In his book Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said examines the relationship between the colonial history of the West and the East by examining the body of literature that has been produced in that time through a postcolonial lens. In the final chapter, he notes that decolonization efforts around the world have sparked many uprisings and revolutions to occur, freeing a good portion of the world from colonial rule. With decolonization efforts have risen new narratives, ones that come from the colonized and not just the colonizer, showing that there is more than just one side to a story, and opening up more possibilities for artists belonging to this group to explore what exactly it means to take back and control the narrative that has been cast upon them for so long.

Through his written body of work, Edward Said has inaugurated the field of postcolonial study by bringing to light the unmistakable influences of colonialism upon the great Western works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What he has also realized is the subsequent decolonization that had sprung as the previously colonized began to fight against the Orientalist canon that had spoken for them for so long. In his 1993 book Culture and Imperialism, Said states, “The authoritative, compelling image of the empire…finds its opposite in the discontinuities of intellectual and secular impurities…rather than classes or corporations of possession, appropriation, and power” (Said 335). This quote represents the current state of the power dynamics between colonized and colonizer, one which has deliberately been altered in an effort to give voice to the victims of past Orientalist phantasms. Said is proclaiming that due to postcolonial efforts by artists and intellectuals around the world, the previously reigning voices of the Western art canon have been met with resistance, that the previously unchallenged nature of said “canon” has been interrupted by intercultural efforts to create an ongoing dynamic relationship with their past. Previously colonized cultures have begun to provide their own works of art that both critique traditional European tropes used in convergence with the Other, and to present authentic views of their own cultures and ways of life—something that has aided in bridging the gap between the different perspectives in our current understanding of this complex history of colonial art.

Western dominant voices should not dictate the way the world perceives the East, and in an age of further separation between “us” and “them” it is crucial that no phantasmal recreations of reality are left unchecked, and that we must look to the revolutionaries and artists that have come before and the many ways in which they have subverted the previously dominant ideologies that relied solely on a false sense of superiority to propel them forward. Among these is the Ottoman administrator, intellectual, artist, archaeologist and museum curator, Osman Hamdi Bey, an artist who had previously trained with noted French Orientalist painters such as Gérôme and Boulanger. However, unlike his counterparts—who would use hyper-realism to mask the devised eroticism and mystery of the East—Hamdi combine this “realism” along with beginning to bridge the gap and give us the reality of the people’s lives. In her work titled Speaking Back to Orientalist Discourse, Zeynep Celik would further examine Hamdi’s role in subverting the tropes set by artists like Gérôme. She states, “In contrast to the constructions that convey fanaticism, exoticism, and even violence in Gérôme’s series of paintings on Islamic worship, Osman Hamdi presented Islam as a religion that encouraged intellectual curiosity, discussion, debate, even doubt” (Celik 399). In his painting Young Emir Studying (1887) Hamdi illustrated a young man lying on his stomach whilst reading a book, at once countering the eroticizing trope of the odalisque and displaying Islam as an intellectual world. In a similar work titled Girl Reading (1893), he is much more visibly deliberate in speaking back to the odalisque trope, as he portrays a girl lying on her stomach and reading a book—similar to that of the young man from before—whilst behind her stands a shelf on which there are stacked books, accentuating her intelligence and agency. Celik continues to remark that, “the girl is hence given back her thinking mind and intellectual life, which had been erased by Orientalist painters” (Celik 401). It is of utmost importance that these subjects of the European Oriental fantasy are able to speak back to these previous representations, and are able to begin reframing their subjectivity within the discourse.

