European journal of American studies

15-3 | 2020 Special Issue: Media Agoras: Islamophobia and Inter/Multimedial Dissensus

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/16138 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.16138 ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher European Association for American Studies

Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 15-3 | 2020, “Special Issue: Media Agoras: Islamophobia and Inter/Multimedial Dissensus” [Online], Online since 22 September 2020, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/16138; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.16138

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European Journal of American studies 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Media Agoras: Islamophobia and Inter/Multimedial Dissensus. Introduction Elena Furlanetto and Frank Mehring

Islamophobia and Literature

Fear of an Islamic Planet? Intermedial Exchange and the Rhetoric of Islamophobia Stefan L. Brandt

Islamophobia and TV Series

Inter/Multimedial Constructions of Islam in Post-9/11 TV Series: The West Wing and 24 Brigitte Georgi-Findlay

Islamophobia and Necropolitics

Islamophobia without Islamophobes: New Strategies of Representing Imperialist versus Suicide Terrorist Necropolitics in Homeland and Syriana Mahmoud Arghavan

Islamophobia and Film

The Reluctant Islamophobes: Multimedia Dissensus in the Hollywood Premodern Elena Furlanetto

Islamophobia and Graphic Novels

Holy Terror!: Islamophobia and Intermediality in Frank Miller’s Graphic Novel Frank Mehring

Islamophobia and Performance Art

Challenging Islamophobia through Intermediality: Anida Yoeu Ali’s Performance Art Martina Pfeiler

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Media Agoras: Islamophobia and Inter/Multimedial Dissensus. Introduction

Elena Furlanetto and Frank Mehring

Agora, n.: A public open space where people can assemble, esp. a marketplace, originally in the ancient Greek world; the structures enclosing such a space. Oxford English Dictionary

1 During the last years, different forms of Islamophobia have become common and continue to infiltrate law, politics, and culture. Although the term has moved, as Khaled A. Beydoun rightly points out, from the academic discussions into the realms of social media platforms and headline news of national newspapers (189), Islamophobia continues to be a slippery term, sometimes employed without clear definitions, in ways that are too generic or reductive, or altogether avoided (Bleich 180); it is a relatively recent word synthesizing ancient forms of hatred.1 To this day, Islamophobia emerges from a variety of studies “as a largely ambiguous phenomenon…, at times indistinguishable from other similar phenomen[a], at times both nondescript and indistinct” (Allen 123). While George Salaita prefers replacing it with the “more accurate” “Anti-Arab racism” (245) and Fred Halliday with “anti-Muslim” (165),2 others, such as Martina Pfeiler in this special issue, retain it precisely because of its ambiguities.

2 This special issue does not aim for a conclusive definition but hopes to contribute to the theorization of Islamophobia by adding a number of elements to the discussion. Islamophobia became an essential part of public discourse in the U.S. after 9/11, contributing to a culture of patriotic self-fashioning: In many cases, Americans defined themselves in opposition to Islam, moreover, the “highly emotive issue” (Allen 376) that informed the discourse over Islamophobia was fueled by a sense of fear of Islam. In fact, most existing definitions prioritize fear (see Lee et al., Abbas, Zúquete). Implied in the etymology of the word “Islamophobia” and enhanced by the contiguous discourse of terrorism, Islamophobia has become discursively anchored in the field of fear and terror.3 But while the legacy of terror reverberates in most manifestations of

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Islamophobia, hate and anger have always been parallel driving forces within this discourse.4 Accordingly, Khaled Beydoun understands Islamophobia as “a modern extension of a deeply embedded and centuries-old form of American hate” (6).5

3 This special issue will concentrate on Islamophobia as a public narrative that became ubiquitous in American mainstream media since the early 2000s and penetrated all channels of modern communication in the Western world. We understand Islamophobia as a cultural phenomenon, crafted and circulated through medial practices such as television shows, films, literary texts, performances, videos, and Internet blogs. The term has been associated with at least two implications: it can function as a) a signifier for fear of Islam and its followers (see Lee et al., Abbas, Zúquete); b) a cultural marker for Muslimness related to dress, rituals, language etc. (Iqbal, Love). Islamophobia leads to a perception and reaction that identifies Muslims with the potential danger of terrorist attacks. Zafar Iqbal underscores that the notion of Islamophobia is by no means a passive response to a threat, but an irrational fear generative of aggressive behaviors and offensive actions (91). Since Islamophobia nowadays is for the most part triggered by mediation and remediation (Bolter and Grusin), studying the function, construction, and circulation of Islamophobic markers in and through media is imperative (82). In the early months of 2020, episodes of racial violence in the U.S. against African Americans like Ahmaud Arberry, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor caused worldwide upheavals and even mainstream voices appeared ready to denounce the American media landscape as overwhelmingly racist. The focus on racially motivated violence has also encouraged reflections on racism as a problem that exceeds blatant macro-aggression, seeping into everyday-life interactions and automatic reflexes. In the realm of cultural criticism, while openly racist cultural products are met by many with uncompromising rejection, the ambivalence of other texts that parade progressive politics and proverbial “good intentions” also calls for urgent scrutiny. As we write, Donald Trump, who has made hatred against Islam a propeller of his campaign, still holds the presidency.

4 Although Islamophobia and related manifestations of Orientalism, like other cultural constructions, have always depended on a degree of media exchange, our approach to Islamophobia builds on inter- and multimedial constellations, asking: how is Islamophobia mediated? How do media systems of the twenty-first century— characterized by the flow of content across media platforms and the interconnection of multiple media industries (Jenkins 2)—forge Orientalism and Islamophobia into new shapes? Contributions in this volume read film, television, performance art, graphic novels and their film adaptations as “media agoras.”6 The term “agora” refers to an open space in ancient Greek cities serving as an assembly area and a place for commercial, civic, social, and religious activities. In its extended use, the term refers to an “assembly for discussion or decision; (hence) any environment or world of social intercourse, exchange, or commercial dealings” (OED2). In this volume on Islamophobia, we refer to virtual agoras where a convergence of media enables diverse ideological positionings, encouraging complex, even contrastive responses to public discourses. More specifically, this publication investigates the predisposition of multi- and intermedial narratives to complicate the expression of consensus or dissensus: thus, single multi- or intermedia texts displaying contrastive interpretations of or articulating dissensus towards Islamophobia can be imagined as “media agoras.” Films and TV productions in particular—as inherently multimedial texts and especially receptive to intermedial aesthetics—but also graphic novels and performance art, offer

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a privileged surface for medial interactions and collisions. In Convergence Culture (2006), Henry Jenkins notes that a culture where a plethora of old and new media converge on a daily basis, as if on a virtual agora, automatically expands the number of voices that intersect in the public sphere, creating the impression that debates may be ruled by logics of “access, participation, reciprocity,” or even profound contradiction (Jenkins 208). In addition, as Tim Marr notes, “migrating Muslim cultural practices have circulated in the United States through different and at times contradictory registers, and these lines of connection have been recently multiplied through social media” (267). These media agoras that we are about to explore provide a discursive space for a more planetary involvement emphasizing the transnational beyond the boundaries of nations and the imaginary constructions of homelands.

5 A similar point can be made with regards to intermedial and multimedial texts, in light of their potential to host interactions, interferences, and productive tensions between media, particularly in our digital age (see Rippl, Bolter and Grusin). A single text containing diverse media—each pervaded by its own mythologies, politics, and histories—gives rise to multivocal narratives that speak in a variety of voices, and may display dynamics of internal accord and disaccord. Multimedial texts that offer coexisting and yet dissonant responses to public debates may disrupt cultural orthodoxies, thus becoming a site of resistance. This is even more the case for intermedial texts, to which scholars have acknowledged an inherently subversive quality. As early as 1998, Dick Higgins’s Horizon: The Poetics of Intermedia claimed that “an intermedium was not intended to conform to the pure medium” (22). Due to this formal hybridity, Birgit Neumann reads intermediality as a “transgressive practice” (514) that challenges notions of homogeneity, unity and sameness, enabling the possibility to critique cultural orthodoxies not only through content, but also through form. Conversely, however, tensions within intermedial configurations may also invalidate the critical impetus of texts that brand themselves as disruptive of established cultural narratives. Multi- and intermediality allows us to overcome the notion of a text’s “intended ideological meaning” (Klinger 4) to explore its potential for multiple and contrasting ideological meanings. However, as critics, we are well advised to not fall into what might be called the “Orientalist trap” by mistaking ideological multiplicity for merely divergent registers of traditional (Eurocentric) forms of Orientalism.

6 The authors of the volume engage the intricacies and contradictions of the discourse of Islamophobia in American mainstream culture through the study of multi- and intermedial configurations and through the concept of multi/intermedia dissensus. Arguably rid of the coarseness of twentieth-century anti-Muslim narratives, post 9/11 Islamophobia in the American mainstream media has fragmented into more digestible, more complex micronarratives dispersed across media, and sometimes across a text’s multimedia structure. Post-9/11 Islamophobia begs us to modify Richard Dyer’s statement that “the effectiveness of stereotypes resides in the way they invoke a consensus” (12) to make room for a new wave of stereotypes that thrive on in-text dissensus. Contributions in this special issue share the premise that 9/11 urges a scholarly reassessment of Orientalist discourse in an age characterized by the diversification of media and by their dense interrelations.

7 The contributions to this special issue elaborate on Islamophobia as a shapeshifting matter that permeates all media and inhabits the interstices between them. We

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approach Islamophobia with an emphasis on a variety of media including literature, television, film, graphic novels and performance art.

8 Stefan L. Brandt opens our special issue by putting his spotlight on the medium of literature. In his article “Fear of an Islamic Planet? Intermedial Exchange and the Rhetorics of Islamophobia” he argues that the post-9/11 era is marked by an unusual rise of Islamophobic rhetoric that permeates the U.S. cultural imaginary. It connects a wide range of medial discourses from literature and cinema to television and the World Wide Web. Orientalist stereotypes have informed Hollywood blockbusters and television series as well as acclaimed novels such as Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), not to mention Donald Trump’s speeches and writings on “radical Islamic terrorism.” Brandt argues that contemporary public discourse in the U.S. addresses an array of viral images, portraying Muslims as essentially ‘alien’ to mainstream American values. The fears of a potential—or already ongoing—“Islamization of America” are kept alive through continual interaction between texts and images from hegemonic visual discourse, involving “intermedial exchange” between literary texts, films, television shows, magazines, newspapers, and the Internet.

9 In her article “Inter/Multimedial Constructions of Islam in Post-9/11 TV Series: The West Wing and 24” Brigitte Georgi-Findlay explains that since The West Wing (NBC, 1999-2006), the political drama series has been a proliferating format for fictional engagements with American politics. Georgi-Findlay focuses on how The West Wing and 24 (Fox, 2001-2010) engage public narratives about Islam and Islamophobia, arguing that the shows go beyond what Evelyn Alsultany has termed “simplified complex representations” by creating contradictory, multivocal texts that display dynamics of internal disaccord. Representations of Arabs, Muslims and Muslim countries are embedded within storylines that challenge each other. Especially The West Wing stages discussions that can lead to informed debates, reflecting and exposing the contradictions within the American national identity discourse between an inclusionist civic and an exclusionist racialized nationalism. In both series, polyvocal narratives are brought across not only by intertwining multiple discourses, but also by way of aesthetic strategies and intermedial references that supply additional textual layers, complicating viewers’ processes of meaning-making and contributing to in-text dissensus and ideological ambivalence. Both series can thus be read against the grain, as contradictory, multivocal texts that both reflect and expose Islamophobia.

10 Mahmoud Arghavan’s “Islamophobia without Islamophobes: New Strategies of Representing Imperialist versus Suicide Terrorist Necropolitics in Homeland and Syriana” turns to the geopolitical context of the emergence of “suicide terrorism” to propose that terrorism in its various forms has less to do with religious ideologies in general and with Islamic faith in particular, and more to do with the colonial and neocolonial politics of Empire in the colonies, postcolonies and occupied territories by the U.S. army and its allies in the Middle East in the post-9/11 era. He analyzes two representations of suicide terrorists in the Showtime series Homeland (2011-) and the film Syriana (2005). Arghavan argues that even though the Islamicate world and Muslims in the post-9/11 era have generally been portrayed in a differentiated fashion, these media productions have had almost the same effects on the public as earlier Orientalist productions. Although they appear to endorse antiracism and multiculturalism on the surface, these current narratives simultaneously produce what

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Evelyn Alsultany calls “the logics and affects necessary to legitimize racist policies and practices” (Alsultany 162). A “dialectical Islamophobia” (Beydoun 40) that is at play in the West and Western media productions legitimizes and values, according to Arghavan, imperialist necropolitics while delegitimizing its opponent, namely the religious necropolitics of suicide terrorism.

11 “The Reluctant Islamophobes: Multimedia Dissensus in the Hollywood Premodern” by Elena Furlanetto contributes to the theorization of how Orientalism has evolved after 9/11 and in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. She specifically addresses the multimediality of films and proposes that post-9/11 Orientalism has dispersed throughout the interplay of different media which constitute the film experience. Furlanetto recurs to Foucault’s concept of dispositif to illustrate how any of these media —such as music, screenplay, editing, acting, etc.—may “[enter] into resonance or contradiction with the others” (Foucault 195), ambiguating the film’s politics. When the film’s different media pursue diverging politics, she speaks of multimedia dissensus. In order to test this hypothesis, Furlanetto focuses on two films which explicitly champion diversity and aim to reverse the logics of Islamophobia by presenting tributes to Muslim culture or denunciations of Eurocentric discriminatory practices: Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora (2009) and Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005). A more detailed analysis of the films’ multimedial complexity, however, shows that they do participate in the Islamophobic discourses that have dominated Hollywood cinema after 9/11.

12 In Frank Mehring’s analysis of “Islamophobia and Intermediality in Frank Miller’s Graphic Novel” Holy Terror (2011) the graphic artist Frank Miller is framed as an innovative force in the field of graphic novels who pushes the medium into new territories. One such territory is Islamophobia and terrorism. Mehring explores how Islamophobia has been mediated and how media systems of the twenty-first century forge Islamophobia into new shapes asking: How does Frank Miller’s aesthetics of silhouetted bodies reframe Islamophobia in an interpictorial and intermedial discourse of images? To what extent do Miller’s graphic stylizations of Islamophobia remediate elements of his previous work on fictional (super)heroes and historical leaders from Batman to the 300 Spartans? He argues that Miller’s visual narrative participates in the Islamophobic discourse of American popular culture by appropriating a wide array of popular culture visual archives for a propagandistic call for Muslim “Othering.” Holy Terror references news media, films and television series, 9/11 photography, familiar comic book heroes, and, of course, Miller’s own oeuvre. Thus, the graphic novel represents a kind of virtual agora where different media converge to engage in, shape and counter public discourses on Islamophobia. Mehring turns to the medium of graphic novels to first reveal how Miller’s narratives and silhouette aesthetics of (super)heroes have become complicit with Islamophobic responses to the crisis of 9/11; second, to trace the discourse of Islamophobia in post-9/11 America in Miller’s work; and, third, to reveal how this discourse interlinks with the patriotic logic of the fight against terrorism.

13 In “Challenging Islamophobia through Intermediality: Anida Yoeu Ali’s Performance Art” Martina Pfeiler investigates Anida Yoeu Ali’s performance art as that of a Muslim, Khmer-American feminist global agitator, who challenges Islamophobia in the United States and transnationally by expanding her work “into ever-widening arenas” (Fraser 82). Ali’s performance projects formulate oppositional interpretations of Muslim

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“identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser 82) in an increasingly Islamophobic era from the aftermath of 9/11 to Donald Trump’s presidency. Drawing on theories of convergence culture and intermediality, Pfeiler provides a close analysis of Ali’s performance projects. The first work is titled 1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim (2010), a performance poetry clip that was directed by the Japanese American filmmaker Masahiro Sugano and widely circulates on the Internet. It stands out as a feminist, transnational critique of an unprecedented “undermining [of] Muslim voices” (Azam 125). The article also includes an exploration of a selection of performance acts from Ali’s The Red Chador Series (2015; 2018; 2020). Pfeiler argues that by establishing discursive counternarratives the two works highlight the cultural potential of using intermediality to challenge private and public Islamophobia in a globally connected world. Thus, these works are explored as performative engagements with national, transnational, and gendered dimensions of Islamophobia.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbas, Tahir. 2004. “After 9/11: British South Asian Muslims, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, and the State.” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, vol. 21, no. 3, 2004, pp. 26-38.

Alexander, Claire. “Raceing Islamophobia.” Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us All. Runnymede Trust, 2017, pp. 13-16.

Allen, Christopher. Islamophobia. Ashgate, 2010.

Alsultany, Evelyn. Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11. New York UP, 2012.

Asen, Robert. “Seeking the ‘Counter’ in Counterpublics.” Communication Theory, vol. 10, no. 4, November 2000, pp. 424-446.

Azam, Hina. “Islamic Feminism between Islam and Islamophobia.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, March 2018, pp. 124-128.

Beydoun, Khaled A. American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear. U of California P, 2018.

Bleich, Erik. “Defining and Researching Islamophobia.” Review of Middle East Studies, vol. 46, no. 2, 2012, pp. 180-189.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT Press, 1999.

Bunglawala, Shenaz. “What’s in a Name?” Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us All, Runnymede Trust, 2017, pp. 69-72.

“Donald Trump: ‘I Think Islam Hates Us.’” CNN. Accessed 17 September 2020. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-Zj0tfZY6o.

Dyer, Richard. “The Role of Stereotypes.” Media Studies: A Reader, edited by Paul Marris and Sue Thornham. Edinburgh UP, 1999, pp. 1-6.

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Elahi, Farah and Omar Khan. “Introduction: What Is Islamophobia?” Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us All. Runnymede Trust, 2017, pp. 5-12.

Fraser, Nancy. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. Routledge, 2014.

Halliday, Fred. 1999. “‘Islamophobia’ Reconsidered.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 22, no. 5, 1999, pp. 892-902.

Higgins, Dick. Horizons: The Poetics of Intermedia. 1998. Roof Books, 2007.

Iqbal, Zafar. “Islamophobia or Islamophobias: Towards Developing a Process Model.” Islamic Studies, vol. 49, no. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 81-101.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York UP, 2006.

Klinger, Barbara. “Digressions at the Cinema: Reception and Mass Culture.” Cinema Journal, vol. 28, no. 4, Summer 1989, pp. 3-19.

Lee, Sherman A., Jeffrey A. Gibbons, John M. Thompson, and Hussam S. Timani. 2009. “The Islamophobia Scale: Instrument Development and Initial Validation.” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, vol. 19, no. 2, 2009, pp. 92-105.

Love, Erik. Islamophobia and Racism. New York UP, 2017.

Marr, Tim. “Islam and Transnationalism.” The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature (Cambridge Companions to Literature), edited by Yogita Goyal, Cambridge UP, 2017, pp. 251-268.

Miles, Robert, and Malcolm Brown. Racism. Psychology Press, 2003.

Neumann, Birgit. “Intermedial Negotiations: Postcolonial Literatures.” Handbook of Intermediality: Literature–Image–Sound–Music, edited by Gabriele Rippl, De Gruyter, 2015, pp. 512-529.

Rippl, Gabriele. “Introduction.” Handbook of Intermediality: Literature–Image–Sound–Music, edited by Gabriele Rippl, De Gruyter, 2015, pp. 1-31.

Runnymede Trust. Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us All. The Runnymede Trust, 2017. Accessed 15 July 2020. https://www.runnymedetrust.org/projects-and-publications/equality-and- integration/Islamophobia.html.

Salaita, Steven George. “Beyond Orientalism and Islamophobia: 9/11, Anti-Arab Racism and the Mythos of National Pride.” The New Centennial Review, vol. 6, no. 2, Fall 2006, pp. 245-266.

Semati, Mehdi. “Islamophobia, Culture and Race in the Age of Empire.” Cultural Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, 2010, pp. 256-75.

Zúquete, José Pedro. “The European Extreme-Right and Islam: New Directions?” Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 13, no. 3, 2008, pp. 321-344.

NOTES

1. The term “Islamophobia” came to popularity in 1997, when the Runnymede Trust issued a report called Islamophobia: A Problem for Us All. 2. Regarding the word “Islamophobia” and its problematization, see Allen 135-138; Shenaz Bunglawala’s “What’s in a Name”; Miles and Brown, Racism. 3. Some scholars note that the target of Islamophobia is “Islam” as cultural universe (Zúquete 323; Semati 1, Alexander 13), some underline that Islamophobic sentiments can be triggered by individuals perceived as Muslim (Lee et al. 93; Abbas 28), and others claim that Islamophobia is

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exclusively directed against people, not religion (Halliday in Allen 135). It is also important to recognize that Islamophobic reactions may be triggered by markers of Otherness or, more specifically, perceived markers of Islam such as dress and appearance (see Love 11; Allen 125). 4. Allen argues that the focus on fear implicit in the etymology of Islamophobia and in most studies overlooks “more active and aggressive elements and activities” that characterize this phenomenon (136). See also Farah Elahi and Omar Khan, who agree with Allen that the pathological implications of phobia obscure “discriminatory attitudes and behaviours” (6). Beydoun dedicates the first pages of Islamophobia to fear as a result of anti-Muslim sentiments among Muslim communities in the U.S. “Our fear,” Beydoun writes, “symbolize[s] the existential tightrope that defines Muslim American identity today. It has become a definitive part of what it means to be Muslim American” (6). 5. “I think Islam hates us,” said Donald Trump in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-Zj0tfZY6o. See also Beydoun’s discussion of Trump as “Islamophobia President” in American Islamophobia, pp. 8 and following. 6. In “Seeking the ‘Counter’ in Counterpublics” Robert Asen elaborates on the notion of “electronic agoras” in the framework of a critique of a singular, overarching public sphere in the sense of Habermas. For Asen, the agora is a flawed representation of the public sphere in so far as it “invokes a notion of publicity as contemporaneous face-to-face encounters among all citizens potentially affected by issues under consideration” (425). This model is, needless to say, unfitting for a highly mediatized public sphere rather defined by multiplicity and complex entanglements.

AUTHORS

ELENA FURLANETTO Elena Furlanetto earned her doctorate in American Literary and Cultural Studies from the Technical University of Dortmund in July 2015 and currently works as a researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She is the author of Towards Turkish American Literature: Narratives of Multiculturalism in Post-Imperial Turkey (2017) and a co-editor of A Poetics of Neurosis: Narratives of Normalcy and Disorder in Cultural and Literary Texts (2018). She has published on the influences of Islamic mystic poetry on Walt Whitman, on Islamophobia and the popularization of Islam in the US, and on the captivity narrative. Her research and teaching interests also include Orientalism, postcolonial literatures, comparative empire studies, and poetry. Elena Furlanetto is writing her postdoctoral thesis in the framework of the DFG Research Unit “Ambiguität und Unterscheidung: Historisch-kulturelle Dynamiken” (Ambiguity and Difference: Historical and Cultural Dynamics). Her focus are dynamics of ‘ambiguation’ in the early and nineteenth-century Americas.

