The Orient Has Arrived: A Critique on Germany’s far-right and Jean Leon Gerome’s Slave Market

Approximately a year ago, Germany’s far-right party Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD),  put up billboards around the capital city of Berlin, using Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1866  painting Slave Market, under the slogan ‘So that Europe does not become Eurabia!’, additionally coupled with the statements ‘Learn from Europe’s History’ (top right corner), and ‘Europeans vote AfD!’. 

The poster sparked a lot of controversy, and was condemned by the Clark Art Institute in Williamston, which has been home for the painting since 1955, after initially being sold to Robert Sterling Clark in 1930.

Olivier Merslay, the current director of the Clark Institute, has acknowledged that despite the demands, "there are no copyrights or permissions that allow us to exert control over how it is used other than to appeal to civility on the part of the AfD Berlin." [1]

The painting, paired with its utilization by a far-right campaign, depicts a form of ‘double-edged violence’, both as an Oriental imagery and as a tool to further assert governmental policies through ideological constructs.

Yet such an approach is nothing new, as the core of imperialism lies within the portrayal of a dichotomy between the us and them, the East and West, the “Orient and Occident”, what Edward W. Said describes as an “ontological and epistemological distinction made between (the two).” [2]

Indeed, it was those same perceptions of the Orient that have made the painting’s mere existence possible, allowing its weaponization roughly a century and a half later.

“Because it is made into a general object, the whole Orient can be made to serve as an illustration of a particular form of eccentricity.” [3]The Orient, therefore, becomes an instrumentalized object in Gerome’s paintings, as he derives inspiration from traveling and documenting the Near East, as “a watcher, never involved, always detached…” [4] A detachment allowing free-wheeling portrayals and personal exaggerations of the places captured. 

“It is unlikely, however, that the artist actually observed a scene like this, as there is little, if any, reliable documentation of such slave markets.” [5]– Gerome’s painting is assumed to have stemmed from “Gérard de Nerval’s 1851 account of a similar incident in his partially fictional Voyage en Orient”, [6]in which Said frequently criticized. “The sellers [of slaves] offered to have them undressed, they opened their mouths so that one could see their teeth, they made them walk and highlighted especially the elasticity of their chests.” [7]

In fact, in a letter written to Theophile Gautier in 1843, Nerval expresses his disappointment after visiting Egypt by noting: “…soon I will know of no place in which I can find a refuge for my dreams; but it is Egypt that I most regret having driven out of my imagination, now that I have sadly placed it in my memory.” [8] A clear testimony that the Orient was, and remains, nothing but an “ethnocentric perspective”, [9]an imaginary construct created by, and for, Europe.

It becomes consequently inevitable to view Gerome’s painting as inseparable from the rooted colonial fantasies in which the Orient is depicted.

The nude woman, surrounded by a fully-clothed scenery, asserting her gaze to her purchaser, replicates the horror of the pornographic and violent body in what Colette Beaudan powerfully called “voyeuristic complicity.” [10]The Oriental woman, although unclear her origins, “never spoke of herself, never represented her emotions, presence, or history.” [11]Rather always remains timid, spoken for, represented, much like Saidiya Hartman’s Venus, Gerome’s and Nerval’s slave is only documented through the barbarous men she is surrounded by, denoting an incomplete archive, only existing in the painter’s and writer’s fantasies, as they continue to employ sexual, female, Oriental forms of escapism. “The archive of slavery rests upon a founding violence.”, [12] a violence which in turn reflects itself onto the present and reproduces beliefs, as the archive becomes “a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body… an asterisk in the grand narrative of history.” [13]Only existing within the words and brushstrokes of delusional men, the slave’s experience “is situated between two zones of death – social and corporeal death…”. [14] In this instance, an underlying misogyny is realized as the objectivity of the slave woman is placed against the dangerous ‘Other’, the black man, the Arab. 

This implication highly resonates with Jackie Wang’s critique of the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement in America, as it began increasing awareness about sexual violence. Wang explains that “the alignment of racialized incarceration and the proliferation of campaigns warning women about the dangers of the lurking rapist was not a coincidence.”, [15] as its vocal point stressed not on rape that could occur within households, but rather on the dangers of potential, Black male rapists lurking in public space. These protectionist ideas that emerge from deeply embodied racism mobilize as a type of safety for women, but also from them. To refer back to Hartman’s social and corporeal death; rape constitutes not only physical but also social effects on women who continue to be reminded of the traumas resulting from such an incident. In addition, the protection from the Oriental woman masks itself by taking part in a pro-feminist stance for her, against the Oriental man, the headscarf, the cultural cues she wishes to no longer be a part of, feigning protectionism which in return allows further far-right argumentation. “The possessive individual is a raced and gendered subject.”. [16]The AfD poster acts as a reminder of the horrendous narratives that could emerge out of pro-immigration policies, as refugees pose a threat on not only the body but also the social shame experienced if such rape incidents were to occur. Possessive nationalism emerges out of the imageries rooted within a state’s citizens, of past glories and achievements, while in contrast producing images of gruesome, far away lands that have arrived to bestow terror on a country. “A little paranoia is really good for every woman.”, [17]and a little horror is really good for every state, what Adriana Cavarero’s Horrorism entails: “…the massacre forms part of a strategy or simply a means toward a higher end. If we observe the scene of massacre from the point of view of the helpless victims… the picture changes: the end melts away, and the means become substance. More than terror, what stands out is horror.” [18]

