In my first post in the “The Aesthetic Turn” series, I spoke of the part of “our experience of a media object [that] exists prior to and outside of language.” I asked whether we could use language to describe it without denaturing the experience itself, and I concluded we can’t, at least not directly. But that doesn’t mean we can’t describe it at all, and in this post, I’d like to suggest how to approach it obliquely, through metaphor and translation. (This post began as a “Digital Lightning” talk I gave as part of a series put on by the University of North Dakota’s Working Group on Digital Humanities. As I spoke, I played Casino Royale in the background.)

I’m a sucker for a good chase scene. I love the elegant excess of the parkour chase at the beginning of Casino Royale, where James Bond (Daniel Craig) pursues a criminal who careens off walls and catapults through improbably small windows.

I love the silly excess of the freeway chase in The Matrix Reloaded, where one pursuit is layered on top of another (in cars, on top of cars, and in motorcycles on top of cars). My favorite right now is the four-deep chase-within-a-chase (and dream-within-a-dream) that marks the climax of Inception.

I want to ask a question about chase scenes that is really a question about something else. In a sense, I want to force two things together in an unlikely metaphor. What do chase scenes reveal about media and translation? I mean “translation” in a broader sense than linguistic recoding, although I mean that, too. The English word translate derives from the Latin transferre, meaning “to carry across.” It implies movement. Other languages (such as Finnish and Japanese) use words that emphasize mediation and transformation, rather than movement. Both, I think, are key: movement implies transformation as signs leave one sphere to become meaningful in another.

How do media shape the phenomenon of movement-transformation? What happens when, say, a TV show travels from one geographic or technological space to another? Few questions are more fundamental in media studies, and few have been asked as often, although we tend not to phrase questions in terms of translation. In the era of “new media” (whatever we mean by that), we frequently speak in terms of remediation: what happens when we view newer media through the habits of thought instilled by older media? This question has grown ever more urgent as media converge. What happens when a fan remixes a show, which then goes through YouTube, and then through a link on Facebook, before it gets to us? I want to shift the focus, however, from the media platforms and technologies to the “through,” the movement-transformation.

What happens at the point of “through”? Is there a logic to “through-ness”? Can we see everything that is happening, or are things hidden from sight? Here is my initial answer: In the process of transformation, a gap opens up between a sign before its movement and after. The original sign and its “translation”—the sign we substitute for it—do not evoke the same things. They might evoke similar things; in fact, translation as we have traditionally understood it—a form of rewriting in a different language—is premised on that appearance of equivalence. But we need to pay attention to the gap, which is a place of doubt and ambiguity. It is also a place where we can observe an experience of a media object that is prior to language. Still, our observation is oblique: how does it feel to enter this place of doubt? Does this ambiguity provoke unease? Something else?

So what does this have to do with chase scenes? I’m forcing a metaphor here, which is to say, I’m transposing a sign—chase scenes—from one context (movies) to another (translation and media). (Not for nothing does metaphor derive from the Greek μεταφέρω, meaning “to carry across.”) Through that metaphor, I’m opening a gap we experience (in part) by asking, why this weird juxtaposition? My purpose is to provoke a reaction—an “aha!” would be great, but a “what the hell” will do perfectly fine, too. The point is to use translation and metaphor to turn our attention away from the object (the chase scenes, the media platforms, the texts) toward our experience of the object. The move is admittedly quite “meta” (μετα?), but it is also potentially quite valuable, too.

This is the second post in Antenna’s new series The Aesthetic Turn, which examines questions of cultural studies and media aesthetics. If you missed guest editor Kyle Conway’s inaugural post last month, you can read it here. Look out for regular posts in the series (most) every other Wednesday into the new year.

One of cultural studies’ preoccupations—and really, this goes without saying—is the audience. Works as early as Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (1957) emphasized the value of asking what readers do with what they read (or listeners with what they hear, or viewers with what they see), rather than presuming to deduce their reactions from the texts themselves. From Hoggart to the CCCS to encoding/decoding to the Nationwide project to textual poaching to acafandom to spreadability—the through-line is clear.

