True Left

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www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/opinion/opera-racism-puccini.html

This fall, the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto gave a botched face-lift to “Turandot,” a Puccini opera about a barbaric Chinese princess in “ancient Peking” who executes her suitors.

To try to mask the racism of the opera, the director changed the names of Ping, Pang and Pong, three of the main characters, to Jim, Bob and Bill, and swapped their Chinese costumes for black suits. My father, a Taiwanese-American tenor, performed the role of Pong (or I guess, Bill?) for the production’s 2019 run. But the characters continued to play into stereotypes of effeminate Asian men as they pranced around onstage, giggling at one another.

Alterations like these have become part of a broader trend as opera clumsily reckons with its racist and sexist past. But if it hopes to win favor with younger listeners like me, opera needs to realize that shallow changes can’t erase the problematic foundations of season fixtures like “Turandot,” “Madama Butterfly,” “The Magic Flute” and “Carmen.”

The Orientalist stereotyping in “Turandot,” for instance, seeps into the music itself. The only way to get rid of it would be to rewrite the opera entirely, a revision that would destroy the classical canon. So how do we bring opera into the 21st century? How do we preserve the beauty of Puccini’s music, the likes of which will never be composed again, while also recognizing that it taints how we perceive Chinese women like me?

What beauty? And why should it be preserved at all? This is why False Leftists will never be able to kill Western civilization: they aren't even trying to do so.

Some critics argue for retiring problematic operas from the stage. While newer operas written by people of color tell their stories responsibly, they aren’t going to replace the classics anytime soon.

Firstly, we do not necessarily need "newer" operas. There are plenty of non-Western classics available. The fact that the author presumes "the classics" to automatically mean "Western classics" is a problem in itself.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive to diversify operas, both in composition and in casting. In fact, that’s ideal. But in the meantime, doing away with these works would destroy the art form, preventing us from reshaping otherwise beautiful compositions in powerful ways.
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The music in “Turandot’’ is entrancing; there is no feeling comparable to the force of an operatic finale. My hope is that more people will feel comfortable in the opera houses of my childhood. If we can hold Puccini’s musical genius in tandem with the racism of his time, there may be hope.

Secondly, it is not beautiful or entrancing or incomporable or ingenious. All who think it is are useless to us. To criticize Western ethics while promoting Western aesthetics is like trying to suppress the symptoms of a disease while encouraging the disease itself. The unflattering stereotypes of "non-whites" that the author complains about are direct products of the very same Western aesthetic standards that she admires, standards which - when applied to view "non-whites" - cannot help but see them as crude caricatures, precisely because they can never fit organically within the Western aesthetic pantheon. The radical (and only thus truly meaningful) solution is to reject Western aesthetic standards altogether:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-is-ugly-48/

REPORT: 100 Years of Hollywood Islamophobia

A new report from the Pop Culture Collaborative details depictions of Muslims on screen—what the entertainment industry must do to uplift Muslim narratives that don’t damage the community.

www.colorlines.com/articles/report-100-years-hollywood-islamophobia

‘Death to the infidels!’ Why it’s time to fix Hollywood’s problem with Muslims

The US government wants the movie business to help counter Isis propaganda. But from shady sheikhs to detonator-happy terrorists, Hollywood’s pervasive Islamophobia is already a big part of the problem.

www.theguardian.com/film/2016/mar/08/death-to-infidels-time-to-fix-hollywoods-problem-muslims

Arabs in Post-9/11 Hollywood Films: a Move towards a More Realistic Depiction?

Classical Stereotypes of Arabs in Hollywood Films Prior to 9-11 Events

Edward Said has pointed out that the prejudiced values which western culture had assigned to the Orient have been advocated through a discourse that helped to justify them. Said believes that “The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be Oriental in all those ways considered common-place by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be–that is, submitted to being–made Oriental.” (Said, Orientalism 5-6) Said argues that the truth about the Orient has been constructed and does not necessarily reflect how the real Orient is. Said makes his concern very conspicuous: he is not interested in the way western culture perceives the cultural practices of the Orient, particularly Arabs, as much as in the representative structure that generates general statements about the Orient, which he describes as uncritical, distant and reductive. Moreover, Ibrahim Kalin argues that the present misgivings about Muslims are due to the set of negative connotations that have often been allocated to the religion of Islam. These notions consistently present Islam as being inherently anti-reason, fixed and traditional. Kalin also relates the existing
3 misconceptions about the cultural and religious beliefs of Arabs to the deep-rooted prejudices about Islam that emerged upon its fast expansion in the eight century (Kalin 166). Kalan explains that Europe’s reactionary attitudes towards the fast growth of Islam have been manifested in the relentless attempts to distort the image of Arabs and their religious doctrine.

docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1056&context=revisioning

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Responding to this post:

All these existed in pre-colonial storytelling all over the world. The difference was, they existed unnamed, and as such as pure artistic inspiration unique in each instance of arising, that other civilizations tacitly understood was not to be arrested by categorization lest it spoil the literary experience itself. Only Western civilization was spiritually coarse enough to explicitly name them all, and thus reduce them to dead "devices", as Duchesne so eloquently put it. Henceforth anyone acquainted with such terms can never again appreciate a story (let alone write one) as innocently as before learning of such terms (and as we all did before such terms existed), but is forced to perceive a network of butchered devices. To the artistically sensitive, Western dissection of literature is almost as violent as Western vivisection of animals, and is certainly motivated by the same utterly insensitive Western thinking. In each case Westerners thinks they are doing the world a favour, totally disregarding what the "favour" feels like to their victims.

This dissection is not only limited to literature. I have noticed that Western film (and video game) critics (mostly on YouTube), for example are extremely snobbish in their criticism and think that by nitpicking all the supposed "flaws"* in movies and games (esp. non-Western movies/games) they sound smart and are doing their audience a favor by polishing their tastes. What's more infuriating is that they will not concede such tastes are subjective, and will instead instead there is objective metric by which they can measure the quality of the media. What do you think?

*While from an idealistic perspective, expecting perfection is acceptable and thus would warrant pointing out flaws, Western critics perceive "flaws" based on Western standards such as whether a certain movie/game is "realistic" enough, which is of course not in line with our views.

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"nitpicking all the supposed "flaws"* in movies"

A peeve of mine is the semantic degradation of the term "plot hole".

During the Counterculture era, a plot hole meant an event that contradicted an earlier event inside the storyline. For example, if the hero had just finished putting his handgun into a drawer, then someone breaks into the hero's house and the hero picks up the handgun off the table to shoot the intruder, that is a plot hole, because the handgun should be in the drawer. So far so good.

These days, however, a so-called "plot hole" mostly means any character failing to choose the best possible strategy available in a given situation. For example, if someone breaks into the hero's house and the hero reflexively tries to pick up the handgun off the table only to then remember that it is in the drawer, that is a "plot hole" according to many present-day critics because the hero "should have remembered" where his handgun was.

Bonus video:



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