This means-ends relationship is described by Walter Benjamin as “the most elementary relationship within any legal system…” [19]and “that violence can only be sought only in the realm of means, not in the realm of ends.”[20] The question that remains is whether violence as a means produces just or unjust ends, and how legality or illegality are then signified. Legal laws can only be realized by legal power, “law sees violence as a danger undermining the legal system.”, [21] therefore sceptically concluding that law is preserved through legislation. Violence hence becomes the means toward political power, Orientalism acting as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over…” [22] but also through, “the Orient.”

Concisely put, the maintenance of law-controlled states requires a production of horror by triggering the notion of terror, in this case placing the white female body in place of the slave’s, producing a collective panic amongst people by warning them from an incoming danger, which, in our case, is Islam.

“Culture, of course, is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of other persons works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent.” [23] We arrive here at the discourse of hegemony, a cultural hegemony in which European identity is perceived as the superior model of all cultures and disciplines, including the discipline of Islam itself. Not only is Islam viewed as a threat, but also as a less original version of Christianity, “a fraudulent new version of some previous experience.”. [24]

Throughout its history, Islam has been demonized as it implied an inferior copy of a religion that has already come before it, only reproduced in a more patriarchal, homophobic, violent form.

What we are nowadays witnessing is a “contemporary Islamophobia” which was already embedded in pre-disposed conceptions of lands inhabited by a lesser people. A post-modern Orientalism that is being directed towards a refugee crisis. Once again granting the West opportunities to further assert domination by adopting right-wing regimes. The Orient has arrived, and with it bringing the imagery of dead corpses, disease, chaos, and most importantly, violence. 

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[1] “U.S. museum demands German anti-Islam party stop using 19th-century "Slave Market" painting” , CBS News, April 30, 2019, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-museum-germany-far-right-afd-anti-islam-party-slave-market-painting/

[2] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 368–2. 

[3] Said, Orientalism, 102.

[4] Said, Orientalism, 103.

[5] Sarah Lees, Clark Art - Nineteenth-Century European Paintings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, (Yale University Press, 2012) , 359, https://www.clarkart.edu/rap/publications/Publication-Items/Nineteenth-Century-European-Paintings-at-the-Sterl 

[6] Lees, Clark Art, 359.

[7] Lees, Clark Art, 359.

[8] Said, Orientalism, 100.

[9] Said, Orientalism, 117.

[10] Lees, Clark Art, 359.

[11] Said, Orientalism, 6.

[12]  Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”, Small Axe 26, no. 2 (2008): 10, Project MUSE. 

[13] Hartman, “Venus”, 2.

[14]Hartman, “Venus”, 12.

[15] Jackie Wang, Against Innocence, 154.

[16] Brenna Bhandar, “Possessive Nationalism: Race, Class and the Lifeworlds of Property”, Viewpoint Magazine, February 1, 2018, 5, https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/possessive-nationalism-race-class-lifeworldsproperty/ 

[17] Wang, “Innocence”, 153.

[18]  Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism, trans. William McCuaig (Columbia University Press, 2011) , 1.   

[19] Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence, (Harvard University Press, 1996), 236.

[20] Benjamin, Violence, 236.

[21] Benjamin, Violence, 238.

[22] Said, Orientalism, 3.

[23] Said, Orientalism, 6.

[24] Said, Orientalism, 59.

Bibliography

1. Benjamin, Walter. Critique of Violence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. 236-252. 

2. Brenna Bhandar, “Possessive Nationalism: Race, Class and the Lifeworlds of Property”, Viewpoint Magazine, February 1, 2018, 5, https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/possessive-nationalism-race-class-lifeworlds-property/

3. Cavarero, Adriana. Horrorism. Translated by William McCuaig. Columbia University Press, 2011.  

4. Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts”. Small Axe 26, no. 2: 10, Project MUSE, 2008.  https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115

5. Lees, Sarah, ed. Nineteenth-Century European Paintings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute; New Haven and London: distributed by Yale University Press, 2012.  

6. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.  

7. Wang, Jackie. Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the politics of Safety.