In this context, I want to ask a pointed question about aesthetics. I have been teaching a graduate seminar this semester on production culture and aesthetics, a topic that was inspired in part by Shawn VanCour’s excellent Antenna post on the aesthetic turn in media studies. He argues for “the value of a specifically production-oriented approach,” and although I agree, I was more struck by his description of how the media effects researchers from radio’s early years were asking questions about aesthetics. They were concerned with media’s experiential dimensions, and thus they brought “aesthetics” back to its Greek roots (it derives from αἰσθάνομαι, which refers to perception or experience).

Indeed, this question of experience is not new. Aristotle posed it in his Poetics, where he was concerned with tragedy’s ability to lead an audience to a point of catharsis. Rudolf Arnheim posed it in his book on radio, where he asked about the psychology of the listener, whom he assumed to be passive. David Bordwell posed it in the first section of The Classical Hollywood Cinema, where he proposed that people watching a film make and test a series of hypotheses as a way to make sense of its plot and structure. This list is far from complete—in fact, it’s really just a reflection of the syllabus from my media aesthetics seminar.

But there is at least one aspect of this experiential dimension that cultural studies scholars have largely neglected. It seems to me (and I’m hedging for a reason) that part of our experience of a media object exists prior to and outside of language. Let’s call it a “gut reaction,” but let’s take that metaphor at face value—it’s a moment when our body registers a response that we can’t quite capture in words. Language here does both too little and too much—too little in that we don’t have words to describe what we feel in our gut (at least not completely), and too much in that the words we do have always mean more than we intend. (When we use a word, we must account for how the people we are responding to used it, just as that they accounted for its prior uses. The effect is additive: words accumulate meaning in ways beyond any individual’s control.) We must translate from our gut to our mind (that is, from raw experience to an account that’s mediated by language) and we lose something in the translation.

So why do I hedge above? Why “it seems to me”? Even my assertion that we experience media this way is subject to the double bind of language, its simultaneous deficiency and excess. This is an idea we can intuit, but—it seems to me—we can’t describe it without denaturing the experience itself. So what is the analytical value of this intuition? Are there ways to observe this experience directly or indirectly? What insight can it provide into the broader range of phenomena related to audiences? What insight can it provide into the moment of production VanCour highlights? Finally, what does cultural studies stand to gain from examining the aesthetic experience of the media?

*****

I’d like to invite other Antenna contributors to continue this discussion. I’ve contacted a handful of potential contributors already, but I want to extend the invitation more broadly. If you are interested, please feel free to email me (conway dot kyle at gmail dot com) or the editors. You needn’t respond to the questions I’ve posed here, although I’d love to hear others’ thoughts. I’m eager to encourage as rich and wide-ranging a discussion as possible.

Until recently, I would have to explain that Marilyn Hagerty writes restaurant reviews for the Grand Forks Herald. But not after what Anthony Bourdain calls “her infamously guileless Olive Garden review” a year ago last March. The review went viral when people elsewhere used it to congratulate themselves for having more sophisticated tastes or, in a second wave of comments, took offense that such earnestness would earn this salt-of-the-earth writer such scorn.

Now Hagerty has published Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews, whose title is pretty self-explanatory. I went to the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks as an undergraduate, and I’m faculty now. Reading her book was like visiting old haunts, many of them long gone.

Watching Hagerty go viral was a strange experience for people in Grand Forks—our town isn’t home to a lot of celebrities. What made it especially surreal was seeing ourselves reflected in the fun-house mirror of blog posts and news articles by people who have never been here but were sure they knew all about about us. Both reactions—the self-congratulatory and the offended on Hagerty’s behalf—seemed to come from the assumption that we’re earnest people immune to the irony that pervades the post-modern cosmopolitan world of the coasts. We’re simple and therefore worthy of disdain or admiration, or some combination. Or, as Anthony Bourdain writes in his preface to Grand Forks:

This is a straightforward account of what people have been eating—still are eating—in much of America. As related by a kind, good-hearted reporter looking to pass along as much useful information as she can—while hurting no one … This book kills snark dead. (p. ix–x)

In other words, what was striking was the claim, made at a distance, about what it means to be here. And by “here” I mean where I am sitting, in my house facing 3rd Street, just north of downtown. Bourdain’s observation is a symptom of a nostalgia for a simpler time, one that—from his perch in New York City—appears to exist here. The distance from there to here is one of time as well as space:

Grand Forks is not New York City. We forget that—until we read her earlier reviews and remember, some of us, when you’d find a sloppy joe, steak Diane, turkey noodle soup, three-bean salad, red Jell-O in our neighborhoods … A prehipster world where lefse, potato dumplings, and walleye were far more likely to appear on a menu than pork belly. (p. viii–ix)

So what does it mean to “kill snark dead”? Snark is what we get when we try through sarcasm to negate what other people say. We pull their rhetorical rug out from under them, so to speak, but in the most cynical way—we know they’re wrong, but we can’t come up with something better ourselves. The truth is, we have no rug, either. It’s a symptom of the post-modern cosmopolitanism of the coasts (which are no longer “prehipster”), or so I’m led to believe.

