>>3986472Context:
Orientalism is a concept by Edward Said, a Palestinian professor who found that Western representations of the Arab world were vastly different from his own experiences growing up in Cairo and Jerusalem. He wasn't white or a lib. There's a lot more to it, but the gist is that Orientalism is the way the West perceives of — and thereby defines — the (Near and Far) East: A negative mirror-image of the West. It asserts that whatever the West isn't, the East is. If the West is civilized, rational, scientific, and progressive, and masculine, then the East must be uncivilized, irrational, sensual, feminine, and rooted in a timeless primitive past. The West weaponized these views as ideological justification for the colonization and subjugation of the East.
As a side note, Orientalism historically arose both from an attempt to “honor” Eastern cultures as well as to redefine them for the West. Orientalism claims to be a faithful recreation of Eastern traditions and peoples, but really draws upon real practices and traditions to create an Eastern construct that is largely exaggeration and myth.
The issue with the artwork:
We don't exist in a vacuum. It's Orientalist. It furthers racist stereotypes that have caused real world harm. Instead of picking any literally any culture in the Near East and googling their traditional clothing, the artist instead was lazy as fuck and fell back on their Orientalist view of the region and its people. Ekko is labeled "Sultan" but isn't wearing anything an actual Sultan would've worn, or even a fictionalized version of what a irl Sultan would've worn. Instead he's wearing a sexualized outfit based on centuries of sexualized Orientalist depictions of belly dancer outfits—an outfit purely based off the horny imaginations of racist Europeans from the 19th century.
tl;dr the artwork is based on and perpetuates racist stereotypes
All that said, the art is technically proficient and Ekko looks hot, so I saved it
