Kristof: The journalist as tourist
The New York Times columnist relies on orientalist cliches when writing about Iran, revealing his outdated assumptions.
Last Modified: 03 Jul 2012
Nicholas Kristof's seemingly unconscious invocation of some of the oldest and most tiresome orientalist clichés in his recent columns in the New York Times, following a short visit to the beleaguered Islamic Republic, once again raises the question of recycled tropes and their instrumental function in not so much revealing the misperceptions of the Muslim world at large - for no-one should really care what Kristof or his "paper of record" thinks about anything - but far more immediately, the dire state of critical awareness at the heart of a floundering empire about the world at large.
The journalistic recycling of orientalist clichés should no longer be irksome because they distort and abuse reality, for they are in fact revelatory - they indeed say very little about the orientalised, but reveal a lot about the orientalist. The significance of writings such as Kristof's is that they reveal the decline of the ideological apparatus that used to accompany imperial projects.
In a magnificent essay, "Be Aware: Nick Kristof's Anti-Politics", Elliott Prasse-Freeman of the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights, who has been tracking Kristof's career for some time, has already exposed the New York Times columnist's propensity for orientalist clichés. Prasse-Freeman summarises Kristof's oeuvre into a number of precise strokes: "By playing on his audience's orientalist, classist and racist fantasies, Kristof fabricates legible narratives out of snapshots of distant worlds. He then crafts stunningly simplistic solutions to the seemingly irrevocable problems that plague those backwards places."
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Nicholas in Wonderland
What's an oriental sojourn without a bit of sexual seasoning? You may be interested in reading about Mr Kristof blushes:
"You wouldn't think a New Yorker could be made to blush in Tehran, but I was taken aback by the hookup scene of one-night stands: young men with flashy cars troll for women, chat them up and then drive off with them."
What is that supposed to mean? That a New Yorker is so used to debauchery and sexual licentiousness that he shouldn't be made to blush when in Iran? Where exactly in New York does Kristof live or work, and what particular neighbourhood does he have in mind, I may ask, as a fellow New Yorker? There are neighbourhoods in New York where women are instructed to step aside when men walk down the sidewalk. There are neighbourhoods in New York - right here and right now - where women must sit in the back of the bus, just like African-Americans did in the segregated south of the pre-Civil Rights era. Who does this Kristof think he is; who does he imagine his audience to be? What sort of mendacious orientalism takes over these people as soon as they cross the Atlantic and enter a country whose language and culture are more foreign than Greek to them?
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Bizarre sexual hang-ups, leftover orientalist fantasies, condescending prose of a latter-day colonial officer-cum-tourist-cum-journalist, racist assumptions about a people, a culture and a civilisation about which they know next to nothing: All come together to make this vintage brand of US journalism nothing more than an extended arm of US military and diplomatic intelligence. The journalists go there and come back to confirm US foreign policy for what it is: putting a thin liberal mask over a flawed and failed imperial project to conquer a world and distort and destroy its cultures of resistance. Those distortions do nothing to alter the defiant facts on the ground - and yet they reveal everything about the intellectual bankruptcy of the Empire.
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怖いのはむしろ、この手の洗練されたレイシストがアメリカの”進歩的”な新聞社でコラムニストとして、通用し、賞賛されていることだ。