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Kazakh critics who oppose the movement rightly point out that the comedy itself is not about our country, but about America’s internal prejudices. They also argue that, as Kazakhs, we should focus on rampant corruption, human rights abuses, and many other “real problems” in the country.
I dedicate my life to investigating the ways in which my administration’s policies have failed its people, and women in particular. I understand all the frustration and anger towards the political regime in Kazakhstan, which far overshadowed any grievance against Borat. Yet claiming that finding Borat problematic negates the ability to acknowledge the most important issues we face as a nation is a disservice to the many activists who advocate for both democratic change in Kazakhstan and accurate representation on the silver screen. It doesn’t have to be a question of either one or, as many Kazakh bloggers claim it is.
If Baron Cohen’s sole purpose was to poke fun at Americans, I wonder why he didn’t just invent a country for Borat. For example, your character from The dictator (2012), as offensive as it was in its reductive portrait of a nondescript “Middle East,” is not linked to any real country. Opting for a real country must have been a strategic choice, but it is also a product of an environment that exists in the Western film industry that allows its creators, particularly whites, to use and abuse other cultures for their own ends. The fact that few in the US know “far away” Kazakhstan also made it a safe option.
This wouldn’t be the first time that American comedians have used authoritarian countries removed from American popular culture to create content. In 2014, for example, The Interview, a comedy about the assassination of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, generated controversy. While the plots and fictional role of each country are significantly different, both films demonstrate how easy it is for Westerners to dehumanize people from “Third World” countries. This dehumanization has been used to justify and turn a blind eye to the oppression and exploitation of people of color, which I discuss below.
Accurate and respectful representation has proven to be something that communities of color had to strive for in carving out a space in Western cinema. Not all communities are large enough with a sufficient demographic presence to be able to do that. This leaves others in a dangerous zone where their names, history, and culture become expendable to mainstream Western culture.
A good example is a recent flash mob to commemorate the erection of a Borat statue in Sydney, Australia. A crowd of men practiced yoga in their “maskinis” with Kazakh flags around them. The importance of a flag to any nation state is obvious. Americans have to pledge allegiance to their own at school every day. As long as we live in a world made up of nations and exist in a global society where national identities have significant weight in how we view and judge people, why Kazakhstan advised to ignore Baron Cohen’s appropriation of their flag and be instantly subjected to questions about what do their frustrations indicate about the country’s post-colonial and xenophobic nationalism? Many people on Twitter who have joined #CancelBorat, for example, are particularly criticizing what they see as hypocrisy of the Western politics of representation and your failure to raise the issue of representational violence in Central Asia that has already been widely discussed in the context of other Asian communities, such as East Asia and Asian-Americans.
Context matters
While it is true that the creators of Borat did not intend to create a bad public relations campaign for an entire country, Baron Cohen’s initial goal of exposing American culture does not absolve him and his team from contributing to perpetual ignorance about the Central Asia region.
Kazakhstan’s unique positionality as an Asian country is crucial here. The comment comparing Borat’s character to the cartoonist depiction of Russians as villains, for example, constitutes a weak comparison when we think of the level of common knowledge about Russia as a country around the world and the constant erasure of Central Asia as a distinct indigenous region. Furthermore, the Russians retain their whiteness, which is not reproached in different situations and does not expose them to racist attacks and questions.
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