There's more than meets the eye in the Orientalist 'Batalvi' video
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The Swet Shop Boys’ video is, to me, a self-aware Orientalist piece of media. Indeed, from the clips of women dancing in Bollywood films, to the clips of men carrying guns and protests in South Asian streets, all of them represent some form of Orientalist thought or projection that the West has constructed through years of fabricating the ‘Orient’. As Saïd states, the West’s dismissive representation of Oriental women as sensual beings, quiet, and of Oriental men as violent and uncivilized terrorists has created an expectation of Brown people in the eyes of the Western audience. But, can Brown artists use that to their advantage?
The most obvious Orientalist element, and perhaps the most ironic, is the Arabic script used in the subtitles. To the knowing eye, the Arabic script is completely nonsensical and is nothing more than a series of letters (in English, it’s basically “A S W E W K B Y T R”), but to a Western audience, that script could very well be real subtitles in Arabic, Punjabi, or even Urdu. What do they know? What's the difference, anyway?
Perhaps, the choice of presenting Orientalist elements to a Western audience serves to reclaim these images, the script, and this culture. Bald argues that embracing the fabricated Orientalist identity can be empowering in some circumstances, and I argue that this is one of them. By using a script that a Western audience can faintly recognize but not understand, the Swet Shop Boys maintain this script as their own, only for them and audiences who know it to understand. The clips show stereotypical and Orientalist representations of Brown people, representations that fit with what the Western audience expects, which creates an illusion of understanding the art. This Western understanding, however, remains limited by its own imagination of what the Orient represents.
To the Swet Shop Boys, the practice of gatekeeping their culture by showing a Western audience these expected and stereotypical images, allows them to make palatable art for the Western masses and art that they think they understand. To audiences that share an ethnicity, a language, or an ‘Oriental’ identity with the Swet Shop Boys, the irony of these images is not lost on them. Indeed, it seems to me that the Swet Shop Boys’ video is an ‘Easter egg’ or an inside joke that is protected from the Western audience, accessible only to those with a more nuanced, personal, real, and self-aware point of view.
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This is the film studies analysis of "Batalvi" I was waiting for. Much respect.
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I really liked the opening and ending quote " Life is a slow suicide " I feel it says a lot with few words.