Ever since the Silent Cinema era, Hollywood’s writers, and directors have mostly drawn their images of Arabs and Muslims from a non-transforming repertoire of essentialist myths, uncritically accepted by the majority of the U.S. public as normative modifiers of these groups. The words “Arab” and “Muslim,” which are not normally considered as probable mutually exclusive identities, would usually trigger an image of primitive people; violent folks thriving on claiming each other’s lives and are, at best, plotting to terrorize and shed the blood of the civilized U.S. American. Unfortunately, this tendency to polarize Arabs and Muslims as a threat-posing Cultural Other has been carried further at the backdrop of the tragic attacks of 9/11. Not only have Arabs and Muslims become victims of the ramifications of an undefined global war on terror, Arab/Muslim Americans have also been subjected to racial profiling, preventive detention, and physical as well as verbal harassment in their home-country; all legitimized in the name of fighting a potential “home-grown terror.” It is in this context that Hollywood’s films have played a significant role in hyping, what I refer to as, the US vs Arab/Muslim trauma, and helped in misleading the US public to believe that the current discourse of terrorism is a mere product of a cultural, if not civilizational, conflict. Seeking to unpack such a trauma, Jeffrey Nachmanoff wrote and directed the thriller "Traitor" (2008), thereby, challenging Hollywood’s polarizing mode of depiction. Subtitled “The Truth is Complicated,” the film bids to differ through appealing to Arabs, Muslims, and US Americans, revealing the fallacy of stereotypes and misconceptions, and offering an in-depth look at the current discourses of “belonging” and “terrorism” in an increasingly globalized world. Central to this paper is a critical analysis of the film’s sharp contentions, uplifting messages, and realistic images, which I argue, constitute the tenets of a new paradigm that would capture, if not re-envision, a more constructive approach to the current deteriorating US-Arab/Muslim divide. Hence, the paper is considered a translation of an interdisciplinary effort, aspiring to link the methodology of Popular Culture analysis with the US-Arab/Muslim sociopolitical realities.

Hollywood has been instrumental in propagating images of Arabs and Muslims as terrorists – be it through dehumanizing caricatures or, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the United States, through more nuanced, yet, ahistorical representations. The American film industry has shown significantly less enthusiasm about screening the victimization of Arabs and Muslims through the Bush Administration’s War On Terror. One such film that tackles this thorny issue is Gavin Hood’s Rendition (2007), which puts “extraordinary rendition” or the U.S.-government-sanctioned kidnapping of unwanted subjects to secret prisons outside of U.S. territory, on screen. My paper investigates how Rendition imagines “nation” and the “West” as places for constructing identity and belonging. I am, in other words, interested in mapping how different notions of U.S. Americanness, Arabness, and Muslimness intersect and how they are negotiated in one of only a handful of U.S. American films that address this ugly side of U.S. state power. My paper argues that the film ultimately dislocates the practice of torture that is implicated in the practice of extraordinary rendition by casting Arabs and Muslims not only as victims of torture but as victimizers/torturers. By drawing from critical race theory, theories on nation-building, first-person narratives of former U.S. detainees, such as Murat Kurnaz’s Five Years of My Life, journalistic reports, and film reviews, my reading of Rendition embeds the film’s particular narrative within a larger cultural and political web of stories that make the film’s content possible in the first place. My investigation of Rendition is part of a larger inquiry into how “nation” and the “West” are defined in American films that depict terror, involve Arab and Muslim characters, and are based on concrete actual events. While other scholars have researched broader tendencies in U.S. film representations of Arabs and Muslims, I argue that, while there are, of course, patterns in representation and production, close readings of single films based on historical events help to unpack very specific assumptions about events and their relevance to national and Western identity formation. Close readings thereby in their detail, in my view, more effectively address the complexities involved in the already lengthy legacy of U.S. American representations of Arabs and Muslims.