FRANK MEHRING

Frank Mehring is chair and professor of American Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He teaches twentieth- and twenty-first century visual culture, music, and theories of transatlantic studies. In 2012, he received from the European Association for American Studies the biennial Rob Kroes Award for his monograph The Democratic Gap (2014). His publications include Sphere Melodies (2003) on Charles Ives and John Cage, Soundtrack of Liberation (2015) on WWII sonic diplomacy, Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music (2018, with Erik Redling) The Mexico

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Diary: Winold Reiss Between Vogue Mexico and the Harlem Renaissance (2016), The Multicultural Modernism of Winold Reiss (2020), and The Politics and Cultures of Liberation (2018, with Hans Bak and Mathilde Roza). Frank is the co-founder of the European Digital Studies Network and the online journal AmLit – American Literatures (together with Stefan L. Brandt and Tatiani Rapatzikou). Frank is a board member of the International Committee of the American Studies Association, the European American Studies Association and the Netherlands American Studies Association. He organized the first international symposium on Winold Reiss in Berlin and co- curated exhibitions on Winold Reiss, the Marshall Plan, and Liberation Songs in New York, Nijmegen and The Hague.

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Islamophobia and Literature

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Fear of an Islamic Planet? Intermedial Exchange and the Rhetoric of Islamophobia

Stefan L. Brandt

1. Introduction: “Radical Islamic Terrorism” between the Media

1 In mid-July 2016, just three and a half months short of the U.S. presidential election, CNN aired a report on the psychology of politically motivated terror. “Fear,” the report cited a well-known psychiatrist, “is the primary psychological weapon underlying acts of terrorism” (LaMotte). When persistently exposed to a perceived or real threat, the human mind becomes smitten by fear, focused on the subjective menace to our physical integrity. “Your body on constant fear,” the report concluded, “is not a pretty sight” (LaMotte). The immediate background of the CNN story was another terrorist attack that had taken place just one day earlier, this time in the French city of Nice— where a nineteen-ton cargo truck deliberately plowed through crowds of people, killing 86 and injuring 458. The Nice incident was widely perceived as one in a long series of attacks that illustrated the threat of what came to be known as “radical Islamic terrorism” (Trump, “Radical Islamic Terrorism”). In this political rhetoric, fueled during the 2016 elections, the fear of political extremism became conjoined with a fear of Islam (the religion being blamed in the mainstream media as the driving force behind global terrorism). During this decisive period of global backlash to progressive agendas, the future U.S. president Donald Trump used the catchphrase “radical Islamic terrorism” repeatedly in political speeches, statements, and tweets, thus stoking an already prevalent discourse of religiously motivated fear; Trump employed the phrase effectively in a statement after the shooting at the Orlando nightclub “Pulse” in June 2016, but also in his inaugural address on January 20, 2017 as well as at many other occasions (Beauchamp).1

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2 The award-winning journalist and scholar Lawrence Pintak has argued that the slogan “Islam hates us” played a crucial role in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign (1). “Those three words helped propel Donald Trump to the White House. They provoked jeers from his supporters, fear within the American Muslim body politic and anger across the Muslim world” (Pintak 1).2 Trump’s attacks were part and parcel of an orchestrated set of rhetorical invectives against American Muslims, often disguised as attempts at national self-defense. Ted Cruz’s proclamation, “Radical Islam is on the rise,” in August of 2015 fits into this pattern of fearmongering as well as Ben Carson’s statement that “Global jihadists” were “an existential threat to our nation” (qtd. in Pintak 12). While this type of Islamophobic rhetoric in the United States can be traced back to the country’s historical beginnings – in particular, the Algerine hostage crisis in the 1790s and the ensuing anti-Islamic sentiment that gripped the imagination of the early republic (see Brandt; Pintak 3-7)3—it gained momentum after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of 9/11, Islamophobia became one of the motors of public discourse in the U.S., initiating not only debates on the role of ‘the Other,’ but also contributing to a culture of self-fashioning in which the American nation was positioned in opposition to Islam. Defined as “a complex, much-contested and highly emotive issue” (Allen, “Islamophobia” 376), the fear of Islam was instrumental in tailoring a specter that seemed suitable for usage in a series of different media, from cinema and television to newspapers, books, and internet blogs. Catering to a powerful set of apprehensions and worries, the discourse of Islamophobia has since grown dramatically in proportions, transforming into what can be called fear of an Islamic planet (to adapt Michael Warner’s famous phrase Fear of a Queer Planet from his 1993 anthology).

3 In this essay, I would like to examine the striking power of Islamophobic imagery that reaches across various media, including television, cinema, literature, and the Internet. I will argue that through the dynamic cross-references between these media the rhetoric of Islamophobia can become particularly forceful and unsettling. For this process, I shall use the term intermedial exchange to indicate the degree of interdependency between medial discourses.4 Images distributed on television may refer back to existing cinematic snapshots and, at the same time, inspire perceptions and representations in literature and on the Internet. According to Irina Rajewsky, intermedial phenomena “take place between media. ‘Intermedial’ therefore designates those configurations which have to do with a crossing of borders between media” (46).5 I have chosen three novels from the post-9/11 era—Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)—to pinpoint the mechanisms of intermedial exchange that are at work here. All three works employ sophisticated strategies of border crossing that connect various media to establish a conversation on modern-day Islam and its cultural representations.

4 In particular, I would like to discuss how the intermedial connection between the discourses of “Islamophobia” and “terrorism” operates. The term “terrorism” was coined as early as the late eighteenth century, connoting the “unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims” (“Terrorism”). Likewise, the concept of “Islamophobia” is grounded in the realm of fear. First used in 1923, “Islamophobia” indicates a strong fear of the Islamic religion or of Muslims, often regarding either of them as the geopolitical source of terrorist

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attacks. As sociological studies have shown, the existence of Islamophobia in a given country does not stand in correlation with the presence of Muslims in that territory, but is nourished through a complex interplay of various media in cultural life (cf. Sayyid and Vakil 319). Far from being rational or logical, Islamophobia is marked by emotions, figuring as “an affective part of social stigma towards Islam and Muslims, namely fear” (Kunst, Sam, and Ulleberg 226).6

5 In other words, Islamophobia must be seen as a cultural phenomenon, crafted, disseminated, and circulated through medial practices such as television reports, films, literary texts, and the Internet. The specter of Islam is systematically constructed, as Edward Said has convincingly shown in his study on the religion’s medial representation in the Western hemisphere, through a “sheer variety of newspapers, magazines, and radio and television programs… to say nothing of books and pamphlets” (Covering Islam 49). Thus conceived, Islamophobia is a systemic component of what Lawrence Pintak calls a “feeding frenzy”—a kind of cultural slugfest that “the media—particularly cable TV” contribute to (13). While media coverage often feeds into —and augments—cultural anxieties, it also engages in the aesthetic illusion that there was any measurable information value regarding the realities of Islam. “The curious thing about these [Islamophobic] statements,” Said observes, “is that they are assertions made about Islam, not on the basis of evidence internal to Islam, but rather on the basis of a logic deliberately outside Islam” (Orientalism 280). Accordingly, most acts of “covering Islam” in the media constitute “a one-sided activity that obscures what ‘we’ do, and highlights instead what Muslims and Arabs by their very flawed nature are” (Said, Covering Islam xxii).

6 The rhetoric of “‘us’ vs. ‘them’” lies at the heart of a number of popular TV shows such as Homeland (which I will discuss later in this essay), thus contributing to a representation of Islam that seems entrenched in a highly dualistic ideological frame of mind. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” one critic summarizes Homeland’s implicit message (Zaheer). While purporting to talk about the social reality in crisis-ridden countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, such shows primarily reflect the sensitivities of the Western viewer, conjuring up a fictional dichotomy between the “Islamic Other” and the “Western Self.” The rhetoric of Islamophobia, Said concludes, is “more fear and less knowledge about Islam” (Covering Islam 43). In other words, we are taught to buy into the logic of Islamophobia through a complex power/ knowledge network of social and cultural interactions that involve psychological processes on the part of audiences as well as elements of manipulation and often clear distortion on the part of the addressers in the media. A recent documentation project consequently defines Islamophobia as “a contrived fear… fomented by the existing Eurocentric and Orientalist global power structure” (“Defining Islamophobia”).7

2. Fifty Shades of Green: Fabricated Images of a Malevolent Islam

7 In the following, I will elaborate on a few textual examples that represent this “Orientalist global power structure.” The phenomenon of a “palpable Islamic threat” that connects representations in various media, such as television, literature, and public speech, can be traced back to Cassius Clay’s conversion to Islam in 1964 and the emergence of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s, with Malcolm X being an especially

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striking figure of militant protest.8 These diffuse images of a violent Islam have haunted the American public imaginary ever since. Often, the initial sparks capable of setting off a myriad of fears regarding Islam are carefully disguised in everyday practice and encapsulated in visions of “America First” and the ‘values’ of American Christianity. Notably, Trump’s election manifesto Crippled America / Great Again (2015/2016) ominously refers to “bad people… coming probably—probably—from the Middle East” (19-20)—a statement that invokes Trump’s famous allegation, made in a television interview in May 2016, that “Islam hates us” (qtd. in Schleifer; cf. Burke; Pintak 1-2).

8 In particular, I will demonstrate how interwoven these statements and notions are on the level of intermedial exchange. The infamous scenes of Muslims allegedly celebrating the terror attacks of 9/11 in the streets of Palestine are a good case in point. First aired on CNN and other news stations a few hours after the attacks on September 11, 2001, images of sadistically joyful Muslims have since become an eerie presence in Western culture. The specter of this image is still so powerful in the U.S. cultural imaginary that it no longer requires any proof or verification. What’s more, the image can be freely transferred to connected scenarios and events, using the original motif as a legitimizing point of reference. When asked in November of 2015 at a campaign rally in Birmingham, Alabama, whether he would support the surveillance of mosques in the U.S., presidential candidate Donald Trump gave the following answer: “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering. So something’s going on” (qtd. in Haberman). Although easily exposed as an empty claim, Trump’s reference to the “thousands and thousands of people… cheering as the building was coming down” assumes an eerie, three-dimensional reality in the recipients’ imagination. We can visualize the situation so easily because we have seen it on television (no matter what the actual context of these images might have been or how authentic the footage really was).

9 In a central passage from Mohsin Hamid’s thriller The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), similar imagery of sadistic schadenfreude is intimated. The protagonist, Changez, a Pakistani man who has worked in the United States for some time, recollects his own feelings when watching the events of 9/11 on television. “I stared as one—and then the other—of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased” (82-83). The book’s implicit connection between the two scenes, one from television, one from the book, is indicative of the overall aesthetics of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The Cheshire-Cat-like grin on the character’s face in Hamid’s novel seems to reflect the elatedly malevolent grimaces of the dancing Muslims celebrating 9/11 in the aforementioned video. At the same time, audiences are reminded of other stereotypical images of Muslims they have seen on television and in films. Notably, in the Disney movie Aladdin (1992), the hero’s homeland is described as utterly barbaric. Aladdin himself and a couple of allied Arab characters speak fluent American English, while the other oriental characters are endowed with ridiculously exaggerated accents, thus being connoted as evil. The original opening song referred to the Middle East as a place where “they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face” (Ward, “From Aladdin to Lost Ark”).

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10 For their documentary Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, based on the eponymous book by Jack Shaheen, the directors Jeremy Earp and Sut Jhally have sifted thousands of films and TV shows representing people from the Middle East. According to the filmmakers, Muslim characters are frequently portrayed as single-minded killing machines fighting the “American way of life.” Reel Bad Arabs shows that Hollywood is literally obsessed with what the directors call “the three B’s”: belly dancers, billionaire sheiks, and bombers. I would like to add a fourth “B” to this list that functions as a subtype of the ‘bomber’ stereotype: bearded terrorists—a concept that has resurfaced in post-9/11 cultural representations of Islam. The archetype of the “Bearded Terrorist” in the Western cultural imaginary is the America-hating militant extremist—an image vaguely modeled after infamous terrorist Osama bin Laden who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks.9 The Bearded Terrorist personifies the hyperbolic image of the Orient as a dangerous place of ubiquitous extremist Islamic violence (and, as such, almost devoid of elements of lived experience); as an entirely constructed and artificial figure, this ghost-like creature exemplifies the Orientalist imaginary with its rejection of realistic representation. “[T]he hyperbole,” Said writes, “is… unique to Orientalism. Life itself— politics, literature, energy, activity, growth—is an intrusion upon this (to a Westerner) unimaginable Oriental totality” (Orientalism 279).10

11 The popular series Homeland (2011-2020), aired on the premium television network Showtime, extensively uses the hyperbole of the Bearded Terrorist. Chided as “the most Islamophobic show on TV” (Zaheer), Homeland features cliché characters such as the high-ranking Taliban official Haissam Haqqani, a veteran of the Soviet-Afghan War and fanatic member of Pakistan’s intelligence agency.11 Sporting a beard and assuming the characteristic demeanor associated with the Taliban, Homeland’s Haissam Haqqani is marked as the archetypal terrorist character. Notably, the show seems to give “little importance… to getting basic details about the Islamic world right” (Zaheer).12 Instead, Homeland encapsulates countless stereotypes connected to Muslims as “a hidden danger to Americans” (Zaheer).13 The show’s Islamophobic agenda is furthered by the suggestion that close physical contact with the region of the Middle East suffices to “infect” a character with the virus of Islamic terrorism. The figure of Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody (played by Damian Lewis) is a good case in point. When he returns to the United States as a celebrated hero after eight years of captivity in Syrian-held Damascus, Brody is now a terrorist and devoted disciple of al-Qaeda leader Abu Nazir (played by Iranian-American actor Navid Negahban). Based on a successful Israeli TV series (Hatufim), Homeland takes its cues from a variety of fictional and non-fictional sources, among them the popular Fox series 24 (also developed by Homeland’s Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa) and actual terrorist organizations such as the Haqqani network.14

12 To what extent the Orientalist imagery is a product of intermedial exchange becomes evident when one considers the world of spoofs and parodies. Nowhere is the quintessence of stereotypes better expressed (and perhaps debunked) than in the realm of caricatures. Probably the best-known example of such hyperbolic representation is the figure of “Achmed the Dead Terrorist,” a puppet invented in 2007 by stand-up comedian and ventriloquist Jeff Dunham.15 Achmed the Dead Terrorist, notably one of Dunham’s most successful comedic acts, represents the skeleton corpse of a bungling suicide bomber. Equipped with a comically large turban, bushy eyebrows, and a thick dark beard, Achmed the Dead Terrorist both mimics and critically deflects

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Islamophobic notions of the stereotypical terrorist. While Achmed’s grotesque appearance is an effigy of visual stereotypes concerning Muslims (as presented in mainstream newspapers and magazines), his thick accent reveals the character’s roots in cinematic imagery. One of many YouTube clips of the act was uploaded in January 2015 and received almost 28 million clicks by January 2020 (“Meet Achmed the Dead Terrorist”). The fact that Dunham’s sketch became a viral internet sensation (and later a special show for Netflix) shows how deeply interwoven images of Islamic terror are throughout the media, connecting footage from real-life historic events (such as 9/11), films and television series as well as books and internet pictures. Through the puppet’s presence on TV, the Internet, streaming platforms as well as live shows, the persona of Achmed the Dead Terrorist has become a vivid example of the interconnectedness of medial forms of representation. With his thick black beard, Achmed provides comic relief (by ridiculing the monstrous and making it comprehensible). At the same time, however, the Achmed dummy is a reminder of the uncanny (albeit somehow tamed) presence of the Bearded-Terrorist specter.

13 The ambiguous Pakistani protagonist Changez in Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist also sports a beard, as we learn in the book’s opening paragraph. “Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance?” the character asks us—and the American visitor—in the novel’s first passage. “Do not be frightened by my beard; I am a lover of America” (Hamid 1). The narrator’s charm offensive is later exposed as a farce; Changez has, in his own words, actually tried to “stop America” (Hamid 191), although it remains unclear whether his attempts have materialized in terrorist actions or remained in the vague realm of verbal and political interaction.16 Not only does the novel conjure up the figure of the Bearded Terrorist that viewers are familiar with from news television, it also reactivates similarly uncanny images from the realm of cinema. Changez’s reference to the horror film Sleepy Hollow (Hamid 194), in which a headless horseman pursues the inhabitants of a New England small town, creates an eerie connection between the character’s own religious belief and the violent act of beheading (exploited in grisly media clips by the terror organization Islamic State).17 “One cannot but join in the terror of poor Ichabod Crane, alone on his horse” (Hamid 194), the protagonist- narrator beguilingly tells his listener, thus putting the “American”—and the reader of the novel—in the uncomfortable position of being confronted with a brutal assassin. If only to exceed the already increasing suspense, the passage then culminates in isolating “that moment when he [Ichabod Crane] first perceives the presence of the Headless Horseman” (Hamid 194). Here, the novel conjoins the experience of the film character Ichabod Crane and the literary character of the “American,” showcasing that both seem to be in a similar situation. This intertextual reference to the world of films ties in with the novel’s decisively cinematic aesthetic that employs dramatic monologue and autodiegetic narration in a way highly reminiscent of film noir’s voice-over technique. This intermedial strategy becomes especially effective at the beginning of chapter 11 when the first-person narrator draws on established images from film noir to convey the mood on the streets of Lahore where he and the unnamed “American” are caught in their sinister conversation: It is odd how the character of a public space changes when it is empty; the abandoned amusement park, the shuttered opera house, the vacant hotel: in films these often feature as backdrops for events intended to frighten. So it is with this market: now that our fellow visitors have dwindled in number to a sporadic and scattered few, it has taken on a rather more ominous edge. (Hamid 176)

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14 Here, the novel invokes the classical setting of a film noir, with its gloomy, menacing scenario, subtly foreshadowing a possibly fatal outcome of events. These intermedial references form an aesthetic pattern throughout the plot of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, in the course of which the narrator repeatedly employs images from the realm of cinema to illustrate his viewpoint. When Changez thinks of his first visit to New York City’s Upper East Side, which immediately feels like home to him, he informs the reader: “I realized later that I owed my sense of familiarity to the many films that had used it as a setting” (Hamid 56). In another passage, the narrator-protagonist compares the city of Manila—counter-intuitively to his expectations to find something similar to Lahore or Karachi—to “a poorer version of the 1950s America depicted in such films as Grease” (Hamid 73).18

15 The novel employs such familiar cinematic hints to visualize Changez’s Muslim perspective through the eyes of the Western reader, while also emphasizing his Middle Eastern background. Along this narrative strategy, the novel continuously oscillates between empathy (letting the reader partly adopt the narrator’s point of view) and othering (encouraging the reader to despise the narrator’s inhuman comments). By casting Islamism “as both the product of and a rebellion against American-led globalization” (Hartnell, “Moving” 341), the novel opens up a dissenting perspective— that of the ‘reluctant fundamentalist’ who turns against America after a long history of disappointment. Yet, at the same time, it employs a narrative pattern deeply embedded into the mainstream rhetoric of anti-Islamism, invoking the image of the unreliable and potentially threatening Muslim invader who plots against America. While citing these very same stereotypes—“that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists” (Hamid 209)—towards its dramatic finale, the novel still leaves readers with precisely these images and possibilities.

16 Throughout its plot structure, The Reluctant Fundamentalist self-consciously reminds us of the power of Islamophobic prejudice; nevertheless, it refrains (in contrast to the film adaptation), by way of its open ending, from fully exposing these assumptions as myths. The book is organized through the narrative framework of a Western perspective that associates its Middle Eastern protagonist with the formulaic “terrorist” who revels in the drama of 9/11 and appears in the shapes of stereotypical characters such as the Headless Horseman and the film noir gangster. The novel’s Islamic hero Changez, one critic observes, is “made accessible only by being, in fact, Western” (Chan 829). What’s more, Changez figures, in Stephen Chan’s words, as a “derivative” of the author: Hamid’s hero/narrator/sole-spokesman-on-behalf-of-other-characters is, like Hamid, a Princeton graduate, a business and financial consultant, and from Pakistan. The entire book, while slowly unveiling the hero’s Islamic revulsion with things Western, is a litany of how practised, nuanced, polished and at ease are the hero’s Western manners and affectations … He has no discernible Pakistani or Islamic equivalent habits. (829)

17 Changez’s lack of a recognizable Pakistani or Islamic background is perpetuated in the novel’s composition through a set of intermedial patterns that demarcate the character as a creature of Western films, newspapers, and other literary texts.19

18 Along these lines, John Updike’s novel Terrorist (2006) also intersects various images from television, cinema, and public discourse to create a scenario in which radical Islam has become an imminent threat. The main character is an American-born Muslim

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teenager named Ahmad who lives in the fictional rust-belt town of New Prospect in the state of New Jersey and is recruited by a workmate to detonate a bomb-laden truck in the name of Allah. It turns out, as we learn towards the end of the novel, that Ahmad is actually “a victim… —a fall guy” (Updike 309). Through the focalizing lens of Jack Levy, a Jewish guidance counselor at Ahmad’s high school, we begin to understand that there has been a “sting operation” organized by the Department of Homeland Security to sacrifice Ahmad as a scapegoat. After the scheme has been exposed, Levy conjectures, the Department does not want “the details out in the media” (Updike 309). The novel’s reference to “the media” playing a key role in the staging of the scheme is no coincidence. Life in New Prospect is dominated not only by educational institutions like the Clifton Public Library (where Jack’s wife works as a librarian), but also by the world of films. The town changes in a major way when the Hollywood studio system collapses and “dazzling subversive visions” such as Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, and A Clockwork Orange are released (Updike 25). The choice of these films as reference points already foreshadows the later plotlines of subversion and juvenile delinquency, situating them in the context of the Hollywood dream factory.

19 How mediated images constantly shape the lives of American citizens becomes obvious in a key scene where the conniving Secretary of Homeland Security follows his vision of “robust screening” (Updike 44) by intentionally manipulating viewers through television. “Destruction,” the Secretary thinks loudly, “is so much easier than construction, and disruption than social order, that the upholders of a society must always lag behind those who would destroy it” (Updike 44). Sent out via television from the Secretary’s “cramped media facility sunk a hundred bombproof feet beneath Pennsylvania Avenue” (Updike 44), the Department’s biased messages are based on the mechanisms of a giant media machinery. The image Updike creates in this scene is that of the media (and especially television) as some massive subterranean power, expanding like a rhizome and connecting all points of social life. Reflected through the viewpoint of the “terrorist” Ahmad, this media bombardment is bound to trigger rage and disillusionment in those who feel wronged by the system. “What else do they give us, the media moguls?” a disenchanted Ahmad asks. Only a few sentences later, the character gives a sobering answer to this question: “The new powers…, the international corporations, want to wash your brains away, period. They want to turn you into machines for consuming—the chicken-coop society” (Updike 172). By having the character denounce “[a]ll this entertainment” (Updike 172-173) and “crap” (Updike 173), the novel creates the impression that its key theme—that of (Islamic) terrorism—is thoroughly embedded into a set-up of medial images. The path of medial discourse, Terrorist suggests, resembles the figural “Yellow Brick Road” from the MGM movie The Wizard of Oz (1939): behind all the fanciful imagery and colossal façade, there is no actual meaning or truth. When looking at the organizing principle that orchestrates this colossal medial war that fabricates concepts such as “terrorism,” we may come to conclude that there is nothing substantial there. After the red light in the media room of the Department of Homeland Security goes off and the Secretary, who has orchestrated the gigantic sham, is “off the air” (Updike 44), the magic seems no longer active. “He abruptly shrinks in size; now his words will be heard by only the handful of TV technicians and staffers around him” (Updike 44). The obvious analogy to the famous “exposure” scene towards the end of The Wizard of Oz pinpoints how cinematic and televisual images control our understanding of what “terrorism” actually is. The specter of terrorism, Updike’s book implies, is no more than a visual

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sensation, designed within a communication bubble that interconnects politics (the Department of Homeland Security) and the media (television) through a network of power and knowledge.

