The video today in class raised questions of representation. The argument being made was that the U.S. media was coming to Haiti to represent Haiti to the rest of the world but the Haitians didn’t really have a say in how they were being represented. The man from the video felt that they were misrepresenting Haiti and only showing “the bad.”

The idea of representation is a large part of our course and an important topic in contemporary culture. For example, misrepresentation perpetrated by the U.S. has been a large complaint coming from many Muslim communities. Iranian-born Shirin Neshat, in her TED talk “Art in Exile” talks about how she constantly has to fight how Iranian women are being portrayed in the U.S. media as powerless and oppressed. She works to find images of all the powerful, educated, and resilient Iranian women to show others in the Western world.

Jasbir Puar similarly discusses this concept in his essay “Homonationalism and Biopolitics.” He cites how the Revolutionary Association of Women from Afghanistan said that the Feminist Majority Foundation (from the U.S.) came to Afghanistan under the guise of “liberating” women but really came to spread and inculcate U.S. political and economic power in Afghanistan. The Feminist Majority Foundation’s “hegemonic, ego driven, and corporate feminism” came to position the U.S. as an “arbiter of appropriate ethics, human rights, and democratic behavior while exempting itself”  (Puar 8).

As we can see, the U.S. savior complex belies the assumption that because the U.S. is so “advanced,” it is their “responsibility” and “duty” to save the world from their “primitive” infrastructures. In both the Middle East and in Haiti, we see the U.S. media representing these places as below them, thus inciting a savior complex predicated on a false sense of superiority. The power of representation lies in the hands of who is doing the representing.

Works Cited

Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Print.