One For All and All For One

I was recently reading an essay by sociologist and comics scholar Casey Brienza about the rise of American manga titled “Books Not Comics: Publishing Fields, Globalization, and Japanese Manga in the United States” (first published in Publishing Research Quarterly.) Most of the essay is an interesting discussion of the format rejiggering by Tokyopop which triggered the manga boom in the U.S. However, at the very end, she broadens her net a bit to focus on the implications of globalization in general.

This is the great tragedy of globalization. Although globalization has changed the world in which we live dramatically, there are places within our interior worlds that even those outward changes cannot penetrate. There is an irreducible distance between different people and different cultures that globalization cannot bridge. Much of manga’s “cultural odor,” to borrow a term from Iwabuchi, is preserved intact on the level of content. But as the manga field migrates into the book field, and manga became just another category of books, like cookbooks, science fiction, or biographies, actors throughout the field will slowly lose their ability to detect that odor at all. Therefore, even though we may all be looking at exactly the same pictures and reading exactly the same prose, there is no positive guarantee that, when we do so, we are seeing anything else besides our own, forever-separate selves reflected back at us.

For Brienza, cultural imports do not change the importer; instead, they themselves are altered. Manga doesn’t make America more Japanese; instead, America simply swallows manga and turns it into plain old bland American books.

In Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the Center of Taste, Carl Wilson observes the same phenomena of cultural adaptation…but he sees it as a positive, not a negative. In discussing Celine Dion’s global appeal, he notes that she has to be marketed carefully and specifically to each global region. Instead of creating a one world of Dion, she has to change herself to fit each niche. Wilson writes:

Now a successful artist has to figuratively become local by fulfilling entertainment conventions in other parts of the world. It is less homogenization than hybridization of cultures. As Jan Nederveen Pieterse of the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague writes, “How do we come to terms with phenomena such as Thai boxing by Moroccan girls in Amsterdam, Asian rap in London, Irish bagels, Chinese tacos and Mardi Gras Indians in the United States…? Cultural experiences, past or present, have not been simply moving in the direction of cultural uniformity and standardization.” He suggests what we’re witnessing is a “creolisation of global culture.” It does not follow that creolization will take a standard form. Localism is ignored, as Celine’s marketers know, at peril. Likewise the global hegemony model presumes there won’t be reciprocal cultural influence on the West, but the counterevidence is all around us: Asian video-game music, for example, is arguably among the most pervasive influences on young pop musicians now. And as Pieterse points out, with the exception of isolated indigenous groups, civilization and hybridization have been synonymous for centuries.

Canadian singer Celine Dion and Japanese signer Juna Ito

So where Brienza laments the hybridization and adaptation of borrowed cultural objects, Wilson celebrates it. Where Brienza experiences a loss of manga’s unique cultural smell, Wilson argues for the joyful blending which results in Asian video game music taking on an altogether new odor in an American context.

As a final take on globalization, here’s Nadim Damluji’s essay about Mickey Mouse in Egypt, written a while back on HU. Nadim discusses an Uncle Scrooge story about Egypt which was reprinted in an Egyptian comic.

The Western ducks discover a historical landmark that the Disney Arabs were incapable of finding on their own and what naturally follows their act of discovery in a foreign land is their immediate sense of ownership (Christopher Columbus much?). Furthermore, we as readers are lead to believe that the pyramids do not possess inherent value for their historical and cultural significance, but only for their ability to hold potential treasure. You see, without this treasure it wouldn’t have been worth digging out the pyramid, not worth hiring the cheap Arab labor. Lastly, we see the popular trope of Pharaonic culture being used as shorthand for all of Egyptian culture. In other words, traveling to Egypt for the Ducks is traveling into the past, not into a different contemporary culture.

Ultimately, I believe the real harm of this story is that it was tucked within the pages of a comic’s magazine that had Mickey wishing young readers Happy Ramadan or celebrating Mawlad on the cover. Mickey was localized insomuch as he could help Disney sell more comics globally, extending their commercial reach deep in to an emerging comic’s market. To be an avid Miki fans means to be an avid internalizer of the importance of capitalism and hence a way of seeing the world that makes certain countries first and others third. Mickey Mouse certainly has a big place in the history of Arab comics, but I believe it is a history whose depth we must challenge and whose psychological harm may be immeasurable.