Marilyn Hagerty does not do snark. On the contrary, she admonishes her readers:

To me, it’s embarrassing when companions make noisy complaints in restaurants. In fact, I avoid complaining even when asked by the waitress if everything is OK. I usually just nod my head and say everything is fine.

But one of my friends tells me, “You are wrong.” She maintains that it helps the restaurant when you let them know what you don’t like.

OK. I’ll concede you should let them know. But I think you should do it politely. (p. 5)

But this doesn’t mean Marilyn Hagerty is simple or naive. Far from it. By Bourdain’s account,

In person, she has a flinty, dry, very sharp sense of humor. She misses nothing.

I would not want to play poker with her for money. (p. ix)

The few times I have met her, I’ve been left with the same impression. What people missed when they read her Olive Garden review is that her humor—what we might read as a refined sense of irony, even if she wouldn’t call it that—shows up in her reviews, if you know where to look. Her irony doesn’t take the form of snark, but it isn’t the simple earnestness for which Bourdain is nostalgic, either. It’s flattering for a town like Grand Forks to be noticed by people like Bourdain, but to the degree that their recognition of the town flattens out the experience of living here, it misses the point.

This is the view from my front yard. It’s not always so dramatic.

So what’s it like to live here? I can speak only from personal experience, but I don’t think I’m terribly different from other people here. I’m aware of what’s happening elsewhere. I travel there often. The fabric of the world beyond Grand Forks is woven into the fabric of Grand Forks, too, and it’s the tug between there and here that gives texture to the micro-structure of feeling (if I may abuse Raymond Williams’s useful term) that characterizes life here. Hagerty is aware of this, too. She travels. She takes the same approach to reviewing New York’s Le Bernardin as she does to reviewing the Grand Forks Olive Garden. The effect is funny and suggests there’s more to her approach than she’s letting on. Her humor is even clearer in the notes that accompany her reprinted reviews in Grand Forks. After her reviews, a quick note appears: “Topper’s succumbed to a fire and the site is now home to a bank” or “Starlite was evicted from the Grand Cities Mall in August 2002 for nonpayment of its rent” or “Mexican Village continues to operate in Grand Forks.” After her review of Le Bernadin, she adds, “Le Bernardin continues to operate in New York.”

(By the way, if you’re ever in Grand Forks, I recommend Rhombus Guys Pizza and, if your timing is right, the Saturday night dinners at Amazing Grains. I cooked for the Amazing Grains dinner once, and Marilyn Hagerty mentioned me in a column.)

For experience is […] a broadening and an identification, a passage from the particular to the universal, the experience [épreuve] of scission, of the finite, of the conditioned. It is voyage (Reise) and migration (Wanderung). Its essence is to throw the “same” into a dimension that will transform it. It is the movement of the “same” which, changing, finds itself to be “other.” (p. 44)

I thought of this passage when I read about the January 2nd deal to sell the U.S. cable station Current TV to the Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera. I have a longstanding interest in how TV news translates foreign experience for viewers (see here and here): How do journalists explain to viewers how members of a foreign culture understand the world and their place in it? But what makes the Current TV/Al Jazeera deal interesting is it inverts that question: How might a foreign network explain Americans to themselves? Might Al Jazeera provide something like an “experience of the foreign” for Americans? What would that even look like?

A number of analysts have provided useful accounts of the deal and its implications. (Here’s what the New York Times had to say, and here’s the Columbia Journalism Review.) Current TV began in 2005, a creation of Al Gore’s. At first, it had a populist, DIY-inflected approach, and it solicited videos from viewers. It evolved in the following years, never finding much of an audience. Most recently, it tried to brand itself as a liberal news outlet, and in 2011, it hired Keith Olbermann, formerly of MSNBC. It fired him a year later, but the image stuck. When the Al Jazeera deal was announced, pundits on Fox News began to rave about links between liberals and Osama bin Laden, leading the Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart to call the announcement the “first Fox boner alert of 2013.”