20 Khaled Hosseini’s celebrated novel The Kite Runner (2003)—like The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Terrorist—builds up its images of Islamic terror through cinematic parameters. The book narrates the story of Amir, a rich Pashtun boy, and his friend Hassan, who spend their childhood in the still-undisturbed city of Kabul shortly before the Soviet-Afghan War. The two boys enjoy an innocent life; their favorite pastimes include kite flying and going to the cinema.20 Throughout its epic story which stretches over almost thirty years, The Kite Runner emphasizes the close connection between literature and film. Not only is Amir’s favorite bookstore symbolically located “near Cinema Park” (Hosseini 21), the novel also accentuates this interconnection on a meta level, suggesting an affinity between its own literariness and the experience of film watching. Thus, The Kite Runner’s key theme—that of kite flying—is intertwined in one of the many retrospective interior monologues. “Did you still fly kites and go to the cinema?” (Hosseini 223) a disillusioned Hassan wonders after not having seen his childhood friend in years. Stephen Chan has argued that The Kite Runner extensively cites and even mimics key aesthetic patterns of Hollywood cinema. While the novel’s first part offers a look at life in Afghanistan through the lens of American film, “[t]he book’s second part is all Hollywood. The blond European childhood acquaintance is now a blond Taliban commander. The scrawny hero is required to fight the blond Talib to the death, while the blond Talib’s soldiers wait patiently outside the room where the duel occurs” (Chan 830).

21 While referring to the genre of American westerns only nominally in its first chapters (Hosseini 28), The Kite Runner, in its second half, strategically adopts the generic formula of the western, employing the genre’s classic ingredients—adventure, conflict, and redemption. “As a cinematic vision,” Stephen Chan maintains, “Hosseini’s book just had to become an actual film. The kite-running, with the immense Afghan sky as a backdrop, could never have been resisted by any producer. But that’s the book’s great fault as well: it was Hollywood even before it was acquired by Hollywood” (832). Following the novel’s own internal logic, Amir and Hassan’s childhood fantasies of “cowboys and Indians” (Hosseini 27-28) are symbolically replaced in the second part by nightmarish encounters between the bloodthirsty Taliban and Afghan natives. The city of Kabul in the mid-1990s, The Kite Runner suggests, has turned into a real-life Wild West, where one would constantly run into danger of getting shot by a gunman. “If you went from the Shar-e-Nau section to Kerteh-Parwan to buy a carpet, you risked getting shot by a sniper or getting blown up by a rocket—if you got past all the checkpoints, that was” (Hosseini 215). In these passages, the novel employs various intermedial references to highlight the apparent difference between media coverage and experienced reality. A haunting scene, told by Amir’s Afghan taxi driver Farid, recalls his first encounter with the Taliban: “I’d seen them on TV, on the Internet, on the cover of magazines and in newspapers. But here I was now, less than fifty feet from them, telling myself that the sudden taste in my mouth wasn’t unadulterated, naked fear” (Hosseini 267).

22 Although the novel seems to draw a clear line between fiction and non-fiction, it still uses emotionally charged images that readers are well familiar with. While ostensibly emulating an authentic mode of storytelling linked to autobiographic writing, The Kite

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Runner equally immerses itself in the genre of the thriller, emphasizing moments of fear and suspense that are effectively interconnected in a dramaturgy of quest, conflict, and final salvation. The various narratives of war and survival are dominated by the notion of “fear of the Taliban” (Hosseini 237). After terror and barbarism have pervaded the country, Hosseini’s Afghanistan has become a living hell, resembling the chaos and pandemonium of a horror film. “[T]he Afghanistan of our youth is long dead. Kindness is gone from the land and you cannot escape the killings … In Kabul, fear is everywhere, in the streets, in the stadium, in the markets, it is a part of our lives here” (Hosseini 233). The novel thus presents a scenario of Taliban terror that matches the expectations of the viewers. The Kite Runner’s plot of friendship and self-discovery is consequently organized around these nightmarish visions. By endowing the events with signifiers that audiences are already familiar with from Orientalist tales of utter ruthlessness, the novel imbues its narrative composition with a sense of authenticity and realness.

3. Sleeping Horror: Invasion of the Bearded Terrorists

23 So far, I have argued that the visual composition of three novels by Hamid, Updike, and Hosseini matches the aesthetic strategy of “reformulating Islam” (Said, Orientalism 282). By invoking a specter of Islam that corresponds with the medial image of the ideologically deluded Muslim, the books say more about the dominant Western cultural imagination than about the real lives of American Muslims or the lives of Muslims in other parts of the world. Here, the motif of the “sleeper” is especially significant.21 A “sleeper,” in this imagery, is a Muslim citizen who has masked his “un-American” and Islamist mindset to conspire against the country. The figure of Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist is marked as such a “Muslim sleeper.” He lives in America to work for a corporation named “Underwood Samson” (Hamid 6), a thinly-veiled allusion to “Uncle Sam,” but concludes that “America had to be stopped in the interests… of the rest of humanity” (Hamid 190). “Changez”—the name already says it—is a shapeshifter, someone who changes his demeanor and perhaps even his personality. At first glance, he seems to be an ordinary man, but his underlying ferocity could break out any time. The name “Changez” is a reference to the Mongolian warrior Genghis Khan, whose troops invaded large parts of Eurasia in the twelfth century. Thus, Hamid’s character also evokes the image of hostile takeover.22 This becomes obvious in another intertextual reference to Joseph Conrad’s classic Heart of Darkness (1899)—and, by implication, to Coppola’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now (1979). In a crucial scene towards the finale of the novel, the character of Changez transforms once again, this time into the evil colonizer Kurtz (from Conrad’s book and Coppola’s movie) who awaits his fate in the shape of his nemesis Marlow. Since the time he was “warned by my comrades that America might react to my admittedly intemperate remarks,” Changez tells us (as protagonist and narrator), “I have felt rather like a Kurtz waiting for his Marlow” (Hamid 208). The impression generated in the end of the novel is that of a potential perpetrator who realizes that he must finally “meet [his] fate when it confronts [him]” (Hamid 208).23

24 If Changez is characterized as an ambivalent sleeper, whose actual potential is only intimated but never fully revealed, Ahmad in Updike’s Terrorist seems to match the classic definition of the Muslim sleeper who poses a real and verifiable danger to

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society. As foreshadowed already in its title, the novel sends out an unmistakable warning to readers that the main character is a presumptive “terrorist.” Unnoticed in his potential threat to the nation, Ahmad attends the community’s Central High School (Updike 3). Ahmad’s teacher is a fanatical imam named Sheik Rashid who bears an uncanny resemblance to Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda and mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. When Ahmad sees him again at the end of the summer,24 Rashid “seems unchanged… though in his beard perhaps a few more gray hairs have appeared, to match his dove-gray eyes” (Updike 232). The beard imagery is significant, since it points to the character’s duplicity and falsehood. “The imam presented half a face, the lower half being hidden by a trimmed beard flecked with gray … Within his beard, his violet lip twitched” (Updike 76, my emphasis). When the imam finally shaves his beard, Ahmad emulates him again. The motive, however, is not a rejection of Islamic radicalism, but its concealment. “[B]earded Muslims, even teen-agers,” a voice-over (presumably that of Ahmad’s religious leaders) tells us, “alarmed the… customers” (Updike 275). As if to confirm the now-hidden threat, the ominous voice-over adds: “Mohammed Atta had shaved, and most of the other inspired martyrs” (Updike 275). The real-life Mohamed Atta,25 one of the ringleaders of the 9/11 attacks, here figures as the prototype of the Muslim sleeper. A seemingly harmless and innocent student who lived in the United States undetected for almost 15 months, Atta had been recruited by Osama bin Laden and trained in an al-Qaeda terrorist camp in Afghanistan.

25 Updike’s Ahmad fits into the cliché of the fanatic Muslim sleeper who believes that all Americans are “[d]evils” that “seek to take away my God” (Updike 3). The novel is literally framed by the notion of Islamic terror slumbering in the heart of American society. Thus, the book ends as it begins, with the character Ahmad meditating over “[t]hese devils [who] have taken away my God” (Updike 310). As Michiko Kakutani observes in The New York Times, “Ahmad talks not like a teenager who was born and grew up in New Jersey, but like an Islamic terrorist in a bad action-adventure movie” (“John Updike’s ‘Terrorist’”).26 The book’s elliptical structure implements its vision of the Islamist sleeper running amok and threatening his environment in a self-fulfilling prophecy (“these devils seek to take away my God”; Updike 3). “True believers,” Ahmad tells his friend Charlie, “know that Paradise awaits the righteous” (Updike 174). Updike here uses the well-known stereotype of the deluded fundamentalist who aspires to murder ‘non-believers’ since he considers himself superior.

26 In the wake of 9/11, when Terrorist and The Reluctant Fundamentalist were published, audiences were faced with countless images of “Islamist sleepers” in television programs such as 24 (Fox, 2001-2010) and Sleeper Cell (Showtime, 2005-2006). In these shows, Arab Americans were frequently portrayed as hidden threats: next-door neighbors who simultaneously engaged in sinister terrorist plots (cf. Reel Bad Arabs). Most recently, the motif of an “immigrant invasion” has been employed in the 2016 presidential campaign, with Donald Trump making his infamous remarks about those “bad people” coming from Mexico. “The countries south of us are not sending us their best people … They’re coming from all over Central and South America, and they’re coming probably—probably—from the Middle East” (Great Again 19-20). Trump’s ramblings on the Middle East bring to mind a wide array of established assumptions regarding Muslims. Notably, Trump cites neither statistics nor hard facts to prove his claim but “headlines and videos [that] tell us what we’re dealing with: rapes, kidnapping, and lining up civilians in order to cut their heads off” (Great Again 37).

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Trump here taps into a number of clichés about radical Muslims from literary and cultural practice.

27 Along these lines of Orientalist imagery, Assef, one of the key characters in Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is marked as a madman, partly German, partly Afghan, and “[a] sociopath” (Hosseini 34) who rapes boys and later joins the Islamist Taliban in Afghanistan.27 In a key scene of the novel, the outcry “Beard Patrol” (Hosseini 267) is immediately connected with the horrors of Islamic terror inflicted upon the country by the religious zealots. The Kite Runner barely defuses this dynamic of fear and constant threat in its aesthetic construction. To the contrary, the novel efficiently plays with these stylistic devices of a “dread of Islam” to increase the power of its narrative.

28 Images of a militant Islam teeming with Bearded Terrorists and other Orientalist cliché figures connect to the contemporary climate in the United States with its fear of the “Muslim Other.” The current political situation is based on a long tradition of Orientalist thinking that shapes a notion of the national self through disguised hints at the Other. It operates through a rhetoric of adaptation linked to what Said calls “the now traditional Orientalist ability to reconstruct and reformulate the Orient” (Orientalism 282). By transforming Islam—or at least aspects of it—into a virtual nightmare, texts across the gamut of the medial scale (from books to films and internet posts) create a specter of terror against which dominant culture must position itself. While pointing to the danger posed by Muslims abroad, this rhetoric equally aims at Muslim citizens already living in America, possibly harbingers of an Islamist invasion. The so-called “birther” movement that questioned whether Barack Obama was a natural-born U.S. citizen is a prime example of this paranoid imagination. Donald Trump, who functioned as an unofficial spokesman of the movement, repeatedly raised questions regarding Obama’s national origins and, by implication, his religion. This included allegations that Obama was, in fact, a Muslim who preferred the Quran to the Bible—a claim visualized in thousands of memes on the Internet (“Did President Obama Use the Quran to Take His Oath of Office?”). As ridiculous as it may seem at first glance, these images have assumed the status of a plausible truth to many viewers over the years. It is through the intermedial mingling of half-truths spread on mainstream television (for instance, information based on biographical notes such as Obama’s childhood in Indonesia and his father’s professional background in Kenya) with purely invented narratives (e.g., conspiracy theories dispersed in YouTube clips and social media) that the “fear of an Islamic planet” is charged with its affective efficiency.

4. Conclusion

29 To conclude, I have argued that a vast number of texts in contemporary U.S. public discourse address notions of Muslims as “alien” to mainstream American values. These “texts” can be films, newspaper reports, books, internet blogs, or stand-up comedy shows. They do not endorse Islamophobic sentiment or intentionally support such notions or feelings. However, through the power of intermedial exchange, elements of Islamophobia are often conveyed and disseminated subliminally, within the banal context of everyday social practice that accompanies the cultural production of texts. What I have tried to showcase is that “accents of alarm and fear” (Said, Covering Islam xxxv) inform—and often dominate—these cultural negotiations. Hamid’s thriller The Reluctant Fundamentalist, for example, invokes an atmosphere of deep distrust between

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the two main characters, a Pakistani professor and an American visitor. While challenging us on some assumptions regarding Islam, the novel also plays with visceral images of threat and incompatibility between Muslims and Christians. In a similar vein, Updike’s Terrorist employs the signifier of the “Muslim sleeper” to talk about fears of uncontrollable Islamic terror, fueled by already existing discourses in U.S. cultural practice. Hosseini’s The Kite Runner makes use of a cinematic aesthetics to let readers live through the horrors of Taliban terror in Afghanistan—a fear that mirrors the Western viewpoint of fear and disgust.

30 In all three novels, the specter of a militant, anti-Western Islam is negotiated, in which the Muslim characters pose a vital threat to American values (albeit with interspersed components of ambiguity, redemption, and at least partial reconciliation). It is through intermedial exchange, that is, the interaction of film, literature, television, and the Internet, that readers are effectively prepared for such stereotypes. Islam emerges here as a religion at war—with America, in particular, and with life and progress, in general. The continuous reference to images already established by the media is part of what Rajewsky calls the “illusion-forming quality” (54) of intermedial processes. Through this act of illusion-making, analogies are drawn between the “principles, rules of communication, and strategies” (55) of one particular text, such as, for example, a speech by Donald Trump, and those employed by texts from another medium, say, an internet blog, a Fox newscast, or an adventure movie.

31 By means of this interaction between the media, fears of Islam are fomented and transformed into a subjective reality to be adopted and appropriated by the recipient. It is worth mentioning that these operational mechanisms between the media would be impossible without a social practice that enables the discourse of Islamophobia to continue. Through social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), key elements of the discourse are isolated and magnified, enhancing an already-pervasive visual practice (television, cinema, etc.). This cultural fantasy of Islam becomes active through elements of intermedial exchange, burning itself into the dominant imagination and growing into a monster, an existential threat that is none. Thus conceived, the fear of an Islamic planet is no more than a fiction turned into a perceived fact through the power of the media.

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NOTES

1. Other examples, in which Trump referred to “Radical Islamic Terrorism,” include an interview on the French presidential elections in April 2017, and a July 2017 address in Poland. He also used the phrase “Islamic terrorism” in his 2015 campaign book Crippled America (that was retitled into Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America after Trump had won the elections) (Great Again 13). 2. Pintak acknowledges the broad cultural and political background that enabled the emergence of this type of fear: “Trump’s words reflected a simplistic and distorted worldview, but the fault did not lie with him alone. Donald Trump was the almost-inevitable product of a long history of misguided politics and misleading assumptions about Islam” (1).

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3. “Muslims,” Pintak writes in his study America & Islam, “were the first enemies of the new republic … In the years after independence, the Barbary pirates were ravaging American shipping along the North African coast, prompting Thomas Jefferson to order a navy be built to mount what would be the first of many U.S. military interventions in the Middle East” (6). 4. In my usage, the term “exchange” refers to the interaction and interconnection between distinct levels of cultural practice, in this case, literature, television, and cinema. Thus, my reading is informed by a New Historicist and poststructuralist understanding of cultural processes of dialogue across the media and across various text types. Similar to the concept of “circulation,” the idea of cultural exchange owes a lot to Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of “restless oscillation” (Greenblatt 8) between history and textuality, in the process of which “practical strategies of negotiation” come into effect. 5. In all quotes, the italics are in the original. In the event that italics have been added, it will be noted. 6. Since Islamophobia operates as “a fear or dislike of Islam that by consequence extends to all Muslims without differentiation” (Allen, “Islamophobia” 376), it exploits, by definition, a set of cultural stereotypes which are emboldened by the media and other “communities of interpretation,” as Edward Said puts it (Covering Islam 36-68). 7. Chris Allen, a sociologist at University of Leicester’s Centre of Hate Studies, has examined the phenomenon of Islamophobia in a number of groundbreaking publications—e.g., Islamophobia (2010) and Reconfiguring Islamophobia (2020). Allen places special emphasis on the global impact that Islamophobic attitudes disseminated in the Western media have on the lives of Muslims in different countries. Citing a much-publicized UN report, he notes: “[G]iven the marked increase in Islamophobia since the turn of the century, if immediate action was not taken, Islamophobia would pervade the lived experience of an ever-growing number of Muslims around the world” (Allen, Reconfiguring Islamophobia 1). Other scholars have cautioned to take into account the nuances that may come into play in social practices of Islamophobia. In Islamophobia Islamophilia, Andrew Shyrock draws attention to the fact that to many recipients there is a perceived “rationale” behind their fear of Islam, rooted in the alarming numbers of medially represented threats linked to persons of Muslim faith (9). 8. Karen Armstrong argues that “we have a long history of Islamophobia in Western culture that dates back to the time of the Crusades” (17). In recent decades, representations of Islam as a radical political movement (symbolized by Malcolm X’s and Cassius Clay’s much-publicized conversions to the Muslim faith) contributed to a resurgence of Islamophobic sentiment. This development has been exacerbated since the 1980s and especially in the aftermath of 9/11, when Islam became widely associated in popular culture with a “violent creed” (see Kabir 11-30, 15). 9. Films employing the stereotype of the “reel bad Arab” include Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), David Cameron’s True Lies (1994) and Edward Zwick’s The Siege (1998). In a famous scene from Lost Ark, Indiana Jones, on one of his journeys into the “Orient,” is faced with a sable- rattling Muslim whom he abruptly shoots in the head. Similarly ridiculous figures can be found in Cameron’s True Lies, in which a group of “Arab terrorists” is paraded as caricatures of Western projections of the Middle East. Zwick’s The Siege cuts between scenes of praying Muslims and images of exploding bombs, conjuring up the specter of “Muslim terror” (cf. Landes). 10. Through the act of hyperbolic exaggeration, the “tension between ‘Islam’ as a transcendent, compelling Oriental fact and the realities of everyday human experience” (Said, Orientalism 278) is at once highlighted and playfully erased. As a device in fiction (especially when deploying realistic modes of storytelling), the hyperbole may no longer be recognized as a rhetorical figure, but serves to replace lived social practice by a mere specter that is now perceived as a gruesome reality (just as the image of a bearded Osama bin Laden has come to function as a distorted proxy of Muslim experience).

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11. The character of Haissam Haqqani, who is played by Turkish-born German actor Numan Acar, appears in season four of Homeland in 2014; the role is reprised in Homeland’s eighth and final season. 12. In his pungent critique of Homeland, Mohammad Zaheer reveals a number of discrepancies and factual mistakes. “Arab characters have been given Persian names,” and Pakistan’s capital Islamabad is one-sidedly depicted as a “grimy hellhole and war zone” (Zaheer). 13. The character of Abu Nazir in Homeland’s seasons 1 and 2 stands out as the epitome of Islamic fanaticism. Functioning as “the show’s central nemesis” (“Hollywood’s Terrorist”), Abu Nazir is marked as an utterly destructive and vicious figure, being an al-Qaeda “terrorist mastermind” (“Hollywood’s Terrorist”) driven by impulses of vengeance against the United States that had organized a drone attack killing his son. 14. The figure of Haissam Haqqani is designed as a reference to the real-life Haqqani network, an Afghan guerilla group that deployed asymmetric warfare against U.S.-led NATO forces and the government in Afghanistan. The group pledged allegiance to the Taliban in the mid-1990s and later became affiliated with the emergent terror network of al-Qaeda (see Rassler and Brown). 15. According to a Forbes list from July of 2009, Jeff Dunham was the third highest-paid comedian in the United States in that year after Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Brown (see Rose). Dunham’s show Spark of Insanity, first taped at the Warner Theater in Washington, D.C. in 2007, became an instant sensation, taking the artist onto a two-year tour through the USA and Europe with 386 venues worldwide. 16. In this closing section of the novel, Hamid uses the device of the unreliable narrator to reinforce a sense of suspense and keep his readers in limbo regarding Changez’s true identity. “What exactly did I do to stop America, you ask?” the narrator mockingly asks the American (and, by implication, the reader), “Have you really no idea, sir?” (Hamid 191). When the novel returns to this question ten pages later, we are still not given a satisfactory answer. Changez’s admission that all he can do is to “attempt an answer, even though it may well leave you disappointed” (Hamid 210) is vested in images that corroborate the impression of obscurity surrounding the character. Not only does he begin his explanation with the ambiguous phrase “as we come to the end of our time together” (Hamid 210), the ensuing account of his protest against America revels more in intimations than factual descriptions, suggesting, for example, that he “was perhaps more forceful on this topic than I intended” (Hamid 207). Notably, Changez’s tale is interconnected in these passages with references to images produced by “international television news networks” (Hamid 207), which underlines the novel’s aesthetics of intermedial exchange. 17. Although the Islamic State started its public beheadings about seven years after the first publication of Hamid’s novel, there is still a strong aesthetic connection between these two cultural “texts.” A reader of The Reluctant Fundamentalist in 2014 or 2015 would easily connect the novel’s references to the motif of beheading with the gory executions filmed and screened by IS which went viral during these years. This subliminal interconnection underscores the sheer power of intermedial exchange, with images from literary texts eerily corresponding to images disseminated through websites and social media forums. Hamid’s cross-reference to Washington Irving’s gothic short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (the title incorrectly used as a reference point to Tim Burton’s film) underlines the importance of intermedial allusions within the novel’s aesthetic structure. 18. The novel consistently accentuates this interconnection between literature and the media industry. In one passage, the narrator Changez reminisces how he travels with his friend Jim to Santiago de Chile where he meets the chief editor of a publishing company. When asked “What do you know about books?” Jim replies: “I specialize in the media industry” (Hamid 160). It is only then that the narrator decides to reveal his family’s connections to literary art (“My father’s uncle was a poet … Books are loved in my family” 161). Referring to the novel’s fascination with

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acts of storytelling and writing (Changez’s girlfriend is a writer as well), Mohamed Salah Eddine Madiou has interpreted The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a work of metafiction whose aesthetics is based on intertextual and self-referential strategies of composition (271ff). 19. “The hero is Islamic,” Chan concludes, “but there is nothing Islamic about him except some brief rhetoric related to the 9/11 attacks on the New York where he used to live” (830). 20. The characters’ affinity with U.S. American cinema is highlighted early in the novel. While growing up in the heart of predominantly Islamic Afghanistan, Amir and Hassan become fond of American westerns. “We saw our first Western together, Rio Bravo with John Wayne, at the Cinema Park, across the street from my favorite bookstore” (Hosseini 28). By accentuating the aesthetic proximity between film and literature, the novel augments the impression of an exchange between the media, both on the narrative and on the aesthetic level (cf. Hosseini 88, 229). 21. The “sleeper” is a crucial motif in the invasion rhetoric of cinema and literature, going back to the genre of science fiction films of the 1950s. In movies such as Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, seemingly innocent U.S. citizens turn out to be messengers of an alien nation that attempts to infiltrate and colonize America. Born out of the paranoid climate of McCarthy’s “red scare” America, the gist of these films is revived in productions from the 1970s and 80s, such as Ridley Scott’s Alien, in which evil forces literally “snatch” the bodies of Americans to breed into U.S. society and extinguish the basis of U.S. culture. 22. Notably, the movie version, directed by Indian filmmaker Mira Nair, resolves some of the ambiguities contained in the novel. While the book plays with the notion of an actual danger emanating from Changez, the film exposes its protagonist as a victim of totalitarian power structures that privilege a dominant western “truth” over the subjugated realities of Muslim lives. 23. What turns this ending into a kind of twist is the fact that the narrator (Changez) finally transforms into the narratee (Kurtz) who meets the actual narrator (Marlow). In contrast to the movie version, which directs the viewer into a position of identification with Changez-the- victim, the book leaves space for an interpretation in which the threat of Changez is not just imagined, but real. 24. The time frame indicated in this passage is a reference to the 9/11 attacks which also took place at the end of the summer (on September 11, 2001). 25. I am using the spelling “Mohamed Atta” here to refer to the real-life Egyptian hijacker and co-architect of the 9/11 attacks, in which four commercial airplanes were commandeered to destroy various civilian and military targets in the United States; in the novel Terrorist, however, he is spelled “Mohammed Atta” (Updike 275). 26. Anna Hartnell takes a slightly more favorable stance towards Updike’s book. While criticizing the author for his “inability to fully acknowledge the communal aspects of Islam” (“Violence” 497), she also lauds Terrorist as an “important intervention that occasions a reflection on the relationship between religion and violence” (“Violence” 478). “Updike’s decision to tackle the perspective of the ‘perpetrator’ is a courageous attempt to pull away from the prevalent cultural tendency to privilege the category of ‘trauma’ in treatments of 9/11” (“Violence” 478). 27. The sepia-colored cover of the first edition of Hosseini’s novel, published with Bloomsbury in 2003, anticipates this theme of invasion. The image shows the rear image of a little boy in shorts and a t-shirt—presumably the author’s fictional alter ego in the narrative universe of the novel— who approaches the entrance of a house to peek into the building’s interior, suggesting a sense of vulnerability and defenselessness. By portraying the boy from behind, the book creates an aura of exposure and imminent danger, to be revealed as radical Islamic fundamentalism.

