Culture sells! Exotic Falafel, made in the Orient!

Cool is so 90s! Exotica is now!

It is now official! Arabs are exotic, again! But while Edward Said tried to explain the first Orientalist hype as a distribution of geopolitical awareness on the grounds of Western domination over the Orient; this new ‘exotic’ craze is really all about falafel!

Falafel and Shirwal are exotic!

As the world is stripped out of politics in favor of a cooler, easily digested, commercial political celebrities, and as faiths and ideologies are narrowed down to slogans and differing lifestyles, other things seem to have an uprising value! That’s when Falafel and Shirwal became exotic!

Just a year ago I was struck by the sight of ‘blonde bombshells’ walking down Taksim, Istanbul in shirwals! Months later shirwal was re-adopted by cool upper-bourgeoisie class in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan as a fashionable summer outfit! Over the past few years ‘exotic’ has ‘out beaten’ ‘cool’ at many occasions, seducing lower to upper bourgeoisie in western societies as means of cultural consumption;

American pop music played oriental rhythms, celebrities started showing in belly dancers outfit, falafel took over Marks & Spencers ‘traditional food’ section and Melissa featured on an Akon song!

Well there’s nothing upsetting about that, specially that one can now take a girl out to dinner at a terribly filthy place at Al-Balad and still remain ‘exotic’! But the irony lies in this counter-stream consumption approach; as political and military tension arouses in the region, increase of restrictions and political and economic boycotting of entire populations, curiosity towards these cultures increased; and as appeared to some, curiosity sells! It always have! It sold all sorts of things, from shirwals, to falafels, to Buddhist books, to I love NY shirts, to an exotic African-American son of Hussein as president to Guevara’s most consumed poster in history, to Edward Said’s “Orientalism” book itself!

All this seems to be quite different from the counter-culture model of globalization everyone made such a fuss about; as if culture never experienced evolution, and it’s can-protected since our ancestors first invented Humos!

Culture sells, and Globalization is pro-market and not counter-culture!

And soon Falafel would be franchised and we would claim intellectual rights of our Falafel and whine like the Italians do over their stolen pizzas!

But either ways, Since Fukyama announced ‘the end of history’ there’s no place left to ‘deliver’, but rather much to sell/consume! So it’s almost ‘wise’ if we could start branding and packaging all sorts of consumer goods starting with falafel and all the way to packaging values, history, culture and all sorts of exotic things, preferably in colorful textiles with Arabic calligraphy and sell at competing prices!

Made in the Orient!