Al Jazeera, of course, is a network with a global reach that has so far failed to penetrate the US market. Al Jazeera English is currently available only in New York, Washington, DC, Burlington, VT, Toledo, OH, and Bristol, RI, for a total reach of just under 5 million viewers, although people can stream it online. What Al Jazeera gains in the deal with Current TV is not so much the network itself as access to its viewers. Current TV is available to about 40 million cable and satellite subscribers, although some cable operators dropped it after the deal with Al Jazeera was announced.

What makes the deal interesting to me is that Al Jazeera plans to launch Al Jazeera America instead of airing Al Jazeera English. Rather than focus on the majority world, as Al Jazeera English has done, Al Jazeera America will focus on domestic news, but from a perspective other than that of its major commercial competitors. As commentators like Danny Schechter argue, it could succeed precisely because it reaches viewers who don’t find themselves represented elsewhere:

An Al Jazeera America needs to plug in to and resonate with American sensibilities and our mix of opinion from A to Z, not just A to B. It needs to understand our country’s growing anger and frustration with such issues as inequality and dissatisfaction with posturing politicians of all political stripes.

In other words, Al Jazeera America’s “translation” might have a paradoxical effect: its “foreign” lens might bring into sharper relief distinctive (and distinctively) American perspectives that are absent from CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and even NPR.

Of course, I’m not sure Al Jazeera America is the right network or the only network to provide a foreign lens for Americans to examine themselves. And Matt Sienkiewicz is right to encourage a healthy skepticism where Al Jazeera’s claims are concerned. Nor am I so naive as to believe it will attract many viewers who aren’t already inclined to think outside of a “mainstream” American framework. But its potential to do something new will make it a very interesting network to watch.

* “Man” is the historically accurate term here — the Romantics were writing in the eighteenth century.

Why Little Mosque matters to viewers:

• Little Mosque was funny. Admittedly, this is a subjective opinion. Many critics found it “hokey” at best. (John Doyle, writing for the Globe and Mail, described it as “hokey as hell” and – consequently – “gloriously Canadian.”) What matters was the attempt by the show’s creator Zarqa Nawaz to take aspects of Islam that provoke a gut reaction of fear for many non-Muslims and use humor to cause them to take a second look. This was something new – its newness, in fact, was one thing that the CBC’s head of English comedy liked about it and one of the reasons he pushed for it to be green-lit. Even viewers who found that the show’s attempts at humor fell flat should appreciate the effort to find something new to air.

Why Little Mosque matters to television scholars:

• Little Mosque was the first North American sitcom about Muslims to feature an ensemble cast of Muslim characters. There are two important parts to this statement: the fact that Little Mosque was a sitcom and the fact that it featured a range of Muslim characters. Both of these were firsts. As a sitcom, the logics of representation differed from those of the news or dramas like 24. The structure of jokes allowed writers to say two things at once – jokes were funny because their literal meaning was juxtaposed against an ironic meaning. In this way, Little Mosque differed from the news, for example, where words’ literal meanings tend to predominate.

  The ensemble cast was another feature of the show that set it apart. Nawaz wanted to show a spectrum of viewpoints, from conservative to liberal, and a range of degrees of religiosity, from fervent to “fence-sitting,” in her words. This is not to say that all Muslims found themselves represented in the show, of course, but the show did present a case to consider when looking at attempts to overcome stereotypes of the Muslim “other.”

• Little Mosque demonstrated both the potential and the limitations of a mixed public/commercial system for creating programs that humanize people outside of the cultural “mainstream.” The fact that the CBC had the mandate to present regional points of view was one impetus for taking a risk on the show, as was the mandate to represent Canadian multiculturalism, although that mandate’s role was secondary. As a result, the production of Little Mosque reveals one set of conditions under which the Orient/Occident binary identified by Edward Said breaks down: Little Mosque was created by a woman who is both Western and Muslim, and the many people involved in its production operated in a constantly reflexive manner. In other words, the show developed in a different set of circumstances than those that “so far as European interest in alien cultures is concerned, have always been commercial, colonial, or military expansion, conquest, empire” (Said, p. 139).