An essential figure in the effort to take back the established colonial narrative is the Hungarian-Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil, who represents a counter story to that of the Western male modernist. In order to deal with current versions of orientalist discourse, we must look back towards this period of modernism, a period which was marked by the end of colonial rule and the beginning of decolonization efforts around the world. However, important figures such as Sher-Gil were able to recognize the primitivist roots of the modernist art movement. It is in her famous work Self Portrait as Tahitian (1934) that we see the direct commentary on the inaugurator of Modernist Primitivism, Paul Gauguin. This self-portrait is a commentary on Gauguin’s Tahitian nudes. It is not eroticized or sexualized, nor is it connected to nature like the portraits by Gauguin. As Professor Saloni Mathur explains, “The entire stance, and the impertinence of the painted lips, departs unequivocally from the disempowering portrayal of Gauguin’s female subjects, whose erotic beauty was inevitably defined by their proximity to nature and their animalistic sexual states” (Mathur 521). She stands with a serious look on her face, at once active and passive in her stance. The shadow of a male figure, perhaps Gauguin himself, “evokes the daunting predicament of the young female artist as she strives to make an artistic maneuver notable for its lack of historical precedent” (Mathur 522). This is a portrait that would catch hold of a casual observer, if not for the striking agency in her gaze, then for the name referencing Gauguin—something that would immediately make one question the significance of this connection, thus leading to a closer reading and re-evaluation of the latter’s previous works. This is an example of art that requires one to read what Said calls “contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which the dominating discourse acts” (Said 51).

More contemporary artists emerged in the twentieth century that would go on to further challenge depictions of the East by the West. In her Untitled Qajar Series (1998), Iranian photographer Shadi Ghadirian would portray the veiled woman—a figure constantly eroticized and sexualized by European photographers—as a confident and modern figure. She turns the gaze back onto the photographer and undoes the conventions by which the veiled woman is presented. In another photograph titled Domestic Life (2002), Ghadirian would present prints on photographic paper of veils with different beautiful patterns, all with a different domestic item placed in the area where the woman’s face would be. Here, she represents the veil as it is in real life, by representing the real women and that they live in and maintain the home much like a traditional Western woman would, thus eliminating any notions of alienation and mystery in light of the reality. Another artist who has subverted the myths of the veiled woman is the Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat. In her Women of Allah (1994) series, she portrays women wearing a veil with their face covered with Farsi and Arabic text, and they are often accompanied with the image of a gun in their hand. This serves to return the gaze and confronts the image of Muslim women as oppressed and in need of saving. In the digital age, photography plays a crucial role in representing what people deem to be true, to be factual. On the development of photography in the Middle East, Irish-Iraqi artist Jananne Al-Ani writes “This cross-cultural fertilization created gaps in the history of the medium in which new and complex development emerged as fresh and vibrant alternatives to the Orientalist stereotypes found in much photography of the period” (Al-Ani 32). Thus, it is key that the people whose identities had been previously confined to the spaces of an Orientalist painting, now use such a medium to interject their own subjectivities into the narrative.

Modern technology has advanced our notions of image taking, and that includes wartime. In her 2003 book Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag notes the importance of the Vietnam War, which was the first American war in the age of television. The significance of this was that quite a few of the photos produced during this time were staged. Sontag explains, “There can be no suspicion about the authenticity of what is being shown in the picture…Nevertheless, it was staged” (59). However, it is the pain of seeing these people who have been condemned to a bad fate, which would summarily impact the people viewing the photographs. In the age of drone warfare, we have taken out the human factor that was typically needed in order to carry out an attack and instead placed a camera on a bomb. This time, it is even easier to distance ourselves from the reality of the human being we are killing. In response to drone operators calling these people bug splats, international artists banded together on a project called #NotABugSplat in which they took the picture of an actual young girl from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region of Northeast Pakistan who had been a victim of the drone attacks, and displayed an enlarged photograph of her face on the ground so that when the drone operators flew overhead, they saw an actual human face, not just a bug. This is a more modern effort to inspire empathy and compassion for someone who should be “identifie[d] as an individual, as a human being”, and therefore should be treated like one (Sontag 61).

Only when we understand the way narratives have been constructed over the centuries, will we be able to finally take control of said narratives. Artists such as Osman Hamdi Bey, Amrita Sher-Gil and Shadi Ghadirian are some of the great examples throughout history of individuals reclaiming these toxic tropes that have been imposed on the Other for so long. Moving forward, we must understand that the importance of images is more blatant than ever, and so it is up to people like the aforementioned artists to take these methods of presentation, and to re-present their stories in the context of their own experiences, making this is a crucial method of producing a contrapuntal reading of our current domestic and global situation.