Against Wilson’s joyful vision of hybridization, Nadim sees the same old hegemony. And where Brienza mourns the fact that cultural objects don’t change people, Nadim mourns the fact that they do. For Brienza, manga is altered so much that it loses its foreign flavor; for Nadim, Uncle Scrooge is given just enough foreign spice so that Egyptian readers can be poisoned by it.

So is globalization bad because it does not make us more alike? Is it good because it does not make us more alike? Is it bad because it does make us more alike? Or (as a possible fourth position) is it good because it makes us more alike?

Or, to put it another way, is the world better if people are more alike or less alike? And how does globalization affect that?

Philosopher Alain Badiou argues that these are the wrong questions. In his book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Badiou insists that, in terms of the movement of global capital (both economic and, presumably, cultural), homogeneity and diversity are not in opposition. They’re the same thing. Wonderful hybridized Arab Mickey and sneaky Mickey hegemon are not opposed — they work together.

Our world is in no way as “complex” as those who wish to ensure its perpeturation claim. It is even, in its broad outline, perfectly simple.

On the one hand, there is an extension of the automatisms of capital, fulfilling one of Marx’s inspired predictions: the world finally configured, but as a market, as a world-market. This configuration imposes the rule of an abstract homogenization…. For capitalist monetary abstraction is certainly a singularity, but a singularity that has no consideration for any singularity whatsoever: singularity as indifferent to the persistent infinity of existence as it is to the evental becoming of truths.

On the other side, there is a process of fragmentation into closed identitities, and the culturalist and relativist ideology that accompanies fragmentation.

Both processes are perfectly intertwined. For each identification (the creation or cobbling together of identity) creates a figure that provides a material for its investment by the market. There is nothing more captive, so far as commercial investment is concerned, nothing more amenable to the invention of new figures of monetary homogeneity, than a community and its territory of territories…. What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments in this upsurge — taking the form of communities demanding recognition and so-called cultural singularities — of women, homosexuals, the disabled, Arabs. And these infinite combinations of predicative traits, what a godsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles, moderate Muslims, married priests, ecologist yuppies, the submissive unemployed, prematurely aged youth! Each time, a social image authorized new products, specialized magazines, improved shopping malls… (All italics are Badiou’s; ellipses are mine.)

So, for Badiou, Celine singing first in Spanish then in Japanese is not a sign that hegemony has been defeated. It’s simply the flip side of the universalism of capitalism; the reduction of every individual soul to a marketing demographic. Similarly,a truly Egyptian Mickey Mouse (or truly Muslim superheroes) would not resist the logic of Western hegemony; it would simply reinscribe the identity of “Arab” on which (with all other identities) Western hegemony depends. The world is one giant bland glob, but not because, as Brienza would have it, we our trapped in our own national identities. Rather, it’s because all identities are the same identity. The lack of smell when you read manga is not a product of Americanization. Rather, the lack of smell is the result of the fact that an identity based on reading manga, whether Americanized or not, is an identity that it entirely permeable by the market.

So if, for Badiou, homogeneity and heterogeneity are the same thing, what exactly is the alternative? Well, among other things, I think he’d probably like us to ignore “culture” all together (he has acid things to say about the flattening of “art” into “culture.”) But more than that, he argues for the primacy of the Event.

The Event for Badiou is something like a miracle and something like a paradigm shift; Paul’s revelation on the rode to Damascus is his exemplar. Subjects do not experience or create the Event, rather they are created by it, and remain subjects to the extent they keep faith with it. Childbirth makes you a mother; having your mother shot makes you Batman. The Event, and your continued investment in the event, is who you are.

In the wake of the Event,individual differences are neither obliterated nor homogenized. Rather, they are accepted without being fetishized or even especially emphasized. So, for example, in Twilight, whether a vampire is white or black, male or female, is unimportant, not because those differences vanish, but because the vampire’s subjectivity is created by the Event of the transformation.

Neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female in vampirism.