  The commercial pressures affecting the CBC – a public broadcaster whose funding has dropped precipitously since the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney in the 1980s – limited what the makers of Little Mosque could do. For instance, Mary Darling and Clark Donnelly wanted to talk about how belief influences people, and as Darling explains, “There’s still a lot of religious content inside the show, we won some and lost some, but the push was always towards – we were always able to get a better hearing when we were like, ‘Hello! There’s a mosque in a church! Hello! Our characters believe in something.’” CBC executives, conscious of viewer expectations, thought that culture could motivate characters to belong to a religion, but they were resistant to the idea that belief itself could motivate them. As a result, the producers of Little Mosque could not explore religion’s influence to the degree they would have liked.

In the end, Little Mosque represented an incremental (not radical) break from programs that came before it. Many critics would have liked to have seen something edgier, a sentiment with which the executive producers agree. Darling says that one of their hopes is to be able to format the program, perhaps for the US market, and change the things that did not work the first time. I look forward to that possibility, although I suspect that the show would be shaped by similar pressures. In the meantime, however, I encourage viewers in the United States to watch Little Mosque, now that it has premiered on Hulu. It is a fun show, and it is imbued with a sense of hope that is uncommon in contemporary North American television.

One consequence of this complexity has been that critics have found in the show largely what they were looking for. As a show that “portray[ed] Muslims with humour in everyday situations,” argues Amir Hussain, Little Mosque “mark[ed] another important development” in Muslims’ self-representation on North American television. Mahmoud Eid and Sarah Khan agree: “Stereotypes about Muslims are refuted and criticized in this satirical comedy, which maintains balance between extremist logic and everyday Canadian values.” Others have seen it as erasing markers of diversity: “all of Mercy’s Muslims seem to practise the same way,” writes Faiza Hirji.

Another consequence has been that program buyers in more than ninety countries have thought that their national audiences would find something in the program worth watching. As executive producer Mary Darling explains,

[B]ecause we’re so interested in religious tolerance and these kinds of things, the conversation always turns … to something more social, right? So, first of all, if you’re a buyer, at the front of it, it has to be a comedy that [you] think will rate. It has to be a show that [you] think can go the long run, but what the conversation would – without a doubt – turn toward would be the issues that people are having with Islam in their countries. So when I think back to … Canal+ in France, there had just been more bombings and fires of cars or riots … and they thought this might be a good thing to just try to create some normalization … [W]e were invited into Paris for a big … cultural festival, and we went and talked at the Islamic center. Which to me really demonstrated why they’re having so many issues – because the taxi driver didn’t know where it was. Taxis don’t go into that part of the city.

One of the places where the producers struggled to syndicate Little Mosque, however, was the United States. (Another was Great Britain.) More than one person recounted to me how they had talked to people at US networks who expressed a personal interest in the show, even a sense of something akin to awe that the show had been produced at all, but who thought that US viewers would refuse to watch it. Given the response by some conservative bloggers to Katie Couric’s suggestion in 2010 that the United States would benefit from a “Muslim Cosby Show,” or the decision by Lowe’s and kayak.com to pull their ads from TLC’s All-American Muslim, such concerns seem well founded.

However, the event that prompted this series of entries is the upcoming premiere (June 28) of Little Mosque on Hulu. What made the difference this time, in contrast to the past? For one thing, Darling attributes the distribution deal to the personal connection that executives at Hulu made with the show: much like Anton Leo, who was instrumental in green-lighting Little Mosque at the CBC, the Hulu executives just “got it”: “They knew of the show, they screened some screeners in preparation for [our] meeting, and they just wanted it.” For another – and I think this is as important, if not more – Hulu’s on-demand distribution made Little Mosque seem like less of a risk. Darling observes that “from a buyer’s standpoint … people get axed so easily in the States for making a bad or risky decision.” The risk appeared smaller to Hulu because of its prior experience distributing programs that could not air on more conventional networks, including, for instance, subtitled Korean comedies that had done surprisingly well.

In this respect, Little Mosque appeared quite attractive: it was a solid hit in Canada, it had been syndicated in more than ninety countries, and its complete run was ready to air. It will be interesting to see whether viewers “tune in” to watch. Needless to say, I think they should, and in my next (and final) entry, I will explain exactly why Little Mosque matters, both to viewers and to scholars of television.