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ABSTRACTS

The post-9/11 era is marked by an unusual rise of Islamophobic rhetoric that permeates the U.S. cultural imaginary and connects a wide range of medial discourses from literature and cinema to television and the World Wide Web. Orientalist stereotypes have informed Hollywood blockbusters and television series as well as acclaimed novels such as Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), not to mention Donald Trump’s speeches and writings on “radical Islamic terrorism.” My essay argues that contemporary public discourse in the U.S. addresses an array of viral images, portraying Muslims as essentially “alien” to mainstream American values. The fears of a potential—or already ongoing—“Islamization of America” are kept alive through continual interaction between texts and images from hegemonic visual discourse, involving what I call “intermedial exchange” between literary texts, films, television shows, magazines, newspapers, and the Internet.

INDEX

Keywords: Intermedial Exchange, Islamophobia, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamid), Terrorist (Updike), The Kite Runner (Hosseini), (Islamic) Terrorism, Donald Trump

AUTHOR

STEFAN L. BRANDT

Stefan L. Brandt is Professor of American Studies at the University of Graz and former President of the Austrian Association for American Studies. After receiving his PhD and Venia Legendi at Freie Universität Berlin, he was awarded lecturer positions at University of Chemnitz and University of Bochum as well as professorial positions at Freie Universität Berlin, University of Siegen, and University of Vienna. He was affiliated – on the research and teaching level – with numerous other universities, among them Università Ca’ Foscari, Radboud Universiteit, University of Toronto, and Harvard University. Brandt has talked and written on a wide range of topics in American Cultural Studies, having published three monographs and (co-)edited eight anthologies, most recently In-Between: Liminal Spaces in Canadian Literature and Culture (2017) (Lang Canadiana Series), Space Oddities (2018) (LIT Verlag, w/ Michael Fuchs), Animals in American Television(2018) (Special Issue of EJAS, w/ Michael Fuchs), and Ecomasculinities: Negotiating New Forms of Male Gender Identity in North America (2019) (Lexington Books, w/ Rubén Cenamor). He is also one of the founding members of the international, peer-reviewed journal AmLit – American Literatures (together with Frank Mehring and Tatiani Rapatzikou).

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Islamophobia and TV Series

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Inter/Multimedial Constructions of Islam in Post-9/11 TV Series: The West Wing and 24

Brigitte Georgi-Findlay

1 Since The West Wing (NBC, 1999-2006), the genre of the political drama series has become a proliferating format for fictional engagements with American politics (domestic and foreign) and with the U.S. presidency (24, Commander in Chief, Scandal, House of Cards, Designated Survivor), vice presidency (Veep), or the office of secretary of state (Political Animals, Madam Secretary).1 Especially after 9/11, public narratives about Islam and Islamophobia have resonated also within these series. However, while there is an extensive body of scholarship on the impact of 9/11 on representations of Islam in American media (see, for example, Morey and Yaqin 2011; Alsultany 2012; Alsultany 2014) and in political thriller series such as Homeland (Showtime, 2011-2020), these narratives do not figure prominently in most of the scholarly discussions on political drama series.

2 Many of these shows feature a built-in problem. Since they focus on national security, international relations, and the business of politics, their engagement with Islam and representations of Muslims is framed almost solely by issues of U.S. national security and terrorism (foreign and domestic). One may surmise that this is why the creators of these series, in order to avoid offense and to offset critique, seem to have resorted to a set of strategies which Evelyn Alsultany has termed “simplified complex representations” serving as the typical “representational mode of the so-called post- race era” (Alsultany 2014: 144). As Alsultany has explained, she is “concerned with the standardization of ‘positive,’ sympathetic representations of Arab and Muslim identities” since these “seemingly positive representations… have helped to form a new kind of racism, one that projects antiracism and multiculturalism on the surface but simultaneously produces the logics and affects necessary to legitimate racist policies and practices” and to “project the United States as an enlightened country that has entered a postracial era” (Alsultany 2012: 16). Although I share some of Alsultany’s concerns, I find the representations of Arabs, Muslims and Muslim countries in some of

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these shows more contradictory and complex. As multimedial texts that are receptive to intermedial aesthetics, television series encourage multiple and contrasting readings and ideological positionings (see Mehring and Furlanetto, “Introduction”; Rippl 3, 12). I read political drama series consequently as multivocal texts that, in the words of Frank Mehring and Elena Furlanetto, “may display dynamics of internal accord and disaccord” (see “Introduction”). These dynamics can be related to the serial character of televisual storytelling, to the particular institutional and political contexts in which the series emerge, and to long-standing tensions between inclusionist and exclusionist perspectives on the American nation.

3 In the following, I will focus on this polyvocality regarding representations of Arabs, Muslims, Muslim countries, and terrorism particularly in The West Wing and 24 (Fox, 2001-2010). As the first TV shows to engage, albeit in differing ways, with the emerging government policies and public discourses in the wake of 9/11, both contributed in significant ways to the framing of narratives about Islam and Islamophobia in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I will explore how polyvocal narratives are brought across not only on the level of plot and dialogue, but also by way of aesthetic strategies (camerawork, soundtrack, split screens and multiple-frame compositions) and intermedial references (newscasts, satellite imaging, cell phones, allusions to the interaction of politics and media). I will show how these strategies supply additional information and textual layers that complicate viewers’ processes of meaning-making and contribute to in-text dissensus and ideological ambivalence.

4 Although the scholarly engagement with the politics of The West Wing and 24 might seem dated in 2020, when the polarization of American politics and the tribalization of American culture appear to have reached an unprecedented high point, it may make sense to bring into view again the political and cultural transformations of the late 1990s and early 2000s (even before 9/11). Both shows emerged in a climate of increasingly partisan politics, defined by “culture wars,” battles over the meaning and consequences of globalization, by the challenges of redefining U.S. foreign policy after the end of the Cold War, and by a controversial national election in 2000. They appeared at a time when the televisual landscape was undergoing shifts from broadcasting to narrowcasting, from a mass audience to niche audiences, from mainstreaming to streaming. In the chronology of these shifts presented by Amanda D. Lotz, both shows belong to what she has termed the “multi-channel transition period,” in between the network era and today’s “post-network era” (ix-x). As network shows, both reflected the pressure to avoid offense while offering innovative programming. As transitional shows, they partook in changes underway in televisual modes of storytelling and audience address, in an industrial context where there was now a broader range of viewing audiences “thriving on specialty, distinction, and niche taste” (39). Both shows segued into new viewing practices (initially mostly defined by DVD) that broke from linear programming schedules and that pushed the boundaries between episodic and serial forms of storytelling (see Lotz 73-4; Mittell 53).

5 The West Wing has received credit for establishing the genre of the political drama series and for offering a lofty vision of public service at a time when real-life official politics and politicians had arguably lost their authoritative power. The show immersed its viewers into the daily flow of political work behind the scenes in a White House perpetually confronted by domestic and foreign policy dilemmas that loosely referenced real-life historical or current events. In the two seasons of The West Wing

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that aired before 9/11, terrorism featured as a marginal plot device. If it became an issue at all, terrorist threats to the U.S. could be seen emerging equally from homegrown sources such as white pride (S1E17, S2E2) or eco-terrorism (S2E12) as from countries identified with Islam (Syria in S1E2). The opening of Season 3 then had to be postponed because of 9/11. On October 3, 2001, a quickly drafted, stand-alone episode was aired which indirectly referenced 9/11 and stirred considerable controversy among viewers and critics. While some felt that “the episode revealed that it was possible to debate terrorism ‘in a sensitive, sensible and intelligent way’” (McCabe 98) and that its style of discussion surpassed the quality found on news channels, others denounced it as preachy, “overly didactic” (Takacs 54) and unable “to conceive the complexities of the Middle East in anything other than Western terms” (Steven Aoun, qtd. in McCabe 99). Stacy Takacs has argued that the episode “pathologized terrorism, promoted ‘American innocence,’ and disciplined its audience to embrace social authority as a condition of ‘American’ identity” (47).

6 Called “Isaac and Ishmael,” this episode serves as my first example to illustrate how a televisual text creates a sense of in-text dissensus that may lead to more ambivalent ideological projections than those suggested, for example, by Aoun and Takacs. The episode features two storylines. While one storyline focuses on the White House hosting a visiting group of racially diverse high school students, in a parallel story an Arab American staffer is suspected of working with Islamic extremists planning an attack in the U.S. The White House is in lockdown mode. Two parallel, intertwined storylines present, on the one hand, the conversation that White House staffers and the President have with the visiting students (a classroom situation), and on the other the racial profiling and interrogation of the Arab American. The two storylines challenge each other. One of them can be read as Orientalist, the other as post-Orientalist or anti- racist.

7 In the first storyline, the White House staffers stage a teach-in for a captive audience of students and viewers alike. Each of the fictional characters represents a different position on the relations between Islam, U.S. culture, U.S. foreign policy, and terrorism which were at the center of American public narratives about 9/11. Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Lyman compares Islamic extremists to the KKK (“the Klan gone medieval and global”) and calls Islamic fundamentalism a “cultural wasteland.” The Jewish-American communications director Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) sees the terrorists on the same level as Nazis (“When you think of the Taliban, think of the Nazis”) while deputy communications director Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) is convinced that terrorism is rooted in eleventh-century Islamic culture and is thus inherently foreign to America. All of the voices imply that Islam, terrorism, and the opposition to pluralism and freedom are un-American, alien, and external to the U.S. Cultural studies scholar Stacy Takacs has therefore argued that these voices all relate terrorism to a violent cultural disposition rather than to concrete political grievances (53). However, these grievances are addressed by the personal aide to the president, African American Charlie Young (Dulé Hill), who sees a link between poverty and terrorism and draws connections to domestic forms of racial violence. In addition, Josh Lyman acknowledges the legitimacy of grievances about U.S. foreign policy when he suggests that “it’s probably a good idea to acknowledge that they have specific complaints. I hear them every day—The people we support, troops in Saudi Arabia, sanctions against Iraq, support of Egypt.” Since all of these voices somehow aim to represent the wide and contradictory range of public narratives about 9/11, I would argue, this storyline of the

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episode may have left viewers to ponder multiple, implicitly also contradictory, political perspectives.

8 The second storyline, which focuses on the interrogation of the Muslim staffer, exposes the interrogators’ racist disposition and brings into view the aggression that Muslims in the U.S. have been subjected to before and after 9/11. It shows what happens “when Americans abandon tolerance in the pursuit of security” (Takacs 50) and suggests that threat cannot be read from ethnicity or religious affiliation (Holland 91). The contradiction between the two storylines is mediated not only on the level of dialogue, but is also made visible by way of casting choices and staging. Thus a visual pan of the students visiting the White House reveals their diversity—male and female, African American, white, Hispanic, Asian. Also, the interrogation of the Muslim staffer is staged in dark tones, evoking a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia. The fact that a respected fictional character, Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer), is chosen to lead the interrogation in a manner that seems to be out of character for him, underscores the disruptive nature of the event. The two conflicting stories thus illustrate how the show deliberately stages an in-text dissensus by exposing the contradictions within the American national identity discourse, between an inclusionist civic and an exclusionist racialized nationalism, a tension that Trevor and Shawn Parry-Giles have identified as central to The West Wing as a whole (17).

9 As critics have pointed out, the episode does not encourage any real engagement with Islam as a religion (Spigel 244) but rather foregrounds politicized forms of Islam that may threaten U.S. national security. Yet I would argue that the episode, like the series as a whole, stages relevant discussions rather than simply “staging an illusion of political debates” (Takacs 47). The polyvocality that the episode displays may be more facile than that usually displayed in The West Wing where Steadicam tracking shots follow staffers walking and talking through the halls, discussing and deliberating political issues from all possible sides, thus making visible the workings of a democracy (McCabe 63-4). By framing 9/11 as an attack on U.S. freedom and pluralism and deeming critical questions of past U.S. policies mostly off-limits, the episode may represent the discursive limitations and pressures hovering over the first days after 9/11. However, as Trevor and Shawn Parry-Giles have argued, it “offered a different discourse than those offered by President Bush and other public officials. It presented a dialogic rhetoric that symbolically invited participation and disputation” about the threats confronting the U.S., although it “still located the power to define and respond to national trauma in the White House” (160). They suggest that with its “pluralistic polyvalence” (166) the episode “self-reflexively questions the ethnocentrism inherent in the conventional American mantra about freedom and democracy” (163). Especially the second plotline “questions the simplistic civic nationalism at work in political culture following 9/11 and gives voice to the racialized and gendered quality of U.S. nationalism” (164).

10 As a whole, I would argue, The West Wing discussed the politics related to Muslims, Muslim Americans and Muslim countries in a way that could lead to informed debates, taking into account multiple perspectives by utilizing a large ensemble cast (of admittedly limited diversity with regard to gender and race). Most of the time this takes place in the form of dialogues and arguments between the main characters. Thus one character argues: “The U.S. Constitution defends religious pluralism. It doesn’t reduce all of Islam to fanaticism” (S3E14), stirring a debate about the complexity of the

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constitutional relationship between politics and religion. Characters discuss issues and ventilate ideas, casting different knowledges and perspectives on Islam, Islamic cultures and geographies in the form of argument and dissent. The show especially stages debates about the relation of Islam to Western conceptions of state and society. Recurring storylines decry Islamic law as a source of oppression, especially of women. Thus, the female White House Press Secretary C.J. Cregg responds in an uncharacteristically emotional way to the news that Saudi school girls had died in a fire because they had been prevented by the religious police from leaving a burning building as they were not seen to be appropriately dressed (S3E19). The series here references a real-life event that drew international attention in March 2002.

11 Yet the show also comments critically upon the idea of a U.S. intervention into Muslim countries’ internal affairs, thus engaging with the real-life public political discourse on the invasion of Iraq as it unfolded in 2002 and 2003. At the end of Season 3 (aired in May 2002), fictional President Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen) sanctions the covert assassination of the defense minister of the fictional Islamic Republic of Qumar who allegedly sponsored a planned attack within the U.S. In the course of seasons 4 and 5 this leads not only to cover-ups and guilt on the part of the president, but also to controversial debates about the logic of toppling a “moderate Islamic regime” (S5E1) and about the problematic role of U.S. policies in the Middle East (S5E9, S5E10). By Season 5 (aired from late 2003 through early 2004) it has become increasingly difficult for the Bartlet administration to assess whether a protest in an Islamic country (to be witnessed on TV news screens) is part of a fundamentalist or a nascent democratic movement (see, for example, S5E10). In its representations of a fictional U.S. policy in the Middle East, the series mediates real-world discussions both by inventing entire countries such as Qumar and referencing real places, events (such as the plight of the Saudi school girls mentioned above) and real-life U.S. relations with Muslim countries. But it is not very consistent here. Although the fictionalization of Qumar may be interpreted as an instance of Orientalism in the way the series imagines the country as a foreign “other,” one could also read it as a dramatic serial device to critically address real-life U.S. foreign policy involvement in the Middle East that includes the support of Saudi Arabia, the issue of state-supported terrorism, questions of human rights (also with relation to gender) and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

12 In fact, by the fall of 2003, The West Wing created a counter-narrative to the real-life invasion of Iraq earlier that year, imagining an alternative U.S. policy in the Middle East. Although the dramatic action takes place in Gaza and involves the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, the series recreates a threat situation that resembles that of the U.S. after 9/11, discussing whether the administration should react (like the Bush administration) with retaliatory strikes, despite insufficient intelligence. In the end, President Bartlet resists the calls for military action also within his staff (S5E21, S5E22, S6E1, S6E2). While the series here very obviously references the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, it uses this imaginary counter-scenario also to address another real- life conflict by reenacting a Middle East peace conference at Camp David. It thus reminds viewers of the historical role of the U.S. as a peace broker that brought Israelis and Palestinians to a table. In this context, the series has the characters render a political debate that considers as many perspectives as possible. Viewers are involved in the process of meaning-making by being presented with a multimedial array of

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dialogues, conversations and images, including TV newscasts, that heighten understanding, but that also leave much space for interpretation, consent and dissent.

13 Ambivalences are generated also by the way The West Wing embeds or buries stories about Islam and Islamophobia within narratives about U.S. political cultures. Thus, in some plotlines, the correlation made within the administration between Islamic countries and terrorism is revealed to be false and home-grown sources of terrorism and danger need to be considered (see S3E18). While this diversification of the “enemy” in surprising plot turns may be explained by TV seriality’s inherent need for variation, it still comes across as a deliberate political choice made by the series creators to engage critically with real-life Islamophobic tendencies. In Season 5, for example, proselytizing Christian missionaries are seen to be more of a problem for the administration than Islamic law (S5E9). Here, the administration is confronted with the hatred against Arab American immigrants. It reacts to Islamophobic attacks on naturalization ceremonies by having the events held in the White House (S5E3). We also hear a Supreme Court justice prepare a brief regarding the racial profiling of Arab Americans, in which the plight of Muslims is compared to that of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor (S5E7). In Season 7 the story of a religiously motivated suicide bomber is embedded within episodes that center on the way the religious right in the U.S. is trying to manipulate a presidential campaign. By pairing these stories, the series creates an equation between Islamic fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism as similar phenomena. It thus picks up the critique of racial profiling and Islamophobia in the U.S. that had been voiced in the “Isaac and Ishmael” episode opening Season 3. These micronarratives seem to disrupt other messages that tend to conflate Islamic countries and terrorism. Although the show at times does not seem to go beyond binary “notions of either patriotism or victimization” (Alsultany, “Representations” 150), and although it tends to conflate Arab ethnicity and the religion of Islam, it nevertheless challenges these binaries and conflations in the way it intertwines multiple stories and discourses.

14 The West Wing clearly foregrounds language and reflects on language use in its attempt to bring across multiple, often contradictory perspectives and political positions. Yet, it is not only dialogues and conversations that challenge viewers, confronting them with an excess of information. Meaning-making is additionally complicated by “a constant interplay between multiple televisions tuned to the different news channels, full of sound bites, spin, and spectacle” (McCabe 69). TV newscasts and press conferences held in the White House, in which conflicting positions both within the administration and within the various media outlets come to the fore, show how the series includes and uses references to the print and news media to illustrate the processes and problems of a democratic discourse. These may include spin, image control, and the framing of issues by the administration. But they also include the conundrum that the administration often only learns about events by watching CNN (which reflects the particular mediascape and its impact on U.S. politics in the early 2000s). White House staffers and administration are seen to be in constant interaction with media that both supply needed information and complicate political work. These media include the print media, broadcast news channels, and talk shows on radio and TV. For the viewer, these intermedial references may add to the impression of an in-text dissensus, for example in S5E10, when both fictional characters and viewers watch newscasts of protests unfolding in the Middle East. Here the series stages a discussion held by White House staffers as well as former and present U.S. presidents around the links between

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monarchic systems, Islamic law, colonialism, U.S. policy and democracy in the Middle East. In the end, the issues are left open for viewers to ponder.

15 Subtextual commentary adding to in-text dissensus may at times also be provided by non-diegetic music. Thus S5E1 ends with a song (“Sanvean” sung by Lisa Gerrard) played over a montage of scenes, all picturing unrelated dramatic personal and political events that unfold simultaneously and that include both the kidnapping of President Bartlet’s daughter and a U.S. airstrike on terrorist training camps in a fictional state in the Middle East. While the storyline draws on viewers’ sympathy for the President’s family and demonizes an abstract “terrorist” enemy, the mournful song that evokes associations with “Oriental” music provides an affective counterpoint, lamenting the loss of lives and human suffering on all sides.

16 All of these examples may support the argument that the series stirs a sense of in-text dissensus not only on the level of plot and dialogue, but also on the level of aesthetic techniques and intermedial references. In addition, as McCabe and Frame have shown, these techniques underwent a significant change over the program’s run. Frame argues that the series’ politics “evolved in response to the seismic, almost simultaneous shocks to its liberal ethos” provided by the transition from the Clinton to the Bush administration and by 9/11 (117-118). He identifies a change from representing “America’s confident post-Cold War attitude towards incursions in foreign lands” (124) to a “re-evaluation of the president’s role in the post-Cold War political environment” (125) and a post-9/11 narrative in which the president’s movement over to the “dark side” (of the “war on terror”) is visualized, for example, by changes in lighting (131-137). Other medial innovations include the use of the handheld camera in the episodes dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict discussed above (S5E21, S5E22, S6E1, S6E2), illustrating “the inability of the president to control unpredictable global events in the post-9/11 environment” and “lending not only a feeling of (manufactured) liveness to proceedings, but also an overwhelming sense of uncertainty and fear” (139). As an “aesthetic shorthand for ‘breaking news,’” Frame suggests, the shaky mobile camera may also reflect changes in the media environment after 9/11 where news and entertainment conflated in unprecedented ways (140). All in all “the changes in visual style and tone can be understood as a subtle critique of Bush’s ‘war on terror’” and as a complication of the Bush administration’s “‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy” (171).

17 Hence, The West Wing can be read as a text that leaves space for interpretation and ideological ambiguity with regard to the representation of Islam, Islamophobia, Muslims and Muslim countries. This ambiguity, which leads to the impression of an in- text dissensus, may have various sources. It may reflect the contradictions within an American national identity discourse. It can be related to the mechanisms of a “serially unfolding television narrative” (Kelleter 75) which is dynamic and evolving, “favoring ongoing variations, increasing entanglements, and ever deeper complications” (60). It may also be related to the pressures working within network television where a show might want to appeal to both sides of the political aisle at first and then cater to a more liberal niche audience. As McCabe has observed, the series initially attempted to balance political debate, also to “stave off accusations that the show had too liberal a slant” (13). In some cases (as in the “Isaac and Ishmael” episode), polyvocality was the result of deliberate staging by the series creators who may have wanted to create a complex text, also with regard to capturing the complexities of the political issues that

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were addressed. In addition, changes in the show’s politics over its run need to be taken into account. All of this may work against the argument that these representations of Islam, Muslims and Muslim countries operate in the service of “racist policies and practices” (Alsultany, “Representations” 144).

18 Watching the first season of Designated Survivor in 2016, viewers might have been struck by the strong critical focus this season laid on Islamophobic politics and violence within the U.S. while it recreated a 9/11 moment. This is especially interesting since the ABC show is regarded as a successor series to 24 (with Kiefer Sutherland as lead actor in both programs) which has been accused of supporting, if not creating, Islamophobia. 24 is both a political drama and an action drama centering on Sutherland’s character Jack Bauer, an agent of the U.S. government’s Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) who in each season races a ticking clock to subvert impending terrorist attacks on the United States and the various presidents during a twenty-four-hour state of emergency. The series is thus part of the genre of “terrordrama” that was increasingly popular after 9/11 (McCullough 2), reflecting and creating a permanent sense of mistrust and paranoia. People are never what they seem to be, and it takes a whole season to understand the identity of the perpetrators. Since the main subject of 24 is the threat to U.S. national security, Muslims, Muslim Americans, Islamic cultures and geographies are addressed only within this context. Yet the series creators have clearly tried to counter critiques of supporting Islamophobia by resorting to a number of strategies that fit what Evelyn Alsultany has identified as “simplified complex representations” (Alsultany, “Representations” 144-149) and that could also be found in The West Wing.

19 Among these are, first, the rotation or diversification of the identity of the enemy threatening U.S. national security. Thus, the threats may come from Balkan villains (Season 1), Mexicans (Season 3), Africans (Sesason 7), Russians (Season 8), or American patriot groups (Season 7). Although it seems that Arabs or Muslims represent the majority of terrorist suspects, if not perpetrators, in this series, most of the scripts reveal white male government authority or executives in the oil and private security industries as motive forces behind the plots. However, as in The West Wing, Islamic countries are connected to political disorder, Arab ethnicity and the religion of Islam are conflated.

20 As a “highly serialized” (Lotz 73) text, 24 uses ambiguities and complications to suspend the stories’ final outcomes. Multiple layers of truth are only gradually revealed. This specific form of serial storytelling also impacts viewers’ ideological meaning-making processes. Thus there are so many plot twists and turns, so many people involved in the plots against America, that the stereotype of the Arab/Muslim terrorist “other” is neutralized. Viewers are coopted into producing “connections between Middle Easterners, Arabs, Islam, and terrorism” (Takacs 91), only to learn that these suspects are “merely pawns or a front for Euro-American or European terrorists. The identity of the enemy is thus flipped” (Alsultany, “Representations” 146). For every “foreign” enemy there is a “domestic” one. For example, in Season 2, after suspicion had fallen on an Iranian bridegroom, it is his blonde-haired, blue-eyed American bride who is revealed to have colluded with terrorists, for reasons that are not quite clear (S2E10). “Good” characters may be misrecognized as “bad” and vice versa. The show consequently performs a balancing act, representing ethnic and religious difference but seemingly refraining from value judgments and leaving viewers to do the work. As

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Stacy Takacs has argued, the show’s “penchant for visual and narrative excess provides the necessary space for the entertainment of multiple points of view and political perspectives, but it does so in a way that devolves responsibility onto the atomized viewers and fans of the show” (92). Takacs further contends that the show implicates viewers “in the construction of meaning” (90) in a manner that makes them “complicit in the construction of the ideological norms the show advances” (91).

21 A second strategy is that for every “bad” Arab or Muslim there is a “good” Arab or Muslim American character ready to fight for the U.S. Islam is “portrayed as inspiring American patriotism as opposed to inspiring terrorism” (Alsultany, “Representations” 145). In Season 2, an Imam is heard condemning any crimes committed in the name of Islam (S2E12). In Season 4 two Arab American brothers who have been subjected to Islamophobia speak out against the conflation of Islam and terrorism and assist Jack Bauer in his fight against the bad guys (S4E13). Yet the show also briefly breaks through the binary of either patriotism or victimization in a scene where an Arab perpetrator becomes the victim of Black Islamophobia (S4E5). The problematic distinction between “good” and “bad” Arab/Muslim is then illuminated when the Arab/Muslim leader of a terror cell explains his actions by pointing to injustices perpetrated by the U.S. against “his people.” We hear his warning: “Renounce your imperialist policies” (S4E19) or “pay the price for your government’s policy…. Renounce your policies of imperialism and interventionist activities” (S4E20). When he is captured and interrogated, his grievances are acknowledged by Jack Bauer who asks him what he wants to change for “his people.” The man answers: “I already have” (meaning he has set a plot in motion to destroy the U.S.) and he adds: “Besides, your president sees me only in one dimension. Evil.” Jack Bauer answers: “As you see us” (S4E22). Nevertheless, even if the imperial character of U.S. foreign policy is briefly acknowledged, the grievances the man has with the U.S. are articulated so vaguely and with so much hatred that his complaints lose credibility and legitimacy.

22 A further strategy that creates ideological ambivalence is the series’ tendency to implicate the Washington political establishment as a potential source of threat. The U.S. government (including its Counter Terrorist Unit) is revealed as morally flawed, ineffective, even corrupt. Government agents like Bauer are subjected to government injustice and are, in the perspective of the Washington establishment, as expendable as the enemy “other.” Hence, Muslims and Islamic countries have no monopoly on conspiracies and violent plots in this series. Although viewers, especially in the wake of 9/11, may have become used to the entertainment of associations between Islam, Arabs, Arab Americans and terrorism, the show rather disabuses them of these too simple associations. It counters its own “Islamophobic reputation” (McCullough 43) by creating a “polysemic, variable, and often incoherent” (75) text that is “riddled with ideological contradictions” (77).

23 In fact, Islamophobia is only a minor part of the culture of suspicion and paranoia that is recreated and evoked in a series where no character can be trusted, not even within the CTU, and things are never what they seem. 24 evokes this sense of paranoia and disorientation on an aesthetic level by resorting to medial techniques associated with live broadcasts. As McCullough has suggested, 24 borrows “techniques from action news, reality television, and sports coverage… in order to intensify audience engagement” (1). The use of handheld, shaky cameras creates a “live effect” that “contributes to a sense of urgency,” but also reinforces the disorientation and distrust

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evoked by the constant plot twists and turns that throw characters and viewers off- course. Split screens and multiple frames encourage “comparisons between different characters’ reactions to the same events, revealing important information about them” (50), and yet viewers are still left with the work to actively “stitch the various pieces of information together into a meaningful whole” (Takacs 89). Other media producing additional information are cell phones and screens showing images from satellites and surveillance cameras. These videographic elements are supplemented by “text printed on screens including digital time clocks and readouts; and… endless images of screens” (McCullough 63). This excess of visual information adds to the “entertainment of multiple points of view and political perspectives” (Takacs 92) and “makes identification difficult” for the viewer (McCullough 63).

24 Additional textual layers that may intensify in-text dissensus are brought across by the use of lighting, color, soundtrack and music. In 24, sound design and music create parallels between the characters’ and the viewers’ search for information (Takacs 89). However, as McCullough has rightly argued, music “rarely contradicts the goal of establishing character motivation and story development” (66). Music and soundtrack may support the visual information by creating “stereotypical associations between characters or locations and musical themes” (66-7). “Oriental” music often underscores the sense of difference and threat tied to spaces and characters, including Muslim spaces such as cities and mosques, for instance in S2E11. However, there are also a few instances in which music may provide a subtextual counterpoint to what is witnessed on screen. Thus, in S4E5 ‘Oriental’ music lends a note of tragedy to the death of an Arab American that had colluded with a terrorist group. Musical associations implicitly undercut the triumphalist impulses that may have been encouraged by the storyline.

25 Hence, both The West Wing and 24 can be read against the grain—and against the more critical readings provided by some scholars—as contradictory texts that both reflect and expose Islamophobia. Since the storylines about Islamic cultures and geographies are never unrelated to contexts of national security, they may reflect the automatism of the links created between Islamic countries and threats to national security. At the same time, American Islamophobic behavior within the U.S. is exposed as implicitly un- American. Both The West Wing and 24 can be read as texts that feature in-text dissensus not only on the level of plot and dialogue, but also on the level of aesthetic strategies and intermedial references that heighten viewers’ understanding but that also leave much space for interpretation, consent and dissent. As polyvocal serial texts that leave viewers to ponder a range of perspectives and political positions, they are ideologically more ambivalent than is suggested by scholars who see the series advancing “a new kind of racism” or contributing to a “multicultural post-race illusion” (Alsultany, “Representations” 144). In their ambivalence they rather seem to expose long-standing tensions within American identity discourses between a civic inclusionist and a racialized exclusionist nationalism that particularly came to the fore in the days after 9/11. Both shows reflect, but at times also transcend, the discursive norms and limitations of their time, the first decade of a new century, and of their industrial contexts. Both emerged in a mediascape in which HBO, cable and DVDs began to define the production and reception of TV shows before streaming and streaming platforms appeared. However, in its multimedia textual structure, especially 24 already manifests and anticipates shifts in the mediascape that have come to define the industrial contexts and forms of televisual storytelling that we know today.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alsultany, Evelyn. “Representations of Arabs and Muslims in Post-9/11 Television Dramas.” The Colorblind Screen. Television in Post-Racial America, edited by Sarah Nilsen and Sarah E. Turner, New York UP, 2014, pp. 140-166.

---. Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11. New York UP, 2012.

Frame, Gregory. The American President in Film and Television: Myth, Politics and Representation. Peter Lang, 2014.

Guggenheim, David, creator. Designated Survivor. Kinberg Genre, The Mark Gordon Company, Baer Bones, ABC Studios, 2016-2019.

Hall, Barbara, creator. Madam Secretary. Barbara Hall Productions, Revelations Entertainment, CBS Television Studios, 2014-2019.

Holland, Jack. “‘When You Think of the Taliban, Think of the Nazis’: Teaching Americans ‘9/11’ in NBC’s The West Wing.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, 2011, pp. 85-106.

Kelleter, Frank. “‘Whatever Happened, Happened’: Serial Character Constellation as Problem and Solution in Lost.” Amerikanische Fernsehserien der Gegenwart. Perspektiven der American Studies und der Media Studies, edited by Christoph Ernst and Heike Paul, transcript, 2015, pp. 57-87.

Lotz, Amanda D. The Television Will Be Revolutionized. Second edition, New York UP, 2014.

Lurie, Rod, creator. Commander in Chief. Battleplan Productions, Steven Bochco Productions, 2005-2006.

McCabe, Janet. The West Wing. Wayne State UP, 2013.

McCullough, John. 24. Wayne State UP, 2014.

Mittell, Jason. Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York UP, 2015.

Morey, Peter and Amina Yaqin. Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11. Harvard UP, 2011.

Parry-Giles, Trevor and Shawn J. Parry-Giles. The Prime-Time Presidency: The West Wing and U.S. Nationalism. U of Illinois P, 2006.

Rippl, Gabriele. “Introduction.” Handbook of Intermediality. Literature – Image – Sound – Music, edited by Gabriele Rippl, DeGruyter, 2015, pp. 1-31.

Sorkin Aaron, creator. The West Wing. John Well and Warner Bros, 1999-2006.

Surnow, Joel and Robert Cochran. 24. Imagine Television, Real Time Productions, Teakwood Lane Productions, 20th Century Fox Television, 2001-2010.

Spigel, Lynn. “Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11.” American Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 2, June 2004, pp. 235-270.

Takacs, Stacy. Terrorism TV. Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America. UP of Kansas, 2012.

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NOTES

1. I want to thank the volume editors and the reviewers for their critical comments and very helpful suggestions.

ABSTRACTS

Since The West Wing (NBC, 1999-2006), the political drama series has been a proliferating format for fictional engagements with American politics. Georgi-Findlay focuses on how The West Wing and 24 (Fox, 2001-2010) engage public narratives about Islam and Islamophobia, arguing that the shows go beyond what Evelyn Alsultany has termed “simplified complex representations” by creating contradictory, multivocal texts that display dynamics of internal disaccord. Representations of Arabs, Muslims and Muslim countries are embedded within storylines that challenge each other. Especially The West Wing stages discussions that can lead to informed debates, reflecting and exposing the contradictions within the American national identity discourse between an inclusionist civic and an exclusionist racialized nationalism. In both series, polyvocal narratives are brought across not only by intertwining multiple discourses, but also by way of aesthetic strategies and intermedial references that supply additional textual layers, complicating viewers’ processes of meaning-making and contributing to in-text dissensus and ideological ambivalences. Both series thus can be read against the grain, as contradictory, multivocal texts that both reflect and expose Islamophobia.

INDEX

Keywords: Orientalism, Multimedia, Islamophobia, Hollywood, Historical Film

AUTHOR

BRIGITTE GEORGI-FINDLAY

Brigitte Georgi-Findlay is professor of North American Studies at the TU Dresden. Her publications include two monographs on Native American literature and one on The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women’s Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion (University of Arizona Press). In recent years, she has focused on Western films and Western television series, and has worked and published on recent series such as Deadwood, Hell on Wheels, The Walking Dead, Westworld, but also on “old” Western series such as Gunsmoke and Bonanza.

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Islamophobia and Necropolitics

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Islamophobia without Islamophobes: New Strategies of Representing Imperialist versus Suicide Terrorist Necropolitics in Homeland and Syriana

Mahmoud Arghavan

1. Introduction1

1 Ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the tropes of Islamist extremism, Islamic terrorism or terrorist Islamism, and suicidal violence have become pervasive in public discourses about global politics and Western governments’ rhetoric of the “War on Terror.” This is partly due to the numerous terror attacks, mostly suicidal, by militant Islamists around the world, with locations ranging from the U.S., France, England, and Germany to Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These suicide attacks have been generating worldwide fear, anger, and anxiety towards a militant Other who is equipped with an extremist ideology and a readiness to use their own body as a weapon to destroy the enemy. Yet, the equations of Islam with terror and Muslims with terrorists show the post-9/11 Islamophobic fruit of a longstanding Orientalist representation of “the rest” by the West and for the West. Perhaps old but still worth citing is Edward Said’s classic definition of Orientalism “as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 3).

2 Due to the Western media’s strategy of what Said (1997) terms “covering Islam,” Western publics seldom learn about the U.S.’s own history of neo-colonial interventions in the Greater Middle East and its cultivation of Islamic extremism in Afghanistan,

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implemented to contain and combat communism during the Cold War (Mamdani 119). Instead, media representations of “terror attacks” accompanied with Orientalist misrepresentations of Muslims and Islamicate cultures fortify Islamophobia around the world to produce “a cultural-ideological outlook that seeks to explain ills of the (global) social order by attributing them to Islam” (Semati 266). Consequently, Islamophobia is a “master discourse” that “conflates histories, politics, societies and cultures of the Middle East into a single unified and negative conception of Islam” (Semati 267) “as the civilizational foil of the west” (Beydoun 36). In American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear (2018), Khaled Beydoun explains how Islamophobia was “not only endorsed and emboldened by law, but also carried out by government actors” (19).2 Therefore, one recurrent outcome of this outlook is that Islamophobes, either as private actors or policy makers in the West, presumptuously hold “Islamic faith and cultures” accountable for all “terrorist attacks,” “suicide terrorism” and any other forms of extremist activities against the West and Western citizens.

3 Two representations of the figure of the suicide terrorist will be analyzed here as they are presented in the Showtime series Homeland (2011-) and the film Syriana (2005). This analysis pursues two goals. On the one hand, through studying these two cases, I will discuss the new representational mode concerning Arabs, Muslims and Middle Easterners in the American media in the post-9/11 era. In my analysis of Homeland and Syriana, I will examine “the simplified complex representational strategies” (Alsultany 14) that Evelyn Alsultany introduces in Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (2012). In her book, Alsultany scrutinizes the unprecedented “sympathetic portrayals of Arabs and Muslims” (4) in American media in the time of “mourning, fear, trauma, anger, and presumably justifiable racism against the entire Arab and Muslim population” subsequent to the September 11 terrorist attacks (1-2). Building on her argument, my aim is to explain that even though the Islamicate world and Muslims in the post-9/11 era have been portrayed more sympathetically, these media productions have had almost similar effects on the public to earlier Orientalist productions. As Alsultany elucidates: These seemingly positive representations of Arabs and Muslims have helped to form a new kind of racism, one that projects antiracism and multiculturalism on the surface but simultaneously produces the logics and affects necessary to legitimize racist policies and practices. It is no longer the case that the Other is explicitly demonized to justify war or injustice. Now, the Other is portrayed sympathetically in order to project the United States as an enlightened country that has entered a postracial era. (Alsultany 16)

4 On the other hand, by discussing the figure of the suicide terrorist, I aim to counter the equation of “suicide terrorism” and Islam based on the logic of martyrdom as an exclusively Islamic way of destroying the enemy. Exploring the geopolitical context of emergence of “suicide terrorism” demonstrates that terrorism in its various forms has less to do with religious ideologies in general and with Islamic faith in particular and more to do with responding to imperial politics in British colonies and postcolonies, as well as U.S.-occupied territories in the Middle East, pre- and post-9/11. Nevertheless, the Islamophobic equation of Muslim and terrorist in the Western media, preceded by the Orientalist otherization of Arabs or Muslims, has been an important part of a process which Khaled Beydoun explains as “dialectical Islamophobia” (29). This process binds the private Islamophobia of ordinary people with the structural Islamophobia of

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the states such as in “War on Terror” policies enacted by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump (Beydoun 29). In dialectical Islamophobia, structural Islamophobia shapes, reshapes, and endorses views or attitudes about Islam and Muslim subjects inside and outside of America’s borders. State actions legitimizes prevailing misconceptions, misrepresentations, and stereotypes of Islam and communicates damaging ideas through state-sponsored policy, programming, or rhetoric, which in turn emboldens private violence against Muslim (and perceived Muslims). (Beydoun 40)

5 The ultimate outcome of dialectical Islamophobia is legitimizing and valuing imperialist necropolitics while delegitimizing its opponent, namely the necropolitics of suicide terrorism. While Achille Mbembe (2003) defines necropolitics as the state’s sovereign right to kill its citizens, the American imperialist necropolitics assumes a neo-colonial transnational right to kill beyond U.S. national borders.

2. Necropolitics

6 In defying Islamophobia and combating neo-colonial imperialist necropolitics, the agency of the colonized and the dominated is a critical and necessary means. By assuming the power of self-representation, Muslims could raise their authorial voices and present an authentic, not necessarily Islamophilic, image of Islam and Muslim societies. This is the main characteristic of Post-Orientalism where “a critically self- conscious colonial subject… attains agential autonomy by way of knowing the language of speaking (fighting) back to the sovereign [the Empire]” (xii), as Hamid Dabashi explains in Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (2009) in his efforts to bring Said’s Orientalism up to date in the post-9/11 era. In the same vein, in Orientalism, Terrorism, Indigenism: South Asian Readings in Postcolonialism, Pavan Malreddy contends that Said’s argument needs to be complemented by including subaltern resistance to colonial domination. Malreddy writes: Said’s overemphasis on ‘synchronic essentialism,’ that is, the distortion of the Orient in literary imagination and the ensuing attempts by the colonizers to transform the Orient in tune with such imagination suffer from inadequate attention to the resistance (which Said has later termed ‘diachronic’ instability (Said 2003 [1979]: 240) to the Orientalist discourse at large. (xxiii-xxiv)

7 Discussing the ways of resisting colonial rule and imperial powers in the colony and postcolony requires a differentiation between the types of powers used by the rulers in the colonies or postcolonies to dominate the occupied territories. In “Necropolitics” (2003), Achille Mbembe expands the ideas of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault to explain the forms of subordination in the colonies. Mbembe argues that the notion of biopower is insufficient to account for the subjugation of life to the power of death in the colonies. He contends that the regime of biopolitical control in European societies is replaced with necropolitical control in the colonies because “the sovereign right to kill is not subject to any rule in the colonies. In the colonies, the sovereign might kill at any time or in any manner” (Mbembe 78). This means that in the colonies, the sovereign’s right to ‘kill and let live’ or the threat of extralegal extrajudicial violence and death define the relations of power.

8 The necropolitical system of domination in our contemporary world creates what Mbembe calls “death-worlds,” i.e., “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of

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the living dead” (Mbembe 92; emphasis in the original). Mbembe suggests that “today’s form of necropower blurs the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom” (92). Stephen Morton explicates: In the light of this argument, Mbembe’s claim that death is a form of agency for people who live under colonial occupation helps to clarify the significance of violent, anti-colonial insurgency as an assertion of political sovereignty in the context of a colonial regime that defines politics in terms of the right to injure, torture and kill its subjects with impunity. (39)

9 From this perspective, the common stereotype of the Middle Eastern Muslim-born terrorist as well as the right extremists’ equation of Islam with terrorism can be countered. In this vein, terrorism and suicide terrorism do not simply arise from a special religious faith, particularly Islam, but are byproducts of colonial domination and occupation of the Muslim world. To begin with, an intersectional study of the historical roots of the American Orientalist cultural and political imaginary, U.S. imperialist geopolitics in the Middle East and the American neocolonial ‘war machine’ in Afghanistan could shed light on the complex history of the rise of Islamic extremism and divert from the prevalent equation of Islam and terrorism employed today. In “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,” Mahmood Mamdani elucidates that during the Cold War and “after the defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, at the start of Reagan’s second term, the United States decided to harness, and even to cultivate, terrorism in the struggle against regimes it considered pro-Soviet” (Mamdani 769). As a result, Mamdani explains, “the tradition of jihad—of a just war with a religious sanction, nonexistent in the last 400 years—[was] revived with U.S. help in the 1980s” (770). The jihad against communism and the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan continued after the Soviets retreated in 1989, thereby triggering a long civil war in Afghanistan. This led to millions of casualties, the mass displacement of four million more Afghans and the destruction of Afghanistan’s infrastructures. Later on, the Taliban and its “suicide terrorism” emerged out of the agonies and despair of war against the Soviet Union and the subsequent civil war, which had turned some regions of Afghanistan into a death-world where people were being reduced to the state of living dead. Under these circumstances, “suicide terrorism” might become the last chance of expressing agency for somebody who is already in a state of living dead.

10 At this point, it needs to be iterated that this paper does not in any way aim to either justify “suicide terrorism” or celebrate terrorists as “freedom fighters.” Rather, it proposes to view terrorism in light of anti-colonial insurgencies and resistance to colonial occupation.

3. Representation of Suicide Terrorism

11 After a long history of Orientalist depictions of Muslims and Islam in Hollywood which is well documented by Jack Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2003), in recent years, Hollywood and Western Media have begun to offer a more differentiated and sympathetic image of Arabs and Muslims. At first glance, the new balanced portrayals of Arabs and Muslims can be interpreted and appreciated as a decline in Islamophobic sentiments around the world (or at least among Hollywood producers). The recent parliamentary elections in Europe and the latest presidential election in the U.S., however, refute this optimistic turn. On the contrary, it seems that a quiet Islamophobia is on the rise: even though more people are avoiding making

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Islamophobic/xenophobic statements in public, the Islamophobic voters in Europe and the U.S. are quietly voicing their opinions at the polls. Recent media productions and Hollywood films are just mirroring this transformation from overt to covert Islamophobia. Alsultany reminds us that as the U.S. government’s overt propaganda of war in the days and weeks following 9/11 became gradually less effective and more controversial, “the production and circulation of ‘positive’ representations of the ‘enemy’ has become essential to projecting the United States as benevolent, especially in its declaration of war and passage of racist policies” (7). This policy was to promote the delusion of entering a multicultural and postrace era, but in reality, it declared the formation of “a new postrace racism” (Alsultany 7). Thus, a new critical analysis of sympathetically portrayed Arabs and Muslims in the context of their narratives will reveal these ideological messages in relation to the larger discourse of the “War on Terror” and also point out how these portrayals contribute to the illusion of a multicultural post-race era.

12 On another front, one needs to bear in mind that Islamophobia is not solely propagated by the right-wing press and politicians. Khaled Beydoun reminds us that “[c]ontrary to popular caricatures and flat media portrayals, Islamophobes are not always conservatives, far-right zealots, ‘lone wolf’ killers, presidential hopefuls—or presidents —using hateful rhetoric, evangelical ideologues, or Trump voters” (30). In the same vein, Hamid Dabashi writes in “The Liberal Roots of Islamophobia” (2017) that liberal Islamophobes like Bill Maher, who in HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” referred to the Qur’an as “Islam’s hate-filled holy book,” “are finagling their hatred of Muslims with smiling faces, silly jokes, phony arguments, forced laughter and manufactured consent —with the full cooperation of otherwise perfectly respectable outlets.” Dabashi contends that “Islamophilia is as deranged as Islamophobia,” and that these critics “dare to talk about the ‘battle of ideas’ without a single citation of any living or dead Muslim theologian, philosopher, mystic, poet, artist, or public intellectual evident in their vertiginously vacuous prose” (Dabashi).

13 Deepa Kumar in Islamophobia: The Cultural Logic of Empire reasons that although neoconservatives and the realist/liberal camps constitute two different modes of thought in policy circles with divergent rhetoric and strategies, “they share a common commitment to U.S. imperialism. Their points of contention revolve around the best ways to maintain U.S. dominance and global hegemony” (5). She contends that immediately after 9/11, neo-conservative and liberal Islamophobes came together to converge domestic and foreign policy to wage the “War on Terror.” Kumar maintains that this resulted in “the construction of the overarching ‘Islamic terrorist’ enemy that must be fought abroad and at home. The corresponding ‘green scare’ (green is the color of Islam) is similar to the various anticommunist ‘red scares’ that marked US domestic politics in the twentieth century” (5). Therefore, detecting the latent Islamophobia of liberals and leftists or the implied Islamophobic messages conveyed along with sympathetic portrayals of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood films and TV shows in the prolonged “War on Terror” era is a task that must be taken on.

14 Hollywood’s new representational strategies, with regard to Islam and the Middle East, as Alsultany contends, include “Inserting Patriotic Arab or Muslim Americans,” “Sympathizing with the Plight of Arab and Muslim,” “Challenging the Arab/Muslim Conflation with Diverse Muslim Identities,” “Flipping the Enemy,” “Humanizing the Terrorist,” “Projecting a Multicultural U.S. Society,” and “Fictionalizing the Middle

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Eastern or Muslim Country” (21-26). These strategies assist the producers to exonerate themselves from charges such as Islamophobia and Orientalism in the so-called post- race era,3 while simultaneously allowing them to produce films and shows that cater to the public’s Islamophobic and Orientalist impulses.

15 I chose to study Homeland and Syriana for two reasons. On the one hand, the figure of the suicide terrorist is represented in both. On the other hand, they both attempt to complicate and challenge former stereotypical portrayals of Middle Easterners and Muslims. The writers of Homeland and Syriana have tried to shift away from Islamophobia and negative stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs. They position their viewers to either largely sympathize with the plight of Muslims or show antipathies towards the U.S. imperialist politics in the Middle East, ultimately presenting viewers with some explanations for George W. Bush’s enquiry of “Why do they hate us?” However, the Islamophobic messages of Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996) between the West and Islam in the form of a war between CIA agents or U.S. marines and Islamic extremists is still at play. Therefore, despite avoiding a monolithic picture of Islam, Arab and Muslim identities are still understood and evaluated primarily in relation to terrorism and sometimes as suicide assailants. Either they are— to use Mahmood Mamdani’s concept—Good Muslims in alliance with the U.S. in fighting the “War on Terror” or they are Bad Muslims who plot a terror attack against the West.

4. Homeland

16 The first two seasons of the Showtime series Homeland, which was renewed for a seventh season in 2019, revolves around sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), an American marine veteran who had been captured by Al-Qaeda in Iraq and spent eight years of his life in Abu-Nazir’s (Navid Negahban) custody. After a long term of torture, humiliation and darkness, he was assigned to teach English to Nazir’s son Issa (Rohan Chand) in return for more comfort. Nazir’s son is killed along with eighty-one other schoolchildren in a drone attack which was planned by the American army to assassinate Abu-Nazir. The Vice President (Jamey Sheridan) authorized bombing the school next to Nazir’s house, even though he knew that this attack would affect schoolchildren. Later, in a press conference, he negates the whole incident and calls it media propaganda. Under the influence of Abu-Nazir, Brody converts to Islam, becomes Nazir’s disciple and swears to avenge Issa’s death. During an American forces operation in Iraq, Brody is freed from an Al-Qaeda jail and returned to the U.S. as a war hero. After passing a difficult period of readjustment to his family and old life, Brody receives the mission and necessary equipment to execute a suicide attack against the Vice President of the United States, who is going to announce his candidacy for the presidency. However, a phone call from his daughter at the last second stops him from detonating his bomb vest.

17 Aside from Brody and his family, the other two main characters of Homeland, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), are also white Americans. The main antagonist in the narrative is an Al-Qaeda leader from Iraq. Although this setting appears to tell another American classic good-versus-evil story with all its potentials for misrepresentation of the Muslim evil, the narrative complicates portrayals of Muslims and terrorists and avoids the usual stereotypical imagery. Carrie and Saul are two CIA agents whose heroic acts always neutralize terrorist plots and

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save American lives. The CIA director, David Estes (David Harewood), is played by an African American and his role is designed to project the multiculturalism and meritocracy of American society. Although David’s character fulfills the diversity agenda of “neoliberal multiculturalism,” his mishandling of critical situations perpetuates the viewers’ belief that perhaps saviors ought to be white Americans. The audience could also “sympathize with the plight of Arabs and Muslims” (Asultany 22) through witnessing the innocent killing of Issa along with the other schoolchildren by a CIA-sanctioned drone strike. At the same time, Abu-Nazir is not portrayed as an absolute devil, rather as a charismatic intelligent leader. He is also “humanized” (Alsultany 24) as a loving father who is not plotting the terror attack against American civilians purely because of his Islamist cause, but because he wants to take revenge on the responsible person for his son’s killing.

18 Abu-Nazir could easily have the Vice President assassinated by his other American disciple, Tom Walker (Chris Chalk), who was captured and converted to Islam in Iraq along with Brody. Yet, he plots a suicide attack on American soil and convinces Brody to implement this mission. A suicide terror attack by a white American would demonstrate the power of an Islamic ideology that can capture the soul and body of an American war hero and inspire him to sacrifice his life in order to coerce the American military to withdraw from occupied territories in the Middle East. As a part of the tradition of the suicide bombers, Sergeant Brody tapes a statement before the operation, where he explains the motivation for his action: I love my country, what I am is a marine like my father before me and his father before him. And as a marine, I swore an oath to defend the United States of America against enemies both foreign and domestic. My action this day is against such domestic enemies—the vice president and members of his national security team, who I know to be liars and war criminals, responsible for atrocities they were never held accountable for. This is about justice for eighty-two children, whose deaths were never acknowledged and whose murder is a stain on the soul of this nation.

19 However, it is against the politics of the American media industry to portray a white American (even one that converted to Islam) as a terrorist, let alone a suicide bomber. The story is not told because terrorists always originate in the Orient and “the land of the free” is by definition destined to cultivate freedom and democracy, not to breed terrorism. According to American mainstream media, only Arab Muslims or Muslims from the Middle East can give up all worldly ties and sacrifice their lives in order to kill the enemy who is threatening their community.

20 Brody, who had once disappointed Abu-Nazir, proves his loyalty to him by killing Tom Walker. He progresses to be elected to the United States House of Representatives. Nonetheless, Brody’s alliance with Abu-Nazir continues in the second season of Homeland. While Carrie and Saul are leading an operation to assassinate Abu-Nazir in Beirut, Brody saves Nazir’s life at the last minute by warning him about the operation. Among the documents that Carrie collects from the field in Beirut, Saul finds Brody’s taped testimony to his unfulfilled suicide attack. Under interrogation Brody confesses to his cooperation with Abu-Nazir and pledges to work as a double agent for the CIA to deter terror attacks on America. At the end of the second season, a car-bombing hits the CIA headquarters leaving several casualties including David, the CIA director. Because Brody’s car has been used for the explosion, the evidence seems to confirm that Brody had conducted the terror attack. However, Carrie, who suffers from bipolar disorder and is genuinely dedicated to protecting U.S. national security, represents the

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Manichean spirit of the discourse of the “War on Terror”:4 she believes that Brody is innocent and helps him to flee to Canada. Brody comes back in the third season of the show to prove his patriotism by penetrating the Iranian Intelligent Service inside Iran. After his arrest in Iran, he is hanged by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in a dramatically depicted Iranophobic scene. Brody’s public execution in a residential neighborhood in Tehran before the Iranian public (including children) who are chanting “Death to America” and “Allah-o Akbar,” links Islamophobia and Iranophobia conveniently at a time when a conflation of Middle Easterners, anti-American Muslims, and terrorism was needed more than ever. It was a time when U.S. propaganda was aimed at orchestrating an international coalition against Iran and its controversial nuclear program. This narrative introduced the Islamic Republic of Iran, equipped with nuclear weapons, as a larger threat to global peace and regional stability than Al-Qaeda and Saddam ever could be.

21 Homeland represents the anti-American threat of Islamist terrorism as an ever- increasing menace within the U.S. borders and against the U.S. forces and allies in the Middle East. The Islamist terrorists are represented as cunning enemies of the West, but Carrie and Saul will always overcome the challenges of neutralizing their plots.

5. Syriana

22 Syriana,5 directed by Stephen Gaghan and released in 2005 (two years after the U.S. military invasion of Iraq) offers an overview of U.S. imperialist geopolitics in the Middle East and its consequences for the marginalized Muslim individuals and communities in the region. With sympathetic portrayals of Arab Muslims and other Muslims such as Pakistanis, the film holds global capitalism and American imperialism accountable for the plight of some groups of Muslim migrant laborers in the oil states of the Persian Gulf.

23 Wasim and his father, Saleem Ahmed Khan (Mazhar Munir and Shahid Ahmed), two Pakistani migrant workers at a Connex refinery, are being laid off due to a Chinese company outbidding Connex for the rights to run that facility. Unemployed and threatened by deportation and poverty, Wasim desperately and unsuccessfully searches for work. Wasim and his friend join an Islamic school to learn Arabic to improve their employment prospects. Then they meet a charismatic Islamic fundamentalist cleric who earlier had stolen an anti-tank missile from a CIA agent. The teachings of the radical teacher of the Madressa triggers Wasim’s personal incentive to take revenge on the cause of his plight. A radical interpretation of his religious faith equips him with an ideology to conduct an act of suicide terrorism. Eventually, divested of their political status, the two Pakistani workers take refuge in an extremist ideology to sacrifice their “bare lives” in a suicide attack by riding their weaponized vessel into on a Connex- Killen LNG tanker. Wasim represents the people of the extremely poor regions of the global south as being the most vulnerable to extremist ideologies. These suicidal assailants with their stateless bodies symbolize that if “capitalism cannot exist without waste [i.e. the victims of global capitalism],” as one economic advisor in the film tells us, these victims, who had been reduced to a state of living dead, will come back and combat the capitalist system. Global neoliberalism degrades Wasim from an individual citizen of the world into a stateless, “homeless” non-citizen worker of global capitalism. In Agamben’s terminology Wasim had been transformed from “Bio” into

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“Zoe” (see Agamben 1998), without any political rights. Wasim is the last part of a network of arms trafficking and proxy wars in the Middle East including Iranian intelligence agents, Hezbollah, CIA and Islamic clerics both in Lebanon and in the religious schools. Captured by Islamist ideology, Wasim and his friend arm their bare bodies6 with a missile that was very likely produced by the American weapons industry to conduct a suicide attack on one of the economic arms of the American war machine. According to Achille Mbembe, A war machine combines a plurality of functions. It has the features of a political organization and a mercantile company. It operates through capture and depredations and can even coin its own money. In order to fuel the extraction and export of natural resources located in the territory they control, war machines forge direct connections with transnational networks. (32)

24 Syriana’s narrative exposes the U.S. war machine and its rationale very critically. In a parallel plot, the CIA assassinates Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig), who in contrast to his father’s repressive government and conformism to American interests, is a progressive politician dedicated to a nationalist agenda. Prince Nasir is going to foster long-term sustainable development by introducing democratic reforms and diversifying the economy of his country in preparation for the time when the oil runs out. As the emirate’s foreign minister, Prince Nasir grants natural gas drilling rights to a Chinese company, which greatly upsets the U.S. oil industry and the U.S. government. Thus, the American government urges the King to name his younger son Meshal (Akbar Kurtha) as his successor, causing Nasir to attempt a coup. On his way to assume power as the new king with a convoy of his supporters, the CIA strikes the automobile of Nasir and his family with a guided bomb from a circling predator drone, killing them instantly. The fact that the U.S. feels free to assassinate foreign leaders on their own soil is evidence of its imperialist necropolitics which I would term as the “neocolonial transnational right to kill.”

6. Suicide Terrorism in the New Discourse on Terrorism

25 Scrutinizing the history of suicide terrorism and representations of this phenomenon in the new discourse on terrorism will help us to better understand why the two characters who were on suicide missions, Brody in Homeland and Wasim in Syriana, act differently in the end. How can we make logical sense of the representations of suicide terrorism in the narratives of Homeland and Syriana, where a white American does not fulfill his suicide terrorist mission, but a young Muslim man from Pakistan accomplishes his assigned task?

26 In the post-Cold War era and the post-9/11 era of the “War on Terror,” Islam has come to represent the horror of terrorism and suicide terrorism and this has subsequently been specialized for Muslims. However, studies on the history of suicide terrorism can disrupt the equivalence of Islam and terrorism by bringing into light the existence of Jewish terrorists in 66 AD, Christian terrorism, and Shi’a Islamic terrorism of Islamili Assassins. In Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2006), Robert A. Pape shows that religion is “rarely the root cause of terrorism [but] often used as a tool in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective” (4). Pape defines terrorism as “the use of violence by an organization other than a national

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government to intimidate or frighten a target audience.… In general, terrorism has two broad purposes: to gain supporters and to coerce opponents” (9). According to him, the most important forms of terrorism include “demonstrative,” “destructive,” and “suicide” terrorism. Pape writes: ‘Demonstrative terrorism’ is as much political theater as violence. It is directed mainly at gaining publicity, for any or all of three reasons: to recruit more activists; to gain attention to grievances from soft-liners on the other side; and to gain attention from third parties who might exert pressure on the other side. (9)

27 “Destructive terrorism,” on the contrary, “is more aggressive, seeking to coerce opponents with the threat of injury or death as well as to mobilize support for the cause” (Pape 10). The most aggressive form of terrorism is, however, “suicide terrorism.” According to Pape, “[w]hat distinguishes a suicide terrorist is that the attacker does not expect to survive the mission and often employs a method of attack (such as a car bomb, suicide vest, or ramming an airplane into a building) that requires his or her death in order to succeed” (10). Nearly all suicide terrorists pursue a secular and strategic goal of either coercing the occupying powers to withdraw from their homeland or compelling a target government to change policy. According to Pape “suicide terrorism attempts to inflict pain on the opposing society to overwhelm its interest in resisting the terrorists’ demands, and so to induce the government to concede, or the population to revolt against the government” (27-8). Because militarily they are in a weaker position in the power structure, they sacrifice their own lives to cause the colonizer or its agents damage in the most efficient manner. Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the communist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or the Tamil Tigers) in Sri Lanka, in a major speech in 1998 said: In terms of manpower, firepower and resources, the enemy was strong and the balance of military power was in his favor. Yet we had an extraordinary weapon which was not in the arsenal of the enemy. The courage and commitment of our fighters was our most powerful weapon in the battle.… The Black Tigers [suicide squad] are the self-protective armor of our race. They are the men of flame who can destroy the enemy’s armed strength. (in Pape 33)

28 Alex Houen in “Sacrificial Militancy and the Wars around Terror” reminds us that “the first suicide bombings in the early twentieth century were carried out by secular Russian anarchists, and the next major instance was that of Japanese ‘kamikaze’ pilots in World War II” (114). Although no religion inherently promotes and justifies terrorist acts or suicide terrorism, under certain circumstances religion can be instrumentalized by political actors and religious leaders involved in games of coercion to “institute an idealism of transcendent justifications for a community” (Houen 115). These transcendent values could be “democracy,” “freedom,” or “God,” and “the nation” (Houen 114).

29 Yet, in the contemporary era, except for the communist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, most suicide attacks around the world have been perpetrated by radical Islamist organizations such as Hamas in Lebanon, the Palestine Islamic Jihad, Al- Qaeda and finally ISIS (see Pape passim). The Islamic background of the majority of twenty-first-century terrorists, the religious rhetoric of the mobilizing forces of the terrorist activities stated in the sermons of some radical Islamists and reflected in instructions for terrorist operations, can provide convincing evidence for Islamophobes who identify Islam with terrorism.

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30 For instance, Al-Qaeda’s infamous fatwa against the United States, signed by Osama bin Laden and others reads: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aksa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. (in Pape 32)

31 The text of the operative instructions and spiritual guidelines for the terrorists who committed the attacks of September 11, 2001 reads: Read the Al-Tawbah [i.e., Repentance], the Anfal chapters [in the Qur’an], and reflect on their meaning and what Allah has prepared for the believers and the martyrs in paradise.… Be cheerful for you have only moments between you and your eternity, after which a happy and satisfying life begins, the eternal pleasures with the prophets, the righteous, the good and the martyrs, … Allah is our best Representative and Defender. ‘That devil scares his followers’ who admire Western civilization and swallow their love and beatification of it with cold water… ‘God will frustrate conspiracies of the infidels.’ Do not take revenge for yourself, but make your strikes and everything in the name of Allah.… When the time of truth and the Zero Hour arrives, then rip open your clothes, and bare your chest to embrace death for the sake of Allah! [. . .] ‘Do not consider those who were killed for the sake of Allah dead,’ … and your last words should be: .There is no god but Allah. Mohammed is His messenger!’ (“The Last Night Letter”)

32 Three identical copies of this manifesto hand-written in Arabic were recovered from the hijackers’ belongings in Boston, Washington DC and at the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 in Western Pennsylvania. The FBI released this evidence on September 28, 2001 and named it “The Last Night Letter.” It has been also known as “Manual for a Raid.”7 Multiple references in this document to some selected passages from the Qur’an and the history of Islam to justify martyrdom and mass murder of enemies of Islam have be utilized by conservatives to prove the accuracy of the ‘clash of civilizations’ theory and to legitimize rising Islamophobic sentiments.

33 Nevertheless, Mbembe’s notions of necropower and necropolitics explain suicide terrorism as expressions of agency and sovereignty over life, i.e., death and afterlife for the colonized subject who has been already stripped to his/her bones of his/her agency by the colonizers. In this way, the religiously stimulated “martyr-to-be” sacrifices his/ her own life and body for two higher ends. On the one hand, martyrdom “paves the way to a happy life” which “[he/she] believes, rests only in God himself. And only through conversion can an authentic relationship to God arise” (Mbembe 50). On the other hand, the suicide terrorist’s commitment to martyrdom struggles to coerce the occupying powers and colonizers to withdraw from their homeland, which will hypothetically facilitate the happiness of his/her people. Thus, the language of the instructions for the suicide terrorists of the September 11 and other manuals can be explained as formulation of a religious necropolitics.

34 Mbembe draws on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and George Bataille about death to elucidate the relation between terror, sacrifice and freedom. Mbembe writes that Heidegger’s granting an existential status to the human “being toward death” as the “the decisive condition of all true human freedom” (Heidegger 74) means “one is free to live one’s own life only because one is free to die one’s own death” (Mbembe 90).

35 Georges Bataille in an essay on “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice” writes, “in order for man to reveal himself ultimately to himself, he would have to die, but he would have to do it

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while living—watching himself ceasing to be. In other words, death itself would have to become self-consciousness of itself” (19). Thus, “the human subject has to be fully alive at the very moment of dying, to be aware of his own death, to live with the impression of actually dying” (Mbembe 90). In this sense, sacrifice achieves the condition of self- awareness of death at the very moment of ceasing to exist. The sacrificed “dies seeing himself die, and even, in some sense, through his own will, at one with the weapon of sacrifice” (Mbembe 90). In the case of suicide bombers, the sacrifice consists of the spectacular putting to death of the self, of becoming his or her own victim (self-sacrifice). The self-sacrificed proceeds to take power over his or her death and to approach it head on. This power may be derived from the belief that the destruction of one’s own body does not affect the continuity of the being. The idea is that the being exists outside of us. The self-sacrifice consists, here, in the removal of a twofold prohibition: that of self-immolation (suicide) and that of murder. (Mbembe 38)

36 Martyrdom embodies “being-towards-death.” It can be a religious act, as in the case of Jihadi suicide bombers, or motivated by secular imperatives, as with the freedom fighters in the colony or the soldiers of the colonizing powers who are called rhetorically to sacrifice their lives for the higher values of the nation such as freedom and democracy,8 but practically for the interest of the Empire. The martyrs continue to live because if their deaths were religiously inspired, religion had equipped them with afterlife philosophy. If their deaths had secular motivations such as independence and liberty for the colonized “freedom fighters” or protecting freedom and democracy for the fighters of the “War on Terror,” the martyrs continue to thrive through their ideals and historical deeds.