Similarly, Badiou points out that for Paul whether Christians were circumcised or uncircumcised made no difference. Thus, Badiou argues, for Paul, Christianity was not a sectarian identity among many, but an insistently universal human subjectivity, available to all through faith in the Resurrection, rather than through coercion or insistent self-demarcation. (Badiou, presumably, hates the Inquisition and Christian pop about equally.)

Badiou’s formulation raises perhaps as many questions as it answers. As just one example —how can you tell a sectarian identity from a universal one? Aren’t the vampires in Twilight themselves essentially a subculture? Isn’t Christianity an identity? Moreover, Badiou bases his whole thinking on idea that the Event constitutes Truth — but his paradigmatic Event is the Resurrection, which (as an atheist) he insists is false. So how exactly do you tell if the Event is true? And if Christianity was not universal because it was true, why was it universal?

Still, arguing with Badiou is, I think, a helpful corrective to arguments about globalization, which can slip rather quickly into disputes about the ideal purchasable cultural product. For Badiou, such managerial fiddling at the marketing margins is a depressing simulacrum of utopian thinking. If we’re going to dream, why not imagine a world where our souls aren’t for sale — where, as Bert Stabler said in a recent comment, “everyone can create shared institutions that aren’t niche markets or normality factories.”

Can The Subaltern Draw?: Waiting For Nabil Fawzi

Welcome to “Can The Subaltern Draw?,” a new monthly column by Nadim Damluji that will explore what comics look like in the in-between space of cultures. Two things: Column title should be pronounced with tongue in your cheek and the author really agrees with Anne McClintock, especially when she writes: “I believe that it can be safely said that no social category should remain invisible with respect to an analysis of empire.”

One of the main reasons I embarked on a year of comics-related travel was to find historical proof that non-Western alternatives to Tintin existed. One of the stops in this journey was Egypt, where I was looking specifically for a regional comic book hero that children from all over the Middle East idolized, learned from, and escaped through. Where was the Syrian version of Astro Boy hiding? Why doesn’t the Arab World have a Superman?

In 1964, an editor at Lebanese publisher Illustrated Publications (IP) seemingly answered this very question in the form of mild-mannered Nabil Fawzi. As catalogued in an excellent 1970 article from ARAMCO Magazine, IP reasoned the Middle East contained a potentially viable market for the same adventure comics that had become popular (and profitable) in the United States; comics like The Adventures of Superman. But instead of creating a Superman-like hero for an Arab audience, IP decided to teach the man of steel himself how to speak Arabic through translating the already abundant English editions of the comic. With these translations we bear witness to the the birth of Nabil Fawzi:

“The first comic strip to be issued in Arabic by IP was Superman. In the guise of Nabil Fawzi, a reporter for ‘Al-Kawkab Al Yawmi’ he swooped into the Middle East from distant Krypton on February 4, 1964, to the instantaneous delight of thousands of young Arab children.”

Translation: Superman IS Nabil Fawzi

Indeed, while it has been exciting to find plenty editions of the Arabic Superman (technically pronounced “Suberman”) in my Egyptian book market excursions, it is very weird to see the well known hero recast with the name Nabil in a presumably Arab Metropolis. I say “weird” because all that has changed is the name. Essentially a big eraser was taken to the English text and the editors at Illustrated Publications (after convincing Western publishers to license the material) retold the story of arguably the most famous American superhero to a captivated Arab audience. In order to give you a sense of what exactly these alterations look like, I’ll pause here for a bit of show and tell. First let’s look at how some covers changed:

English covers via the archive at Cover Browser.

