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Hollywood Orientalism is not about the Arab world
- donatj 5y agoStrikes me as a strange reaction. Dune is set 20,000 years in the future, on an entirely different planet. Races and religions are to have been completely mixed and jumbled in that time. I don’t read the Fremen as intended as any sort of direct middle eastern metaphor, they’ve little in common other than living in the desert and don’t play into tropes. The language of the book follows the jumbling of time, and borrows from a lot of languages, though likely most heavily from Arabic. This however is the shared lexicon of the universe, not just the Fremen or the planet Arrakis. It’s a very distinct imaginary culture, much like Tolkiens imaginary cultures. Arguing misrepresentation of someone not being represented in the first place is just confused and misplaced.