There has been a saturation of representations of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. media since September 11, 2001. My research on representations of Arabs and Muslims in post-9/11 TV dramas has uncovered three common images and storylines: first, Arabs and/or Muslims as terrorists threatening U.S. national security; second, “good” Arab and/or Muslim Americans who work for the U.S. government in the fight against “bad” Arab/Muslim terrorists; and third, Arab and/or Muslim Americans who are the unfair victims of post-9/11 hate crimes. This second and third kind of representation, of the good/patriotic and victimized Arab/Muslim American, is a relatively new mode of representing Arab and Muslim Americans that raises important questions about the circulation of “positive” images of Arab Americans during the War on Terror. At MESA 2009, I will present some of my research on post-9/11 TV dramas with Arab/Muslim terrorism as its central storyline, with a particular focus on “24” and “Sleeper Cell.” Using a Cultural Studies approach that examines the meanings articulated by the media, I will present the numerous representational strategies deployed by writers and producers of TV dramas to circumvent reinscribing the stereotype of Arab/Muslim terrorists. Strategies include inserting patriotic Arab Americans into the storyline, inserting white villains alongside the Arab/Muslim terrorists, and presenting complex multi-dimensional terrorist characters. After delineating these multiple strategies, this presentation will ask: How effective are these strategies in circumventing stereotyping? What kinds of racialized meaning are being produced about Arabs and Muslims through TV dramas? How have justifications for war and the exclusion of Arabs and Muslims from human rights been predicated on articulating racial meanings alongside displays of racial sensitivity? How do such representations impact Arab and Muslim American experiences with citizenship and belonging? While the writers and producers of these shows might intend to create non-stereotypical and sympathetic portrayals, it is not unusual for individuals and institutions to appropriate these good intentions in order to diffuse racist policies and practices to prove that the U.S. has a liberal and enlightened culture. I argue that these strategies provide the illusion of racial sensitivity while producing covert forms of racism and reinscribing the Arab/Muslim terrorist threat to U.S. national security.

The US image in the Arab world in the post 9/11 era, and especially in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, has steadily deteriorated. How has the Arab media responded to the U.S. media's representation of Arabs and the Arab world? Just as the West has Arabized all Muslims, the East has Americanized the entire West. The post 9/11 anti-Arab/Muslim media campaign in the United States plays a crucial role in generating a new visual dialogue between the US and the Arab World. This paper examines the visual dialogue that is taking place between the U.S. and Arab media and the political, religious, and racial forms of this dialogue. On the Muslim side the actors participating in this visual dialogue hope to legitimize their attempts at renegotiating the Arab/Muslim world position in the international system; on the American side there are attempts to convince Americans that the US leadership status within the very same international system is positive. This paper focuses on the various forms of anti-U.S. and pro-Arab sentiment that mark the shoe-throw incident. Muntadhir Al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist, threw both of his shoes at President Bush during a news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad. His shoe-throwing act was accompanied with the epitaph, “This is a farewell kiss, you dog.” Hurling a shoe at someone is considered in the Arab world the most insulting act while Bush made light of it by making it a ‘way to gain attention.’ Through a visual and discursive analysis, my paper will examine how the Arab media represented the shoe-throw incident. I will focus on the clash of cultures that made many Americans, who prefer to throw their politicians with rotten eggs, unable to understand the logic behind Al-Zaidi’s act and look at it as an act of violence rather than a form of protest. Al-Zaidi’s act has been used by the Arab media to make a counter-stroke by exalting an Arab who was able to stand up and make a public show of resentment against the US president. This paper analyzes the responses this incident evoked in the Middle East. In particular, it shows the significant change in the representation of the US in the Arab media based on the observation of the current image and representation of Arabs/Muslims in the US media.

This paper examines images of the U.S. in selected Egyptian films, with a focus on the work of master filmmakers, such as Youssef Chahine and Khaled Youssef, produced prior to and after 9/11. I will show that these filmmakers’ representations of the U.S., in fact, heavily respond to the images circulated in the U.S. mainstream media, which tends to equate Islam and Arabs with terrorism. The resulting Egyptian cinematic counter-narratives, such as, Chahine’s The Other (1999), directly address U.S. dominant perceptions of Islam, and correct it by locating the roots of our current crises not in Hollywood’s iconic referent to terrorism, namely a Middle-Eastern, Muslim, male person, but in a system of brutal capitalism, racism and growing inequalities. In these counter-narratives, the U.S. emerges as the embodiment of brutal capitalism and the atrocities it commits with its military might. U.S. power dominates their aesthetic work, which resents the current world configuration and seeks to resist it. Yet, by drawing on Hamid Dabashi’s insightful thoughts on how to move towards decolonizing our analytical apparatus, I argue that the corrective mode of these films fixates on the workings of U.S. power and turns the directors to combative speakers with the imperial U.S., which is their main interlocutor. I argue that by doing so, these films remain blind to the many discursive possibilities that could more effectively resist their object of resentment: U.S. power. By doing close readings of film scenes, I will point out the absences and elisions these films resort to and offer alternative interpretive frameworks. I intend to suggest in the conclusion that an Arabs-in-relation narrative or a migrant-workers-in-relation narrative, in the context of the films I deal with, might be much more defiant of the colonial manufactured boundaries that enable and secure consent for imperialism than the angry reaction to the U.S. dominant perceptions of the Arabs and Islam.