There is more to Images than Meets the Eye: A Visual-Social Semiotic Reading of Sasson’s Princess

This article focuses on diverse front covers of Sasson’s Princess: A True Story of Life behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia (1992) and tries through the visual-social semiotics of Kress and Leeuwen and postcolonial perspective of Whitlock to elaborate how images, especially book covers, have recently been deployed in the west to disseminate the neo-orientalist ideology in the last decade. To this end, two front covers of different editions of Sasson’s best-selling book, Princess, has been studied to discuss the ways the Western political discourse has altered the images of oriental women, used on the front covers, to further diverse ideologies. It is argued that with the change of the Western political discourse after 9/11 the covers of books like Sasson’s have also altered to suit the neo-orientalist, Islamophobic leanings in the West. Such changes not only foreground the old notions of “Western women/Oriental women,” “the self/the other” but also “represent” the West’s intervention in the Orient more as a humanitarian, feministic move than military aggression.