Before I found their English counterparts, I was confounded by these Arabic covers. As you can see, the most noticeable difference is that most of the text — sometimes known as “context” — is removed. I found both scenes so confusing that my best guesses were up top the artists were depicting a Zombie invasion and below they were illustrating that one time Nabil mistook a weeping child’s room for a phone booth. Another noticeable difference is the color palette, which takes on a different shade in the Arabic versions. The blond crying boy turns into a red head, and Superman’s signature “S” gets a less iconic red and pink treatment. Beyond the covers, the “S” on the chest represents the most glaring difference throughout the Arabic translations:

Since Arabic moves right to left, the “S” was inverted along with the rest of the art before being translated. For me that backwards “S” serves as a visual cue throughout the entire translated series of how misplaced “Nabil” is in his Arabic surroundings. In fact, I find the whole translation of Superman to be a somewhat problematic venture, insomuch as it deferred the creation of a uniquely Arab superhero in favor of re-presenting a clearly American icon. You can change his name, place of employment, and hair color hue, but at the end of the day Nabil Fawzi still looks like American-bred Clark Kent. This new idol for Arab children — and a lot of them considering IP publishing  2,600,000 translated copies annually — was identical to the long established idol of American children: a superhero living in a big Chicago-like city but raised and moralized on a small Kansas farm. Ultimately, the name “Nabil Fawzi” does as good a job at disguising this true identity as Clark Kent’s glasses do at obscuring his identity as Superman.

Back in 1964 (especially in 1964), other Arabs shared this concern. As the ARAMCO article recounts, there was a real objection to importing a Western product instead of generating a new superhero out of the rich Arab history and artistic talent. Unfortunately, the article brings up this criticism as steadily as it dismisses it as “impractical” based on the testimony of Leila Shaheen da Cruz, then publisher of Illustrated Publications. As she states in 1970 on the reality of creating an Arab superhero instead of translating an American one:

“That kind of art work, story continuity and long-range planning, is still unfamiliar to most local artists or is too expensive. The adventures of Sinbad, the Sailor, for example, would be a natural out here, and we know that there would be a rich market for an adventure strip based on the exploits of Arab commandos. But so far we haven’t found a local cartoonist who is not either inexperienced or overpriced.”

The main reason I contest Mrs. da Cruz’s assessment is because I have in my possession Arab comics dating back to the 1950s which refute her claim that local cartoonists were “inexperienced,” and bearing in mind the original retail value of these issues I doubt their talent was “overpriced” either. Indeed, creating Nabil may have been a good business decision, but it is deeply unfair to claim that a profitable business choice was creating a cultural product that Arabs could not.

Now for a moment of contrapuntality: I don’t think that translating Superman was a completely deplorable endeavor. For one, his success ushered in a string of other well-known comic book heros. Superman was soon followed by Arabic versions of Batman and Robin (renamed “Sobhi and Zakhour”), Little Lulu, Tarzan, and The Flash. These are comics that I grew up reading in Lebanon, and I concede that on some level a child escaping through comics is a child escaping through comics no matter where that child happens to read them.

In retrospect, Superman’s presence in the Middle East served as an integral chapter in the history of Arab Comics as a whole. One can argue that without Nabil Fawzi fighting evil from the 60s onwards, we wouldn’t have many of the talented regional artists we have creating comics today. In fact, many of the generations who read Nabil as kids later grew up to challenge his faux-Arabness. Take for example The 99, an extremely popular Arab superhero comic created by Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa. These comics feature the same tropes found in issues of Superman, with the chief difference being they are actually Muslim heros (with powers based on the 99 attributes of Allah) for a new generation of children to look up to.  Bringing it full circle in a way, a recent crossover event featured members of The 99 fighting crime alongside DC’s Justice League (of which Superman holds a membership card). In an interview I conducted with Dr. Al-Mutawa in Abu Dhabi, he explained that The 99 was created precisely to form new positive associations with Islam among children globally. Just as Superman was being Arabized in the 1960s, today The 99 is being translated for an English speaking audience. Encouragingly, this time around characters like Dr. Ramzi aren’t being recast as Dr. John in translation.

I’ll leave you with a subversive contemporary take on Nabil Fawzi and his famous friends that was recently spotted in Indonesia — the country with the highest population of Muslims — and subsequently made the blog rounds. Isn’t it strange to see Mr. Fawzi putting his actions where his name is?

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Another link to that indispensable ARAMCO Article that this post heavily relies on is here. I also highly recommend checking out these scans of the same article that some kind soul put on the web. Those certainly are some wonderful accompanying graphics.

Speaking of, here is one more cover comparison that I didn’t want to clunk up the body with: