Kyle Conway - Little Mosque on the Prairie and the Paradoxes of Cultural Translation

Two things make Little Mosque on the Prairie both different from other shows and valuable as an object of sustained study. First, its creator and producers took a deliberately interpretive approach, in contrast to most shows where the value of Muslim characters if there are any at all is the role they play in the structure of the plot. Muslims frequently are villains or, as has been the case since 9/11, innocent victims of people who believe the stereotype that Muslims are villains (, 2045).

Second, Little Mosque used humour to talk about Muslims. characters in Little Mosque were Muslims, but they were also works of fiction, a fact that jokes helped bring into the foreground.

To understand how these two traits worked together, we could ask producers about their work. The people involved with Little Mosque, from the originator and producers to the writers, directors, and actors, were reflexive in their work. But their explanations show the influence of contradictions within the television industry. Although they wanted to humanize Muslims, they were careful not to appear didactic for fear of alienating viewers. Nawaz explains, I dont feel like there was ever any real attempt to educate or to teach anyone, but because it happened to be about Muslims, the stories revolved around Muslim issues (interview with author, 2011). Darling echoes Nawaz: I see Little Mosque on the Prairie as a show which should have been able to air on any of the channels ... we went in with a very strong interest in the content for our own reasons, but those reasons couldnt become preachy or didactic, or it wouldnt have gotten 2.1 million [viewers] on its first airing (interview with author, 2011).

In other words, the people who made Little Mosque wanted to counter stereotypes about Muslims by helping viewers understand them better, but they also wanted to create a successful show. The pursuit of commercial success restricted their choices about how to interpret Muslims to a wider audience. This contradiction appears in their accounts of the show: they described both goals improved understanding and commercial success as primary, but they often elided those points where they came into conflict. Thus, we must go beyond their accounts to understand how Little Mosque performed the work of representation. What are the implications of this contradiction? How did it shape the interpretive work Little Mosques makers wanted to do? How did humour help resolve the contradiction?

We need a different analytical lens. The contradictory forces that shaped Little Mosque also created a series of paradoxes, variations on the theme of the erasure of difference in the name of diversity. But these paradoxes were not absolute, and they allowed for a certain give and take among producers, network executives, and audiences. To ask questions about the limits of the interpretive impulse, in this chapter I draw from the field of translation studies, which has been examining these limits for four decades. I use the lens of cultural translation, or the negotiation that takes place when people try to substitute a sign in one semiotic system for a sign in another. I begin by describing why such substitutions are necessarily imperfect. I then identify the people involved in the specific negotiations that led to Little Mosque and examine how these negotiations played out during production, how they became manifest in the program itself, and how audiences reacted.

What I demonstrate is that two things make jokes valuable. First, by saying two contradictory things simultaneously, they create a set of formal conditions for change: they present people with alternatives to the stereotypes they usually see. Second, by making people laugh they act as a potential catalyst for causing them to question their prior assumptions. Whether this potential is realized that is, whether viewers question their assumptions depends on the viewers, but the value of identifying the formal and affective dimensions of humour is the insight we gain into the mechanics of sitcoms and cultural translation.