37 The new discourse on terrorism, descending from Orientalism, essentializes this religious necropolitics as inherently Islamic to serve the interests of Empire and justify the suspension of the rule of law in occupied territories such as Iraq and Afghanistan. As Edward Said writes in “The Essential Terrorist,” an article published in Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (1988), “the spurious excuse of ‘fighting terrorism’ serves to legitimize every case of torture, illegal detention, demolition of houses, expropriation of land, murder, collective punishment, deportation, censorship, closure of schools and universities” (Said 156).

38 In another essay entitled “Punishment by Detail” (2002), Said criticized the distorted image of the reality of Palestinian people through the misrepresentation of Palestinian suicide bombings. While admitting the unforgivable horror of terrorism, he points out that: “Suicide bombing is reprehensible but it is a direct and, in my opinion, a consciously programmed result of years of abuse, powerlessness, and despair. It has as little to do with the Arab or Muslim supposed propensity for violence as the man in the moon.” Stephen Morton explains that Said criticizes the discourse of terrorism because it “is used by the United States and its allies to describe violent acts of resistance to imperial occupation rather than addressing the violence of imperial occupation itself” (36). Morton argues that the causal logic of the discourse on terrorism “conceals the fact that the threat of terrorism is an instance of metalepsis: an effect of colonial discourse that is presented as a cause”9 (36). This logic, according to him, focuses “on the emotional and aesthetic connotation of terror instead of examining the geopolitical context of its production” (Morton 37). Similarly, Malreddy (2015) writes that the term “terrorism” “has come to represent a nameless Oriental collective that stretches from the Saharan Tuareg in North Africa to the Solomon Islands in the Asia Pacific. Thus, …

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the Oriental collective that is glutted by seamlessly borderless terrorists can no longer be defined in terms of a fixed geographical entity” (3). Indeed, the new discourse on terrorism designates terror to alien domains and outlines the borders of the Orient according to the terrorists’ origins. In other words, Orientalism defined the Orient as geography of Otherness which is characterized by Islamic fundamentalism, women’s repression and tyrant rulers. The Orient for the new discourse on terrorism constitutes an imaginary geography from which the terrorists come. “Terrorism” defines where the Orient is, because “[t]error and torture always refer to the actions of others, never to ourselves [meaning Americans]” (Gregory 229). Moreover, the United States of America is by definition incapable of breeding terrorists and/or equipping them with the required ideological weapons. Even in case of Muslim American citizens involved in terrorist attacks in the U.S., their country of origin outside of U.S. borders, somewhere in the Orient, will be pronounced as their homeland because “home-grown terrorism” in the West is unimaginable. Therefore, a terrorist is always already “foreign-grown” (Malreddy 4). As a result, even in the cases of Timothy McVeigh10 and Andres Behring Breivik11, the term “home-grown terrorist” has been hardly used. Malreddy reports, “four years after the tragedy, Breivik is certified as a ‘maverick,’ a ‘nut-ball,’ a ‘crazy- loner’—but not quite a terrorist” (4).

39 Malreddy writes that “unlike ‘old’ terrorism, which is defined as a violent but unlawful form of political resistance, ‘new’ or ‘categorical terrorism’ refers to the nonconventional, nonpolitical, and even ‘irrational’12 violence that primarily targets Western civilians” (Goodwin in Malreddy 4). Thus, in the new discourse on terrorism [i]f a Westerner kills his fellow civilians, he is a ‘crazy-loner;’ if an Oriental kills his fellow civilians, he is the good old terrorist; and if the same Oriental kills Western civilians, he is the ‘new’ terrorist. Only Western ways of killing civilians—be it through war, invasion, or military conquest [which Mbembe explains, are not ‘subject to legal and institutional rules’ (Mbembe 78)]—are deemed superior, proper, and unquestionably legitimate. (Porter in Malreddy 4)

40 Therefore, according to the logic of the new discourse on terrorism, Sergeant Brody could not be portrayed as a suicide bomber because this role is reserved for Muslim Middle Easterners such as Wasim.

7. Conclusion

41 As Achille Mbembe (2003) reminds us, an important feature of the wars of the globalization era is that “military operations and the exercise of the right to kill are no longer the sole monopoly of states, and the ‘regular army’ is no longer the unique modality of carrying out these functions” (31). The growing gap between high-tech and low-tech means of war in addition to the illegitimate imperialist presence of the West has given rise to the necropower of the figure of the ‘suicide terrorist’ who uses his/her own body as a means to confront the state’s necropower. Therefore, from a broader view, the “War on Terror” and terrorist suicide attacks represent an ongoing contest between the U.S.-led Western states and non-state militant Islamist organizations over the “right to kill” the Other who is either, for Americans, a threat to national security and democracy or, for Al-Qaeda followers and ISIS fighters, a threat to their Islamist ideology and the cause of the plight of destitute Muslims and Arabs in the Middle East. After all, G.W. Bush’s “War on Terror” agenda was based on his assumed sovereign

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right to kill the adversaries of what his administration framed as modern liberal democracy.

42 On another level, the Muslim people of the Middle East are subject to both U.S. neocolonial necropolitics and imperialist biopolitics. These people, who are full citizens in their countries of origin during and after the state of exception, will either be killed in the middle of the bloody competition between the U.S. necropolitics and the necropolitics of violent non-state actors such as Al-Qaeda, Taliban and ISIS or flee their lands in order to survive. As a result, displacement divests these war refugees, who are often educated and skilled workers in their homelands, of their human rights to a happy and safe life and alters them from full citizens of their countries to stateless asylum seekers and eventually to second-class cheap labor force for Western countries. In this way, Empire exports products of its arms industry to the flourishing markets of the war zones and imports cheap labor. This simultaneity of biopolitics and necropolitics is the unique characteristic of a neocolonial imperialist power in the twenty-first century, which under the state of exception assumes the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death, which eventually manipulates the natural flow of the world populations in many directions and many respects.

43 The American neo-colonial necropolitics could not be executed in the Middle East without an Islamophobic construction of an “Arab-Middle-Eastern-Muslim Other.” In Islamophobia and Racism in America (2017), Erik Love explains that the racialization of Muslim identity in the “War on Terror” prescribed Muslim Americans and nationals of Muslim majority countries a collective political identity which would translate into the suspicion of terrorism and subversion. Islamophobia, according to Semati, “posits ‘Islam’ as a conception of the world that is incompatible with modernity, with civilization, and, more important, with Euro-Americanness. Islamophobia, on the one hand, creates difference (the ‘Other’) and, on the other hand, erases difference (all of ‘them’ are the ‘same’)” (267). Therefore, American imperialism instrumentalizes modernity and its values such as freedom, human rights, democracy, women’s rights and equality to racialize Islam, otherize Muslims, and implement politics which target those states and non-governmental organizations who endanger its capitalist interests.

44 Because modern racism based on biological differences has been long discredited and disgraced, Islamophobia, as “an essentialist view of peoples whose culture it deems ‘different’ in an eternal, fixed, and immutable fashion” (Semati 266), is built on cultural differences. Semati points out that “[i]n the ‘neo-racist’ logic, the Other/self dichotomy is no longer explained in an inferior/superior framework. Instead, the Other is believed to be ‘different’” (266). In the era of neo-liberal multiculturalism which largely translates into “racism without races,” “cultural racism” (Balibar, Naber) substitutes race and “racial difference” with culture and “cultural difference.” It also replaces insults against Muslims such as “sand nigger” and “diaperhead” with respectful sentences such as “they are different” and “we cannot mingle because our life-styles and traditions are incompatible.” Aside from the “cultural racism” of private Islamophobes, according to Nadine Naber in “Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!” the period of post-9/11 has witnessed a “nation-based racism” of structural Islamophobia as well. According to Naber, “[i]n the context of the ‘War on Terror,’ the interplay between culture-based racism and nation-based racism has articulated subjects perceived to be ‘Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim’ not only as a moral, cultural, and civilizational threat to the ‘American’ nation, but also as a security threat” (280).

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Beydoun (2018) shows that structural Islamophobia reflects and authorizes the private Islamophobia of ordinary people on the one hand, while it is supported, voted for and reelected by private Islamophobes and reproduced and reinstated by the media, art and literature, on the other hand.

45 As Alsultany contends, “government and media discourses” on the “War on Terror” are inextricably interrelated and together form a “hegemonic field of meaning” premised on “they hate us for our freedom” (Arabs and Muslims 7). This discourse “provided the logic and justification needed to pass racist foreign and domestic policies and provided the suspicion needed for many citizens to tolerate the targeting of Arabs and Muslims, often without any evidence that they were involved in terrorist activities” (Alsultany 7). Alsultany, in response to a conservative film critic who was concerned that humanizing the terrorists in films such as Syriana blurred the moral difference between terrorist and those who fight terrorism and raised sympathy for the terrorists, points out that “viewer responses suggest that for most the dominant message remains the same: the United States is at war against terrorism because Arabs and Muslims are a threat” (38). She views the impact of these “simplified complex representational strategies” (14) to being limited to circumventing accusations of racism for the writers and producers with the aim of maintaining the largest viewership possible. These viewers generally “take away the message that Arabs and Muslims are a threat to U.S. national security despite a few Arab and Muslim characters that are against terrorism” (Alsultany 38).

46 What Hollywood films and American TV shows have failed to convey to their viewers is that there are some millions of Muslims who are living peacefully in the U.S. just like other citizens and work as doctors, engineers, university professors, taxi drivers, construction workers, etc. whose stories and characters, regardless of their religious views, could be told and depicted in American films and TV shows, and not just relegated to stories related to terrorism and war in the Middle East.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford UP, 1998.

Alsultany, Evelyn “Arabs and Muslims in the Media after 9/11: Representational Strategies for a ‘Postrace’ Era.” American Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 1, 2013, pp. 161-169.

---. Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11. New York UP, 2012.

Balibar, Etienne. “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?” Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identity, edited by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Verso, 1991, pp. 17-28.

Bataille, Georges. “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice.” Yale French Studies, vol. 7, no. 8, 1990, pp. 9-28.

Beydoun, Khaled A. American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear. Tantor Media, 2018.

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---. “Islamophobia: Toward a Legal Definition and Framework.” Columbia Law Review Online, no. 116, 2016, March 2020. Accessed 15 September 2020. https://columbialawreview.org/content/ islamophobia-toward-a-legal-definition-and-framework/.

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

Dabashi, Hamid. “The Liberal Roots of Islamophobia.” Al-Jazeera, March 2017. Accessed 4 September 2020. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/03/liberal-roots- islamophobia-170302152226572.html.

---. Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror. Transaction Publishers, 2009.

Homeland. Created by Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, Showtime Networks, 2011-2019.

Houen, Alex. “Sacrificial Militancy and the Wars around Terror.” Terror and the Postcolonial, edited by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, Wiley Blackwell, 2015, pp. 113-140.

Kumar, Deepa. Islamophobia: The Cultural Logic of Empire. Haymarket, 2012.

Love, Erik. Islamophobia and Racism in America. New York UP, 2017.

Makiya, Kanan, and Havan Mneimneh. “Manual for a ‘Raid’.” Striking Terror: America’s New War, edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein, New York Review of Books, 2002, pp. 319-27.

Malreddy, Pavan K. Orientalism, Terrorism, Indigenism: South Asian Readings in Postcolonialism. SAGE, 2015.

Mamdani, Mahmood. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. Doubleday, 2004.

---. “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism.” American Anthropologist, vol. 104, no. 3, 2002, pp. 765-775.

Mmembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran, Duke UP, 2019.

---. “Necropolitics.” Translated by Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 11-40.

Morton, Stephen. “Terrorism, Orientalism and Imperialism.” Wasafiri, vol. 22, no. 2, 2007, pp. 36-42

Naber, Nadine. “Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!” Race and Arab Americans before and after 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects, edited by Amaney A. Jamal, Syracuse UP, 2008, pp. 276-304.

“President Bush Visits Troops in Iraq,” The White House, 13 June 2006. Accessed 27 March 2020. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/06/20060613-2.html.

“President’s Radio Address,” The White House, 24 May 2008. Accessed 27 March 2020. http:// www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/05/20080524.html.

Said, Edward W. “Punishment by Detail.” Monthly Review, October 2002. Accessed 4 September 2020, https://monthlyreview.org/2002/10/01/punishment-by-detail/.

---. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. Vintage Books, 1997.

---. “The Essential Terrorist.” Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, edited by Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, Verso, 1988, pp. 149-58.

---. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1979.

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Saldívar, Ramón. “Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction.” American Literary History, vol. 23, no. 3, 2011, pp. 574-599.

Shaheen, Jack G. Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11. Olive Branch, 2008.

---. “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 588, no. 1, 2003, pp. 171-193.

---. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Olive Branch, 2001.

Shryock, Andrew. Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend. Indiana UP, 2010.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Deconstructing Historiography.” Deconstruction: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 4, 2003, p. 220.

Syriana. Directed by Stephen Gaghan, Warner Bros, 2005.

“Syriana.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation Inc. Accessed 4 September 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Syriana#:~:text=In%20a%20December%202005%20interview,Empire) %20that%20ensured%20continued%20western.

“The Last Night Letter,” September 2011. Accessed 4 September 2020. https://www. 911memorial.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/2001%20sept. 10%20the%20Last%20Night%20Letter_0.pdf.

NOTES

1. Islamophobia without Islamophobes in the title of my essay is inspired by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. 2. “Failing to account for the law’s role in authorizing and executing Islamophobia overlooks the relationship state actors have to the hateful violence of individual bigots, and it ignores the reality that the state enlists private citizens to partake in the national project of identifying and punishing individuals stereotyped as presumptive terrorists” (Beydoun 19). 3. See also Saldívar, Ramón. “Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction.” American Literary History, vol. 23, no. 3, 2011, pp. 574-599. 4. I am referring to G.W. Bush’s dividing the world into ‘with us’ or ‘with the terrorist.’ 5. I read the film’s title, Syriana as a combination of Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. “In a December 2005 interview, Baer told NPR that the title is a metaphor for foreign intervention in the Middle East, referring to post-World War II think tank strategic studies for the creation of an artificial state (such as Iraq, created from elements of the former Ottoman Empire) that ensured continued Western access to crude oil. The movie’s website states that “‘Syriana’ is a real term used by Washington think-tanks to describe a hypothetical reshaping of the Middle East” (Wikipedia). 6. Referring to Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life.” 7. The author of the manifesto is not clear as of today, but it has been written by one of the terrorists. It was translated into English along with commentaries by Kanan Makiya and Hassan Mneimneh 8. “President Bush Visits Troops in Iraq,” 13 June 2006; “President’s Radio Address,” 24 May 2008.

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9. Gayatri Spivak discusses this idea of metalepsis in “Deconstructing Historiography” (341). 10. Timothy James McVeigh was a Gulf War veteran who planned and executed the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and left over 680 others injured. 11. Andres Behring Breivik also known as Andrew Berwick is a Norwegian far-right terrorist who committed the terrorist attacks on 22 July 2011 in Norway that killed 77 people. 12. Furthermore, such “irrationality” of violence is said to be motivated by the terrorists’ perception that civilian populations in the West are “complicit” with their state policies against them (Malreddy 4).

ABSTRACTS

This paper investigates the geopolitical context of the emergence of “suicide terrorism” to propose that terrorism in its various forms has less to do with religious ideologies in general and with Islamic faith in particular, and more to do with the colonial and neocolonial politics of Empire in the colonies, postcolonies and occupied territories by the U.S. army and its allies in the Middle East in the post-9/11 era. Two representations of the figure of the suicide terrorist will be analyzed as they are presented in the narratives suggested in the Showtime series Homeland (2011-) and the film Syriana (2005). I argue that even though the Islamicate world and Muslims in the post-9/11 era have generally been portrayed in a differentiated fashion, these media productions have had almost the same effects on the public as earlier Orientalist productions. Although they appear to endorse antiracism and multiculturalism on the surface, these current narratives simultaneously produce what Evelyn Alsultany calls “the logics and affects necessary to legitimize racist policies and practices” (Alsultany 162). A “dialectical Islamophobia” (Beydoun 40) that is at play in the West and Western media productions legitimizes and values imperialist necropolitics while delegitimizing its opponent, namely the religious necropolitics of suicide terrorism.

INDEX

Keywords: Islamophobia, Necropolitics, Orientalism, New Terrorism, Suicide Terrorist, “War on Terror”

AUTHOR

MAHMOUD ARGHAVAN

Mahmoud Arghavan is an independent scholar from Iran residing in Munich. He completed his PhD in American Studies at Free University of Berlin in 2013 with a dissertation entitled “Iranian American Literature: From Collective Memory to Cultural Identity.” Since 2016 he has been working as coordinator for the Unit of Aid for Refugees, Migration, and Integration at Innere Mission in Munich. His research interests include Diaspora Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Critical

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Race Theory, Border Studies, Global Warming and Climate Refugees. He has authored the article “Postcolonial Orientalism: A Study of the Anti-Imperialist Rhetoric of Middle Eastern Intellectuals in Diaspora” in the edited collection Postcolonial Justice (Brill, 2017), and co-written the article “Writing against Neocolonial Necropolitics: Literary Responses by Iraqi/Arab Writers to the US ‘War on Terror’,” which appeared in a special issue on “Global Responses to the ‘War on Terror’” in the European Journal of English Studies (2018). He has also co-edited the volume Who Can Speak and Who Is Heard/Hurt?: Facing Problems of Race, Racism, and Ethnic Diversity in the Humanities in Germany(transcript April 2019).

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Islamophobia and Film

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The Reluctant Islamophobes: Multimedia Dissensus in the Hollywood Premodern

Elena Furlanetto

1. Introduction

1 In February 2020,1 Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite made history winning four Academy Awards, including best foreign picture and best picture, awarded for the first time to a non-Anglophone film. After Parasite’s game-changing success, the question of Orientalism in Hollywood has become more layered; perhaps, as Mubarak Altwaiji suggests, working toward the exclusion of countries from the map of the Orient and their inclusion in the imaginary perimeter of Western progress (see 313).2 Yet, as South Korean cinema makes its grand entrance into the persistently white halls of the Academy, Muslim countries remain underrepresented and Muslim characters continue to be heavily stereotyped. Altwaiji goes as far as suggesting that neo-Orientalism of the post 9/11 kind has triggered a re-evaluation of the classic Orient with the “Arab world” and its stereotyping as its center (314). Although film audiences and professionals are more vigilant than in the past—consider, for example, Joaquin Phoenix’s 2020 Oscar acceptance speech on whiteness in the Academy3—Orientalism, Islamophobia, and racist stereotyping continue to inform Hollywood’s dominant imagination in less conspicuous but equally insidious and “more enlightened,” meaning subtler, ways (Alsultany 15). In order to understand this phenomenon in detail, one needs to go back to the early 2000s as a previous “transformative moment” (Altwaiji 313) in the development of Hollywood Orientalism.

2 In his study on “Orientalism(s) after 9/11,” Pavan Kumar Malreddy4 shows how engagements with Orientalism have defined post-9/11 popular culture. Some of these engagements feed off traditional stereotypes of the “Orient” as “terra incognita” defined by religious fanaticism; others appear more liberal but nevertheless obsess over the Orient as “an external force” that unleashed tragedy and trauma on an

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innocent Western world; lastly, some nuanced critiques of Orientalism unveil the complicity of colonialism in the release of terrorist violence (see 237). My paper proposes to look at an additional category of Orientalist cultural productions that configure themselves as vehemently critical of Islamophobia but reverse their politics midway.5 I will present two films that “disagree with themselves” as indicative of a significantly more ambivalent Orientalism, in so far as they reveal intratextual, or more specifically, intermedial6 debates that generate significant ambiguities.

3 This paper regards multimedia texts, films in particular, through the lens of the Foucauldian dispositif: a formation of discursive or non-discursive, said or unsaid elements that may entertain contradictory relations among each other. The dispositif or apparatus, Foucault clarifies, “is the system of relations that can be established between these elements” (194). This paper focuses on the nature of these relations and offers an analysis of films as structures composed of heterogeneous media—such as music, screenplay, editing, acting, etc.—in which one of these “enters into resonance or contradiction with the others” (Foucault 195), ambiguating the film’s politics. When the film’s different media pursue diverging politics, I speak of multimedia dissensus. While Foucault’s dispositif strives to level its discrepancies through “a re-adjustment or a re- working of the heterogeneous elements” via “a perpetual process of strategic elaboration” (195), the ambiguous politics of the films analyzed in this paper remain unresolved.

4 These considerations bear on the development of Orientalism after 9/11. Evelyn Alsultany7 notes that since 9/11 figures of Muslims in U.S. media have undergone a process of “rehabilitation” that slowly but steadily replaced negative images of Muslims with positive, sympathetic, and acceptable ones (14). The standardization of the “good Muslim” functions to “offset the stereotype of the Arab/Muslim terrorist” but also contributes to the illusion of a post-race society where racism is no longer tolerated (Alsultany 14-15). Arguably rid of the coarseness of twentieth-century Islamophobia, then, post 9/11 cinema begs us to modify Richard Dyer’s statement that “the effectiveness of stereotypes resides in the way they invoke a consensus” (The Matter 12) to make room for a new wave of stereotypes that thrives on in-text dissensus. I propose that post-9/11 Orientalism has fragmented into more digestible, more complex micronarratives dispersed throughout a film’s multimedia structure. In doing so, I elaborate on Alsultany’s proposition that the post-9/11 era has seen the rise of cultural products that “[project] antiracism and multiculturalism on the surface but simultaneously [produce] the logics and affects necessary to legitimize racist policies and practices” (16). In order to test my hypothesis, I focus on two films which explicitly aim to reverse the logics of Islamophobia by presenting tributes to Muslim culture or denunciations of Eurocentric discriminatory practices. A more detailed analysis of the films in their multimedial complexity, however—such as star personas, casting choices, and historical setting—shows that they do participate in the Islamophobic discourse that dominated Hollywood cinema after 9/11.

5 The two case studies, Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora (2009) and Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005) offer at first glance non-Eurocentric narratives and “scathing attacks on fundamentalism of all stripes” (Elliott 11). They remind their audience that Christianity8 itself rests on a history of violence, terrorism, and religious fundamentalism. Both films dwell in the peripheries of Hollywood: Amenábar is a Chilean-born Spanish director, Scott is British, and both worked on American as well as

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off-Hollywood productions. By way of speculation, it is perhaps the peripheral character of these films that allowed for a measure, superficial as it may be, of political ex-centricity and narrative unconventionality. Kingdom of Heaven openly challenges Islamophobic narratives that circulated in the post 9/11 global debate by presenting the horror of the Crusades as a counterpoint to contemporary Islamic terrorism. The film was so successful in its putative reversal of Islamophobic narratives that Crusade scholar Jonathan Riley-Smith labeled it “Osama bin Laden’s version of history” (Riley- Smith in Edwardes) and lamented the lack of references to the genuine idealism of the crusaders (see Richards 31). Some features, however, undermine the manifest rhetoric of the film and reveal its ultimate adherence to a Eurocentric vision. By the same token, Amenábar’s Agora proposes to destabilize the equation of terrorism and Islam by portraying a moment in history where Christians terrorized the peaceful hybrid spirituality of the city of Alexandria. Ultimately, a look into media interplay within the cinematic text (such as screenplay versus casting choices and star personas) ambiguates the film’s political orientation.

