Comments on: Geographies of the Imagination

By: Bill McNeill

Bill McNeill — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 02:50:59 +0000

Response to ADM #105…I never saw Gung Ho, but I remember the 1980s and 1990s pop culture stereotype of the Japanese as a nation of highly regimented factory workers (either comical or sinister, depending on the context) who were led by ruthlessly efficient corporate masters. (A stereotype that became noticably less prevalent after the Japanese economy took a nose dive.) But I’d maintain that this sort of stereotyping is of a different sort than the representations of Africa discussed at the top of this thread because the foreigners being mocked were specifically Japanese, and not generically Asian.

As a thought experiment, imagine an American comedy that made fun of European characters. You could get laughs out of having an Italian guy be all cornball romantic and perpetually on the make, or a German guy being really uptight and overly-punctual, etc. Now imagine an American comedy that tried to get similar mileage out of depicting stereotypes of a “typical” Nigerian or a “typical” Somali or…Well, I can’t imagine a movie like this, because I, like a lot of Americans, lack the cultural knowledge about Africa to come up with even the most clumsy stereotypes, because even stereotypes indicate a certain level of cultural familiarity.

By: Gary Farber

Gary Farber — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 02:07:31 +0000

Okay, maybe 12 or 13.

I am shamed yet further.

By: Gary Farber

Gary Farber — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 02:05:13 +0000

‘On that topic, how many of Tim’s Africa tropes hold true for South America—especially the Andes and Amazon?”

ObObvious: Begining of Raiders Of Teh Lost Ark.

Particularly apposite remark by Bill McNeill, i think, also.

Re wil s, I did a Super-8 film I alleged was based on Rhodesia for an elementary school project, which should give a clue as to my age. (It was entirely moronic, by any possible standard, and it shames me, in retrospect, save as a memory of the possible innocence of childhood, or the cleverness of trying to pass a class with no effort. The major feature was film of me climbing on pipes in our basement. Speaking of African stereotypes. I confess this only because I want to have Holbo’s babies. Is that job taken? Also, I was 9.)

By: wil s

wil s — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 22:52:34 +0000

Thinking back into the mists of my childhood… I don’t know how universal this was, but we were assigned to write thick reports about countries in the sixth grade. I received Africa. The continent. I didn’t really possess the social, racial or historical vocabulary to express the utter wrongness of it at the time, but honestly… Bless education in Arizona.

By: Robbie Taylor

Robbie Taylor — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 21:23:20 +0000

What state was Gov. Gatling the governor of in Benson? I think it was either fictional or undefined.

Either Rhode Island or Connecticut – since it was a spin-off of Soap, it was the same state that the Tates and Campbells lived in.

By: Omri

Omri — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 07:07:33 +0000

Western Europe isn’t as sacred as one might like, at least in the airport class of novel. Tom Clancy takes enormous liberties with geography in the Rhine valley. The worst was a character getting in trouble driving from Aaschen to Aix-la-Chapelle.

By: Another Damned Medievalist

Another Damned Medievalist — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 02:25:21 +0000

LOL Bill—I have that problem with the Sue Grafton novels, because I know Santa Barbara pretty well. But never have that problem with made up countries—except when they’re clear analogs, like Qumar in The West Wing.

But wrt the Roth comment, it wasn’t all that long ago that Hollywood came out with Gung Ho—a film about a Japanese car company in the US.

By: Nathaniel Thomas

Nathaniel Thomas — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 02:17:27 +0000

There’s always the made-up university of campus fiction (and the closely related invented Oxbridge college, that is, an invented college of a real university). But campus fiction descends into the roman à clef much of the time.

By: Bill McNeill

Bill McNeill — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 19:37:31 +0000

Also, does anyone else find the whole made up place trope as supremely annoying as I do? Not because it indicates some pernicious cultural blind spot, but because it makes suspension of disbelief impossible. Of course intentionally fake places like Gotham City are fine, but I just can’t buy a thriller that’s set in the tiny Central American country of San Marcos, because I know there’s no such place, and it sticks in my craw. It’s like in the movies when somebody writes down a phone number that begins with “555-”. All I can think for the rest of the scene is doesn’t that guy realize he’s being given a fake number?

By: Bill McNeill

Bill McNeill — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 19:22:55 +0000

The degree of specific knowledge a popular culture assumes about a particular region of the world varies over time. For instance, there a joke in Portnoy’s Complaint about a U.S. soldier who marries a Japanese woman for the sole purpose of upsetting his mother. It’s primarily one of the Jewish mother jokes on which Roth’s career is based, but there’s a detail that always threw me. The name of the Japanese bride is something like “Ming Ling”. It’s clearly supposed to be a made up nonesense name, but it’s also clearly a nonsense Chinese name. I could never tell whether this was on purpose, to show what an idiot the soldier was, or because a man of Roth’s generation didn’t have enough command of east Asian stereotypes to come up with Japanese gibberish.

Either way, that detail dates the novel. Today you’d have to call her “Akiko” or something, or else the joke would fall flat. Times have changed. For the typical American of a few generations ago, east Asia was just one big Oriental blur. That’s not the case today. Today Americans generally grok that there’s a difference between China and Japan, and of course everybody knows about Vietnam and Korea. The level of cultural literacy has increased via the usual suspects of war, trade, and immigration.

So the phenomenon we’re talking about here is likely not specific to Africa, and is possibly also more sensitive to cultural contact they we realize. As an American, it’s hard for me to get a sense of it: this culture’s idea of Africa is particularly abstract because there hasn’t been as much war, trade and immigration from that part of the world. (Lingering guilt over slavery and its reprucussions muddies the waters even more.) Africa is still one big black blur. I wonder if representations of Africa are more specific in European as opposed to U.S. popular culture because African immigrants are more common there.

By: Bill McNeill

Bill McNeill — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 18:47:08 +0000

Given the number of counterexamples here, I propose a revision of the claim about representations of fictional places in Africa. For specificity’s sake, let’s focus on representations of Africa vs. Europe in U.S. popular culture. It is not the case that it is easier to make up fictional African countries than it is fictional European countries. However, even if U.S. popular culture contains many made-up European places, it also contains many real European places. We have WWII dramas and spy thrillers with very specific European settings. We have “Sex and the City”, where at one point Mr.Big moves to Paris, and not some mythical European city. We even have the Meg Ryan comedy “French Kiss” that takes place in a France full of snooty concierges and slick lotharios—which are all broad comic stereotypes, but they’re stereotypes of a specific real culture instead of just something spun from whole cloth. What’s different about the representation of Africa is the absence of these specific representations. There isn’t a “Hotel Rwanda” for every “Sahara”, so in the end the generic Africa is all we’ve got.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 17:49:20 +0000

ADM: quite a few of those tropes apply to Central/ South America and/or the Pacific and Papua New Guinea. In fact, a few of them, in my view, originate from there historically. (The chief’s daughter married to the explorer strikes me as a gloss of Western reactions to Polynesian sexuality…) One of the interesting things that I noticed preparing my introductory presentation on the visual trope of the missionary in the cannibal’s cookpot (besides discovering, that there is an entire icky genre of pornography devoted to images of naked women in cookpots) was that more recent popular culture basically takes the substance of the cannibal trope and makes it more contemporaneously acceptable by grafting it onto…headhunters. (The Far Side is really notable for this).

By: Anna in Cairo

Anna in Cairo — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 13:23:56 +0000

The lost city in the Amelia Peabody series appears in two books, the first being the Last Camel Died at Noon, and the second being something like Guardians of the Horizon. It does not have a name. It is called the Lost Oasis, I think, in general conversation. They are very fun. She (Elizabeth Peters) modeled them on the Rider Haggard books such as King solomon’s Mines. Another thing she uses a lot for inspiration is the Prisoner of Zenda (which she uses a lot in the Vicky Bliss novels). Yes I possess many of her paperbacks. :)

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 12:26:20 +0000

Hm, 100 entries and no one has mentioned Shangri-la, in or near Tibet. Tibet and neighboring areas such as the present Uzbekistan were inaccessible until well into the XIXc.

In Muslim traditions Tibet was a magical fantasy land for centuries as a place where “When a Muslim goes there, he becomes so happy that he never returns”. So was Korea sometimes.

By: Liz

Liz — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 11:11:10 +0000

The 1985 season of ‘Dynasty’ ended with the infamous ‘Moldavian massacre’ cliffhanger, where all but two of the cast were attacked at the wedding of Amanda Carrington to Prince Michael of Moldavia. (All the regulars miraculously survived.)