In my interviews with the makers of Little Mosque on the Prairie, it became clear that they recognized this, even if they might not have expressed it this way. They wanted Little Mosque to serve as a vehicle for this productive form of surprise, so that non-Muslim viewers would come to understand that the images of Muslims they saw in the news or on shows like 24 were partial and distorted. But they also recognized the economic and industrial constraints they faced in producing a sitcom, especially the need to please broadcasters and attract viewers and advertisers. They decided (quite deliberately) to follow the conventions of the sitcom, as Michael Kennedy, who directed more than thirty episodes over the show’s run, explains:

It was my belief, and the network executives’ strong recommendation, that the show would benefit best by being shot in a very clean and simple, straightforward manner, deliberately without any trendy contemporary stylish aspects such as handheld camera, etc. They wanted it to look very much like “a traditional sitcom.” It would be a traditional sitcom, with a very edgy topic. If it had been possible I am sure they would have shot it with 3 or 4 cameras in front of a live audience, like many successful American sitcoms.

In this respect, Little Mosque hewed to many of the conventions that mark the sitcom as fundamentally conservative, in particular the episodic structure of stasis-conflict-resolution-stasis. These conventions worked at cross-purposes with humor’s potential to draw people’s assumptions about the world into question.

So how did this situation play out? The many people involved in Little Mosque’s production negotiated their way between these conflicting forces throughout the show’s run, in ways that were registered in the program itself. To give only one example, the show’s mode of production changed when Little Mosque was picked up for a second season. Executive producer Mary Darling explains,

[S]eason 1 was … about issues, it was thoughtful, we had a lot of time to develop it. [In] season 2 we went … from a cottage industry [to] a factory model, and we brought in a show-runner who didn’t quite understand what it was we were trying to do. [As a result] we had a couple of decent episodes but we lost our way in that season, trying to be funny and relying too much on the jokes instead of the … relevant … conversation that’s happening in the world.

As Darling further explains, they reached a point where “if you just sort of forget about the rest of the world and just make funny episodes … then it’s just a bunch of funny people, some of whom are wearing a hijab.” In reaction to this situation, the executive producers, with the support of the show’s creator Zarqa Nawaz and the encouragement of people like the head of CBC comedy, Anton Leo, decided to abandon the conventional return to stasis. Darling explains:

So by the time we hit season 3, we went and talked to the CBC and said … we just thought with religion or spirituality or whatever word you want … to address transformational occurrences in a person’s life, there’s something measurable that goes with that, right? … I was feeling very much like we’re missing the heart now. We’re missing the thing where there’s a measurable transformation, so a character can have memory … I want there to be a memory of where we’ve been so that we can begin to measure where we want to go.

It was at that point that they introduced character and story arcs, an introduction that signaled a shift in the tension between the sitcom’s conservative nature and humor’s productive potential. When the sitcom’s conventions came to dominate the show in season 2, they decided to adjust course and change their approach to writing the show.

Negotiations such as these shaped the show for the rest of its run. It was because of them that the show was complicated and contradictory, allowing critics to see in it what they wanted to see. But that texture, nuance, and excess were also what made the show exportable, as I will discuss in my next entry.

Thus there might be the temptation to see these mandates as a causal factor in the show’s genesis, but to do so would be short-sighted. Instead, in my interviews with Zarqa Nawaz (the show’s creator), Mary Darling (one of its executive producers at Westwind Pictures), and Anton Leo (the former CBC executive who advocated that the show be green-lit), people told me that they were responding to a much more complex web of relationships: the one between non-Muslims and Muslims in North America, the one between majority and minority (or “mainstream” and “multicultural”) Canadians, and the one between viewers and the various members of the television industry. To be sure, these relationships overlapped and shaped each other: the relationship between non-Muslims and Muslims was influenced, for example, by the relationship between majority and minority Canadians, although it was in many ways distinct.

The various people involved in Little Mosque’s production were positioned differently in the communities between which they were mediating, and as a consequence, the factors that influenced their creative decisions differed, too. The factors shaping Zarqa Nawaz’s creation of Little Mosque were both intrinsic (related to identity) and extrinsic (related to global geopolitics). Nawaz was concerned about the growing conservatism of Canadian mosques due, as she saw it, to the influx of imams trained outside of Canada. Her identity as a Muslim and her convictions as a feminist provided an initial impulse, which was shaped in turn by factors deriving from global geopolitical events as well as her experience in Canada’s broadcasting and film industries.

