Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 23:09:29 -0700
From: Paul Brians <brians-AT-mail.wsu.edu>
Subject: Re: East is East


I can't say I didn't find "East is East" amusing, but I also found it 
alarmingly stereotypical. No one can dispute that the director has 
expressed his own lived experience; but by providing no balancing 
context, he reinforces numerous stereotypes held by "Westerners": 
that all Muslims are fanatics, that they beat their wives, that South 
Asians routinely force their children into horrible arranged 
marriages without consulting them, etc. If there had just been a few 
other South Asian/Muslim figures in the film who reacted against the 
father's behavior besides his own children I wouldn't have had a 
problem with this portrait of a hypocritical brute. One wonders how 
much the director has generalized his own experience to the whole 
community and how much he just couldn't be bothered to provide a 
context.
-- 
Paul Brians, Department of English
Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99164-5020
brians-AT-wsu.edu
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians


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