“Artists got ‘Homeland is racist’ Arabic graffiti into the latest episode of ‘Homeland’”
“Three artists say they were hired by a production company in June to paint graffiti as a way to bolster the aesthetic authenticity of the set on the outskirts of Berlin. But rather than scrawl the fake refugee camp with pro-President Bashar al-Assad graffiti, they hatched another plan, Cairo-based artist Heba Amin told The Washington Post: “What if we could use this as an opportunity to be subversive, to make a point with it?”…
“It’s very important for us to address the idea that this kind of stereotyping is very dangerous because it helps form people’s perceptions of an entire region, a huge region, which in turn affects foreign policy,” Amin told The Post. “It was a way to claim back our image.”
This is a great story partly because it’s just really amusing and ironic, but also because it so perfectly highlights how deeply clueless we can be about other cultures and especially about the Middle East. How actively clueless.
There is this show that is set in the Middle East, that is trying to represent the current events and the politics of the region, and it has so little regard for the actual people. How did no one read Arabic well enough to realize this? How did no one care enough about the grafitti artists?
Homeland will keep going, and the news cycle will turn and we’ll forget about this, but we really, really shouldn’t. This means something.
