Book Description
National Geographic magazine has long been a staple of home, school, and public libraries across the country. In Veils and Daggers, Linda Steet provides a critically insightful and alternative interpretation of National Geographic by examining one hundred years of its Arab world coverage. Steet's analysis of the discourses of Orientalism, patriarchy, and primitivism in the magazine's representation of the Arab world uncovers the ideological perspectives that have guided National Geographic throughout its history. Drawing on cultural, feminist, and postcolonial criticism, Steet generates alternative readings that challenge the magazine's claims to objectivity and to mirroring the world. In this fascinating journey, it becomes clear that neither textual nor visual constructions of Arab women andmen, of Islam, and of Arab culture in the magazine can be regarded as natural or self-evident, and it is artfully demonstrated that the act of representing others is never innocent. Steet turns National Geographic inside out showing that decade after decade, while Arabs were locked into predictable Orientalist interpretations, National Geographic was itself veiled and daggered. Veils and Daggers repositions and redefines National Geographic as an educational journal. Steet's work is an important and groundbreaking contribution in the areas of social foundations of education, cultural studies, feminist studies, social studies, and ethnic studies. Once encountered, readers of National Geographic will never regard it in the same manner again.
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About the author
Linda Steet is Associate Professor of Social Foundation of Education and Women's and Studies Program at the State Univeristy of New York. You may e-mail her at steet@geneseo.edu.
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
