The Odyssey Was the Opposite of Colonization

[00:00:00]The Odyssey was the opposite of colonization and Christopher Nolan is kind of an example of colonization. Let me explain.

[00:00:09]Hi, I'm Sema. This is Art Less. We talk about art and culture in context. So, why did Christopher Nolan film in the desert?

[00:00:17]I think one of the challenges is that we in the West very rarely hear about the complications of identity outside of it.

[00:00:26]So for example, I hear many Americans talk about how the six co counties of Northern Ireland should be removed. They should all be Ireland.

[00:00:38]That usually is discourse that the American Irish say, American ethnic Irish say. And much of the discourse in the Irish press talks about selfdetermination.

[00:00:49]So, it's not that the Americans or the British get to decide what happens to the six counties that are in Northern Ireland, but actually the Irish do. And that's a much more nuanced thing I just said. And nuance is not something American media is very good at. And so what you have is things like only one um genocide is talked about. And so the Sudin genocide or what's happening in the Congo is not paid attention to or things that are very complicated stories like in Myanmar the Buddhists are many times the ones who are attacking Muslims. And so it breaks a singular narrative our media is usually trying to push. Complexity and singularity are opposites. Our media loves singularity.

[00:01:38]And so one of the things that happens is when somebody is making a choice for something that costs money like a film, they basically often weigh cost over how much bad press they're going to get. And so for someone like Christopher Nolan, he probably knows there's not a lot of press about what's happening with the contested lands that are in, you know, what is contested land south of Morocco.

[00:02:07]And many many people don't know how much the people who are migrant people are suffering in that area. They are not a people with a clear and unified nation like Morocco. And so it is a story that is hard to tell.

[00:02:26]So he was like, well that story is probably not going to be told. And he felt like this would be fine. Now I will say the Sahara is quite large and there are other deserts too you know that that that he didn't think well I could just source something that is not contested land is a little bit hard to understand but that is me as somebody who's not a white man for a white man they might just see that this is their purview that they can just pick to film in this area and So he might have seen nothing wrong with what he did and he hasn't made a statement about it. He might still see nothing wrong with it. But it does highlight how much for the West stories that they don't know are stories that don't matter. And I would put into the same section the idea of people like Zenaia and Anne Hathaway wearing um artifacts that are mounted. Now let's start with Anne Hathaway's mounted artifacts. Now mounting artifacts is something that has a very long history like um the tomic Egyptians would use ancient Egyptian items in their um you know adornments.

[00:03:41]So we as humans have been taking human heritage and turning it into something new. Um many crowns from uh Europe if you look at them they have like a whole hodgepodge of stones and that's because they were remounting things. They were like, "Oh, that's a great stone. I want to look unpowerful."

[00:03:59]So, the idea that we remount things is not at all new or contemporary. And you know, Anne Hathaway's uh the the spokesperson for Belgari. And so, Belgari has a whole line and they're largely using things that have very clean provenence and things that are created in on mass like coins. And so, this is a coin from the reign of Carakella. And I think it's kind of funny because that is um was in the new gladiator m movie. Um they are the sons of the first Roman emperor who was um from North Africa and the sons had to rule together and then one son kills the other and it goes kind of a um so I don't know if that Bulgari knew that there was sort of a film reference in using the coin. I have no idea. But, you know, some people online say, "Well, you know, this is fine. It's coins. Like, there's a million coins and if it has clean provenence, we know where it came from. We know it wasn't stolen. It doesn't matter." [snorts] And I can see that. I um I just sort of bristle because we shouldn't be worried about what's right now, you know, a thousand years from now, how many coins are left.

[00:05:11]So, I that that's sort of my take. I wouldn't necessarily wear one or buy one, but hers is less problematic.

[00:05:18]Zenaia on the other hand is wearing earrings from the um Zway horde which is a very complicated story. What basically happened in the 1950s is that in what is now Kurdistan or you could say northwest Iran and it highlights that even that verbal where is this from is that the land was actually not nation. It was this was probably from maybe 3,000 years ago, probably 700 um BC. And so there were no nations. It was not the way we think of things. Um but the central Asia was completely um rich with communities and sometimes we call them the Cythians. Um and they were very good at making gold, but we also don't quite know who they are. What I think really is the sort of takeaway is Central Asia was full of a lot of different communities who were probably interrelated who probably traded with each other and then one of those communities in what is now Kurdistan and northwest Iran collected a lot of stuff. So you have jewelry from this horde that probably is cythian meaning kind of like northern that could be like Russian or um western China.

[00:06:38]You also have things that's Assyrian. So that's from what is now Iran. You also have some things in associated with this horde that could be Persian. So it's like a hodgepodge of amazing jewelry.

[00:06:49]the best of the best from 700 except for we don't quite know if they were all together because the find wasn't the first thing that happened in the 1950s there was a big desire to collect things and so people who were in communities that were not as wealthy throughout the world so Africa South America and Asia were you know this is post war this is the postwar era where the United States was booming but much the rest of the world was not. And so they were selling things on the black market. And so items come out and they get sold on the black market. And then somebody's like, "Wait a second. Where are all these coming from? Are they related? Because they're not all from the same place. They're not all the same culture. What's going on?"

[00:07:37]And so they finally come to a decision that's probably from this palace on this hill.

[00:07:44]But it is very complicated and still contentious. So when somebody as famous as Zenaia wears something that's that contentious and the um jeweler out of London Broom London was like you know I mean it's you can revert it like we didn't drill into the you know plaque so it it's okay um then we have the problem of really making sure we understand what is happening and so what we see in both the colonization filming and the jewelry wearing is that because these are so big and so prominent, we do not have the ability to share the nuance that really makes these make sense. And I will say I don't think any of these three situations make sense for the world we're in. They make sense for the world of the past, which is not the world we want. We don't want a world where people are still too poor and so stealing their cultural heritage. We don't want a world where people who are nomadic are being killed for being on land that their ancestors were on.

[00:09:01][snorts] in a movie about the Odyssey about a complicated person who comes to find home. I feel like we could have celebrated that story by not actually making mistakes, but instead by remembering the importance of home, heritage, and people, and keeping away from things that decrease that. Thank you very much for watching. Like, subscribe, and share for more.