweden, albeit in an epigonic and decontextualized version. One can therefore assume that because of this historical and demographic background, the general public in Sweden are most probably not as aware of East Asian histories, traditions, conditions and developments as the general public in, for example, Britain, France, the US and the Netherlands, where there exists a stronger historically continuous relationship with East Asia and East Asians having deep historical roots. Thus, the specific Swedish context wherein these images, and especially the twin themes of the East Asian caricature and the East Asian character, are produced, distributed and consumed is above all characterized by a dehistoricized and depoliticized one, given that Sweden is also a peripheral Western country with its own peculiar provincialism and exceptionalist self-image. In other words, instead of identifying and recognizing these images within a colonial discourse and a racial archive (and this particularly concerns the themes of the East Asian caricature and the East Asian character), they are instead categorized as falling within the on-the-surface harmless and pleasurable genre of humour and comedy.

Another trait which contemporary Sweden’s visual culture shares with most other Western countries, is the near-absence of stereotypical representations of Jews after a long history of centuries of anti-Semitic portrayals, while the ones that still exist of Africans are contested, and the ones of Arabs and Central and South Asians are highly debated in the post-9/11 climate of terrorist fear, religious conflicts and civilization wars (Kunelius et al. 2007; Lindekilde, Mouritsen and Zapata-Barrero 2009). Thus, as in any other Western country, Swedish visual culture also tries to grapple with the discrepancy between the colonial imaginary and the post-colonial condition, whereby ethnic minorities interact with the majority population within the same national context. Stereotypical ‘old-school’ representations of indigenous populations such as American Indians and Inuits are certainly still present within Swedish visual culture, but these ethnic groups are today perceived as fairytale and fantasy figures rather than connected to a certain minority. When it comes to stereotypical representations of East Asians, they even seem to be increasing both in frequency and in intensity from the first decade of the twenty-first century, judging from the collection which this study is based upon, a tendency which we interpret as

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