Little Mosque creator Zarqa Nawaz.

The factors influencing Little Mosque’s executive producers, Mary Darling and Clark Donnelly of Westwind Pictures, were also intrinsic (related to identity) and extrinsic (related to global geopolitics and the Canadian television industry). As with Nawaz, questions of religious identity played an important role in the decision by Darling and Donnelly to produce the show. Darling and Donnelly are Bahá’í, holding unity across religion and race as a central value, and their faith plays a central role in their decisions about which shows to produce. Like Nawaz, they were concerned about the growing mistrust between Muslims and non-Muslims. However, their decisions were also shaped by their assessment of a show’s potential for success and their ability to secure funds for its production.

For Anton Leo, the creative head of CBC television comedy in the mid-2000s, extrinsic factors (the CBC’s regional and multicultural mandates) outweighed intrinsic factors (identity). Leo was well aware, of course, of the CBC’s multicultural and regional mandates, but for him, the question of those mandates was inflected through – and gained its relevance from – that of identity. He thought that Little Mosque had promise because it told a universal story, that of the immigrant experience, in a country where everyone (except, of course, for First Nations) came originally from someplace else. Multicultural programming, in his view, was programming to which a country of immigrants could relate.

There are many interesting things to note about how the people responsible for Little Mosque understood their relationships to the communities between which they were mediating. One is worth noting here: for Nawaz and Darling, the show was about religion, or even more to the point, about belief. For Leo, it was about culture. This difference shaped Little Mosque’s evolution, in conjunction with other features of the program that resulted in a complex show with multiple contradictory interpretations and meanings, as I describe in my next entry.

Over the next two weeks, at the kind invitation of the editors of Antenna, I will be writing a series of entries about Little Mosque on the Prairie, whose producers met with resistance for years as they tried to syndicate the show in the United States. Last month, they struck a deal with Hulu, meaning Little Mosque (no longer “on the Prairie,” at least on Hulu) will finally be available to US viewers, as of June 28.

I’ve spent the last year and a half interviewing the people involved in Little Mosque’s production, including its creator (Zarqa Nawaz), its executive producers (Mary Darling and Clark Donnelly of Westwind Pictures), its writers, and one of the executives at the CBC (Anton Leo) most responsible for getting the show green-lit. I wanted to know how humor becomes a medium for “translating” religion, especially Islam, in North America. My questions were prompted in part by reviews such as this one by Michael Murray, printed in the Ottawa Citizen on January 20, 2007, right after Little Mosque’s premiere:

One of the ways that new communities gain acceptance into the mainstream is through humour. Once you’re able to laugh at yourself and your environment, everybody tends to relax, and a sense of security sets in. And there is nowhere people feel more relaxed and secure than in front of the television set. So often the success of new sitcoms signals the acceptance and recognition of a new culture into the mainstream.

Through sitcoms, we’ve seen black, Italian, gay and Jewish cultures, amongst others, take their place in North America. Now, it seems, with the debut of CBC’s Little Mosque on the Prairie […] it’s finally time for the Muslim community to show Canada that they’re just another wacky and lovable family living amidst us.

Humor becomes the medium through which the Muslim community is transformed and ultimately domesticated (in the sense that Muslims become “mainstream” North Americans). But what exactly does this transformation look like, and what factors influence how it takes place?

The answer to that question, I’ve discovered, is complex. Humor, as Mucahit Bilici writes in an essay in Islamophobia/Islamophilia, holds the potential to draw stereotypes into question by casting them in a strange, unexpected light. The sitcom, however, is characterized by certain conventions that are fundamentally conservative, in particular the return-to-stasis that is typical of their episodic structure. These two features would appear to work at cross-purposes. In the case of Little Mosque, which feature prevails?

My purpose in these entries will be to answer that question, at least to a limited degree. In my next entry, I will address the genesis of the show, examining the role of the CBC’s mandate to reflect Canada’s multicultural nature. Then I’ll examine the program itself to address the question of humor head-on. After that, I’ll consider the obstacles that Westwind Pictures faced when trying to syndicate the program, especially in the United States, and the role of different logics underpinning network and on-demand distribution. I’ll conclude with some reflections on my initial question about humor as a medium of translation.