6 In The Return of the Epic Film, Andrew B. R. Elliott eponymously argues that the first decade of the twenty-first century brought about a revival of the epic film, dragging out the genre from the niche it had occupied since the 1960s back into mainstream glory. “From Gladiator [(Scott 2000)] to The Immortals (Singh 2011), via Troy (Petersen 2004), Kingdom of Heaven (Scott 2005) and Alexander (Stone 2004),” but also The Lord of the Rings (Jackson 2001, 2002, 2003) and Pirates of the Caribbean (Verbinski 2003), “the decade came to be characterized by a slew of historically-themed, costly, spectacular, lavish—in a word, ‘epic’—films” (1). Bruce Holsinger complicates Elliott’s argument by bringing Hollywood’s new “cycle” (Elliott 5) of epic features in conversation with post 9/11 rhetoric. Holsinger argues that 9/11 revived a medievalist imaginary and “functioned as a prolific generator of new Manichaean allegories, dualisms rooted in self-consciously medieval rhetorics of crusade, religious fundamentalism, and divine right” that inspired a “discursive recruitment of the medieval” (470) as well as its “ubiquitous deployments” in culture and discourse (473). I consider Agora and Kingdom of Heaven worth studying in combination not only because of their crypto-Islamophobia and because they are indicative of what I termed multimedia dissensus, but also because they are both epiphenomena of the 9/11 premodern, given their use of the medieval or, in the case of Agora, Hellenic past as a ‘typological’ antecedent of the Islamophobic present.9

2. Proto-Christian Terror in Agora10

7 Agora is the story of Hypatia of Alexandria, a neoplatonic philosopher and mathematician persecuted by Christian authorities for her ideas and probably killed by Christian vigilantes, the parabolani, in 415 A.D. Since the Enlightenment, Hypatia has been regarded as a symbol of freedom of thought, and a secular martyr to religious fanaticism. In line with the 9/11 premodern, Amenábar’s Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) is a surface that reflects the discursive struggle between analytical science and blind faith, as her life and death depend on the rupture of the delicate equilibrium between the two. Agora celebrates Hypatia’s work and thought but mostly zooms in on her everyday life as beloved teacher and daughter. Agora unconventionally resists the temptation of a romantic subplot as Hypatia, unlike traditional female figures in Hollywood, remains

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unattached. Nevertheless, the film reaches peaks of intense tenderness and lyricism— for instance when the slave Davus (Max Minghella) caresses Hypatia’s feet while she is asleep, or when Orestes (Oscar Isaac) plays the aulos and the music can be heard in space. In its doubtless complexity, Agora lends itself to multiple readings but does not exclude a post-9/11 one, which the director himself encourages as he speaks about the film’s positioning vis á vis religious conflict. “You could interpret the film as anti- Christian, but I think it’s actually ‘Christian.’ I explore the [good] side of Christianity, working with lepers and the poor – the humanity of it. But this movie is against fundamentalism, the idea that ‘I will kill you for what you think’” (Amenábar in Brooks).

8 This view of Agora as a mirror of Christian values is easily confuted by looking at the overlay text before the end credits, which explains that, after mandating Hypatia’s murder as well as violence against Alexandria’s Jews, the early Christian pope Cyril of Alexandria was declared a saint and father of the church (“Posteriormente, Cirilo fue declarado santo y doctor de la Iglesia”). The film’s unsympathetic portrayal of Cyril and the endnote on his role in Christian hagiography is meant to shock and outrage. Most importantly, the Christians whose “good side” Amenábar claims to show are the fundamentalists he critiques. This “little known religion,” as the film describes it, represents Alexandria’s lower classes, “the lepers and the poor,” and is devoted to improving their condition, but is also a constant threat to the city’s Hellenistic majority and its Jewish community. Thus, Amenábar’s statement outlines the ambiguity at the core of the film and foreshadows its inner dissensus.

9 Agora is partial to Alexandria’s Hellenistic culture, as demonstrated by the explicit celebration of its spiritual hybridity and sophistication in the opening onscreen texts: “Alejandría, en la provincia de Egipto, aún conservaba parte de su esplendor. Poseía una de las siete maravillas del mundo antiguo: el legendario Faro, y la biblioteca más grande conocida.”11 Christianity functions as a disruptive agent: being the religion of the enslaved and the dispossessed, it is imbued with thirst for social revenge that manifests itself through violence, for instance when Hypatia’s convert slave Davus destroys the statues of the gods his mistress worships. At first reading, this is a projection and reversion of the way Islam has been represented as an atavistic force threatening Western democratic values: to put it with Edward Said in Covering Islam, “Islam represents… not only the threat of a return to the Middle Ages but the destruction of what is regularly referred to as the democratic order in the western world” (Said 55). In a backward look to the premodern, Amenábar shows that Christianity bore the same destructive impetus. Christians also terrorize the local Jewish community, killing some of its members in an ambush, and limit women’s freedom. Indicative, in this respect, is the sermon by Cyril, reading a passage from Paul’s first letter to Timothy where the apostle commands women to dress modestly and be silent. This scene and its contents will receive more attention below, for now, suffice to say that these words emerging from a Biblical reading are a potential site of unrest for Western audiences concerned with the oppression of women in Muslim countries. The film—very much like Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven—reminds audiences that Christianity rests on a history of religious fundamentalism and that the configuration of Islam by post 9/11 Islamophobic rhetoric as “a violent, militant, and oppressive religious ideology” (Kalin 143) applied first and foremost to Christianity.12 By so doing, Agora turns Islamophobia on its head and highlights the transreligious

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nature of fundamentalism. But these premises, too, are easily confuted as the film’s multiple media speak at cross purposes.

10 Richard Dyer notes that actors’ bodies and personas function as media texts or as “a set of media signs” and carry social significance (Heavenly Bodies ix). Accordingly, casting choices represent the greatest source of ambiguity as well as a case of multimedia dissensus in Agora as they contradict the politics of the screenplay. As anticipated, the film is in awe of Alexandria’s Hellenistic culture as the ante litteram repository of Western Enlightenment values; hence, it is also partial to its exponents, above all Hypatia and her father, the scholar Theon, played by Rachel Weisz and Michael Lonsdale, two white European actors.13 In Agora, class, religion, and color lines coincide: Hypatia’s students and other representatives of the Alexandrian Hellenistic upper classes are white. To the contrary, most of the Christian characters—who, parallel to that, are lower class or enslaved characters—are played by actors of Muslim or Middle Eastern ancestry, such as Omar Mostafa (Isidorus), Oshri Cohen (Medorus), or Homayoun Ershadi (Hypatia’s slave Aspasius). This is true, most prominently, for the two Christian archvillains, Ammonius and Pope Cyril. Cyril is played by Sammy Samir, an Egyptian actor who starred as one of the Palestinian terrorists in Spielberg’s Munich (2006), while Ashraf Barhom, an Israeli actor of Arab origins, plays Ammonius, the leader of the parabolani, a particularly vicious proselytizer, and the brain behind the attack on the Jewish community of Alexandria. While Agora’s surface narrative offers a critique of the Islamophobic equation of fundamentalism and Islam, casting choices and star personas invalidate this explicit effort and implicitly reconnect fundamentalism with Muslim bodies and spaces. Malreddy concisely summarizes post-9/11 (“new”) terrorism in the image of an “Oriental” killing Western civilians (“Introduction” 234)14: by centering on Christian terrorism, Agora tries to reverse this template, but ends up confirming it through its casting choices. Since both Samir and Barhom act in English with a perceptible accent, terrorism is relegated to a sphere that is exotic, alien, and Other to Western civilization (see Said 71-72). This reconnects Agora to the traditional Islamophobic discourses the film hoped to circumvent: specifically, those that “relegat[e] ‘terror’ to an alien domain” (Malreddy, “Introduction” 233). As the different aspects of a Foucauldian dispositif—the said and the unsaid, the intentional as well as the unintentional—may resonate with each other but also enter into collision, the liberal politics of Agora’s screenplay collide with the race bias of its casting choices.

11 Cyril’s sermon best illustrates the film’s perplexing crypto-Islamophobia. The sermon which I briefly mentioned earlier turns the city against philosopher Hypatia and prepares the stage for her murder. Cyril reads from Paul’s first letter to Timothy: “I desire women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes.… [I desire] that a woman learnt in quiet and full submission, I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man” (Agora). Although deeply critical of fundamentalisms in general, this passage is ferociously anti- Christian in particular. Evoking debates around Muslim women’s rights in Europe and the US, the film shows that the same patriarchal rhetoric veiling women and relegating them to submission lies at the core of the Bible. Deepa Kumar argues that “most public discourse in the United States continues to uphold the myth that Muslim women are victims in need of rescue and that the West, an enlightened entity, can play a progressive role in such a context” (262). This polarizing narrative is uncritically mirrored, for example, by Bernard Lewis’s definition of the condition of women as “probably the most profound single difference between [Western and Muslim]

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civilizations” (Lewis 67).15 On a similar note, Laura and George W. Bush, but also Tony and Cherry Blair,16 have stigmatized Muslim cultures as oblivious of women’s rights. On one level, Agora vocally exposes the complicity of Christianity in the oppression of women, on another, by reconnecting fundamentalist rhetorics to non-white bodies, the film as dispositif hosts a collision of racist and antiracist epistemes that disarms its own productive self-reflection on Christianity’s legacy of terror (see Foucault 196).

3. ‘New World’ Encounters: Kingdom of Heaven

12 Kingdom of Heaven is a fitting representative of post 9/11 aesthetics as theorized by Holsinger and of the centrality of the crusade rhetoric for the 9/11 premodern, as “9/11 rendered visible a dualist medievalism of crusade and Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’” (Holsinger 472). Sharon Waxman of the New York Times summarizes the centrality of the crusade imaginary to post 9/11 discourse as follows: President Bush initially called the war on terror a ‘crusade’ after the 9/11 attacks but was criticized by some for using a term that has long had anti-Muslim overtones. Meanwhile, some Islamic experts who analyzed Osama bin Laden’s motives after 9/11 suggested that he was trying to cast himself as a modern-day Saladin. And Saladin’s name was invoked by Saddam Hussein’s government to rally Muslims against the American-led invasion of Iraq. (Waxman)

13 The film came out in 2005, after the invasion of Iraq,17 and draws an arch between post 9/11 interreligious hostility and the crusades as a pivotal tragic event in Christian- Muslim relations. The story is set during a peaceful interlude between the warring sides (1180s) due to a truce negotiated by King Baldwin IV (Edward Norton), who ruled the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Saracen general Saladin (Ghassan Massoud). The political resonance of the film is undeniable, although Scott, as Amenábar did for Agora, denies political involvement and laments—with tangible resentment and curious disengagement (see Dargis)—that his putatively coincidental interest in the crusades will be treated as a commentary on the post-9/11 era. There is no escaping the parallels with our time…. We set out to tell a terrific story from a supremely dramatic age—not to make a documentary and propagandize. But since our subject is the clash of these two civilizations, and we are now living in the post-9/11 world, Kingdom of Heaven will invariably be looked at from that perspective. (Scott in Burt)

14 Scott was correct in anticipating that the crusade theme through the prism of 9/11 would inevitably be a dominant motif in commentaries and reviews. Many, however, did not see the parallel as coincidental. Some commented on the “odd timing” of this “big-budget Hollywood epic depicting the ferocious fight between Christians and Muslims” (Waxman).

15 On the same note, the spokesperson for the Washington American-Arab Anti- Discrimination Committee Laila al-Qatami dismisses Scott’s naivety and calls attention exactly to “the concept of a movie about the Crusades, and what that means in the American discourse today” (al-Qatami in Waxman). Central to my argument, however, is another statement by Ridley Scott, where he claims that Kingdom of Heaven shows “events from the Muslims’ point of view as well, and the way to do that was to develop strong, multidimensional characters on that side. Especially Saladin, as played by Ghassan Massoud, a wonderful Syrian actor. I felt it was important to use Muslim actors to play Muslim characters” (Scott, “When Worlds Collide”). The strategic decision of

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awarding complexity to Muslim characters through, for example, casting choices and star personas contributes to shaping the film’s aspiration towards non-Eurocentrism.18 By so doing, Kingdom of Heaven reverses Agora’s problematic use of Muslim actors in the roles of (Christian) terrorists. Scott explicitly addresses the choice of casting acclaimed Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud in the role of Saladin, whom the film constructs as a noble leader, intense and quietly commanding (see Dargis). It is widely known that Massoud turned down a role in Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005), claiming he feared the film would be anti-Arab. To the contrary, he accepted the role of Saladin “only when he was satisfied the script would respect his own culture” (Fisk). “[Massoud’s] politics are as fierce as those of Saladin,” comments Robert Fisk in an interview with the actor, where he speaks very openly about his abhorrence of George W. Bush’s Middle East policies. In this light, the choice of casting Massoud strengthens the film’s alleged pro- Muslim gesture. As Dyer puts it, “stars are part of the way films are sold. The star’s presence in a film is a promise of a certain kind of thing that you would see if you went to see the film” (Bodies 5). In the case of Kingdom of Heaven, Massoud becomes the emblem of representative fairness.

16 The film’s non-stereotypical representation of Saladin did not go unnoticed and attracted a good deal of criticism. British crusade scholar Jonathan Riley-Smith described the film as “complete and utter nonsense…, the Muslims as sophisticated and civilized, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality” (in Edwardes). Riley-Smith’s unkind summary does justice to the film’s polarizations: like Agora, Kingdom of Heaven is unambiguously critical of Christianity in evoking a historical dimension in which the “jihadists” were Christian. In addition to that, Christendom is a corrupt universe: in the best-case scenario Christians are disillusioned, beaten, and father multiple illegitimate children they later abandon. In the worst, they are vulgar, capricious, power-hungry, and strategically incompetent. The templars, like the parabolani in Agora, are a terrorist religious militia gladly resorting to unjustified violence and gratuitous murder. “There is so much in Christendom,” says a laconic bishop, “of which Christ would be incapable” (Kingdom). To the contrary, Muslims are honorable, devout, decent, and peaceful. A generous Saladin offers Christians safe passage out of newly conquered Jerusalem and respectfully puts a fallen cross back to its place. These choices have generated clear responses by critics and scholars: Richards, for example, states that Kingdom of Heaven points to an “impeccably liberal” moral that prefers tolerance to war, reason to fanaticism, kindness to hate, integrity to profit (25).

17 The soundtrack to Kingdom of Heaven by Harry Gregson-Williams further underscores the film’s careful avoidance of stereotypical representations and its strive towards a balanced perspective. A BBC reviewer praises Gregson-Williams for his attention to “authenticity” and the balancing of diverse music traditions (Reavley). According to this review, the film captures the cultural tension between East and West by juxtaposing and awarding equal complexity to the two musical landscapes. Christian devotional music alternates with “gaudy Arab dances and searing laments” (Reavley). The use of little-known instruments to Western audiences, such as the kanoon or the kamancha, Arab soloist features, and musicians from Istanbul concur to create a “modicum of authenticity” (Reavley). “Authentic” is a word that recurs in another British soundtrack reviewer, who, although being generally unimpressed, admits that the soundtrack is “nothing if not authentic” (Broxton).

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18 Despite all, in an interview with The New York Times, Islamic law scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl calls the screenplay offensive, insists that “the movie teaches people to hate Muslims,” and claims that it perpetuates classic Orientalist stereotypes of Muslims as “stupid, retarded, backward, unable to think in complex forms” (Abou El Fadl in Waxman). Although Kingdom of Heaven does walk a road paved with good intentions, these points are legitimate. Agora’s Christian masses, ragged and disorderly, stand no chance against the elegance of the “pagan” upper classes, and the spectator’s sympathies are decidedly directed towards the latter. This is unsurprising, since Alexandria’s Christians are invariably the target of disparaging representations and the pagans of celebratory ones. Kingdom of Heaven, too, has its unruly Christians and Muslim peasants, but it abounds with celebratory representations of both cultures. In other words, what happens when Kingdom of Heaven’s noble Muslims are confronted with the film’s Christian hero, Balian?

19 When Balian (Orlando Bloom) is washed up on the Palestinian coast after a shipwreck, he stumbles through the desert in search of Jerusalem. As he pauses to drink from a spring, he chances upon Imad (Alexander Siddig), one of Saladin’s officers, and his servant. Being in a jocular mood, Imad claims Balian’s horse is his and fights him for it; Balian would rather keep his horse but is reticent to draw the sword. Imad, exchanging roles with his servant to trick Balian, pretends to translate his “master’s” Arabic: [Imad] ‘He says this is his horse.’ [Balian] ‘Why would it be his horse?’ [Imad] ‘Because it’s on his land!’ [Balian] ‘I took this horse from the sea.’ …. [Imad] ‘He says you are a great liar. He will fight you because you are a liar. [Balian] ‘I have no desire to fight.’ [Imad] ‘Then you must give him the horse.’ (Kingdom)

20 Richards argues that “the desert encounter between Western hero and Saracen” yields “mutual respect” (29), but this reading can be significantly complicated. This scene is reminiscent—perhaps a quotation—of David Lean’s 1962 Lawrence of Arabia, when Omar Sharif’s character Ali is first introduced. Both characters tease their distressed white interlocutors, Orlando Bloom in Kingdom of Heaven and Peter O’Toole in Lawrence. Ali claims he owns the well, Imad the horse. Both scenes introduce prominent Muslim characters played by equally prominent actors of color: Imad is played by Alexander Siddig, a Sudanese-British actor well known to Western audiences due to his roles in Syriana (2005), Reign of Fire (2002), and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999). Yet, in Kingdom of Heaven, the Muslim lord is portrayed as capricious and cruel, forcing his servant to fight for his entertainment—and die in the process, although that was not part of Imad’s plan. When Balian wins the unnecessary duel Imad initiated, he shows mercy and refuses to make his defeated opponent a slave, as it would be customary in the Muslim universe he is entering. Balian’s choice to opt out of slavery places him on a higher moral ground than his opponent and sets the moral standard for Christianity. Balian’s flawless chivalry dilutes the potential for self-scrutiny found in Kingdom of Heaven’s depraved Christians, whom one easily dismisses as marginal representatives of their civilization. The same cannot be said for Imad, who, as likeable as he may become in the course of the film, is also the ambassador of dubious ethics and his first

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appearance does little else but setting the stage for Balian’s display of moral superiority.

21 Princess Sibylla (Eva Green) provides another example of the film’s predilection for Christian ethics. Watching Muslims during their morning prayers, she tells Balian that “they try to be one. One heart. One morality. Their prophet says ‘submit.’ Jesus says ‘decide’” (Kingdom). Sibylla didactically elaborates on how Christianity champions individual freedom, while Islam insists on abnegation and submission to a monolithic (“one”) morality. Her statements remain uncontested. Under the guise of presenting a critique of Christianity as a cultural universe in crisis due to individuals who twist religious ideas to serve their own ends, the film actually redeems it via its noblest and most righteous exponents. Conversely, the premodern violence of noblest and most righteous Muslims remains unredeemed.

22 Most of the film’s contradictory politics are concentrated in the figure of Saladin. By way of summary, Scott’s choice of Ghassan Massoud as Saladin harkens back to the actor’s personal engagement with and statements on fair representations of Muslims in Hollywood. Correspondingly, Saladin is generally represented as an intelligent and benign leader, but his morality is not spotless as, unlike his counterpart Balian, he is responsible for some of the film’s whimsical blood shedding. When a newly crowned but incompetent Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas) marches towards Saladin’s army in the desert with insufficient water supplies, Saladin shows mercy to the Christian king, offering him a cup of water. When the king hands it to his second in command Reynald de Chatillon (Brendan Gleeson), Saladin, offended, slices Reynald’s throat.19 Saladin’s choice could be read as retaliation against Reynald after he had killed Saladin’s sister to provoke the Muslim leader into war. Yet, one can also posit that Saladin meets the Orientalist cliché of the cruel tyrant previously met by Imad in his desert confrontation with Balian, as well as displaying the same disregard for the life of a subordinate.

23 As Imad’s violence is a reflection of his master’s, so are his intelligence and nobility. Isolated accidents aside, Scott’s Saladin is a practical, rational, and morally upright leader. What debilitates the film’s pro-Muslim stance, however, is that Saladin remains the enlightened exception in an ocean of fanatics. The following dialogue, where an officer questions Saladin’s military strategy, will clarify this point. [Mullah] ‘Why did we retire? Why? God did not favor him, God alone determines the result of battles.’ [Saladin] ‘The results of battles are determined by God, but also by preparation, numbers, the absence of disease, the availability of water. One cannot maintain a siege with the enemy behind. How many battles did God win for the Muslims before I came. That is, before God determined that I should come.’ [Mullah] ‘Few enough. That’s because we were sinful.’ [Saladin] ‘It is because you were unprepared.’ [Mullah] ‘If you think like that, you shall not be king for long.’ (Kingdom)

24 The scene exposes the dichotomy between Saladin’s enlightened rationalism and his officer’s faith in divine providence. Saladin’s argument fits comfortably in an American discourse of self-reliance—which is an important point and will be returned to later— that does not encounter the officer’s favor, and he predicts that, holding such views, Saladin “shall not be king for long.” This implies that Saladin stands alone in his rationalism and is not representative of his culture. If Saladin is an exception, one may argue, so is Balian on the Christian side: they are both celebrated as remarkable leaders

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ahead of their time. Yet, their exceptionality leads into opposite directions and contradictory conclusions. If Balian is Christianity’s chance for redemption, this is not true for Saladin and Islam. If the former is allowed to multiply and transform, we leave the latter to the ominous threats of his officers.

25 This leads to questioning, once more and from a different vantage point, the Muslim point of view the film claims to pursue and the validity of its critical premises. Saladin’s pragmatism and self-reliance resonate with the same foundational American mythology one finds in the proliferation of New World imaginary in dialogues between Christian characters, in Balian’s disruption of patterns of enslavement, and in Sibylla’s nod to freedom and individualism.20 If the Brown bodies and accented English of Agora’s proto-Christians relegated fundamentalism outside the boundaries of the Western world, Massoud’s voice is a vessel for American foundational myths such as self- reliance and the promised land. Balian’s refusal to enslave the man he overcame in battle shows that he incarnates the (missed) chance for an alternative course of history, redeeming not only Christianity but also, by virtue of the argument I will be making in short, the United States. By way of conclusion, I’d like to show that Kingdom of Heaven offers a repository of prototypical American stories, and thus vanquishes its investment in the crusades as a trope of Western guilt and shame. This collision of imperial and anti-imperial epistemes ambiguates the film’s politics, creating a deep- seated dissensus between the “coordinates of knowledge which issue from it but, to an equal degree, condition it” (Foucault 196). In Kingdom of Heaven, incursion into Muslim lands is both a fitting metaphor for the dubious morality of the forces driving post-9/11 intervention in Muslim countries, but also an appraisal of the American journey to the promised land and errand into the wilderness. The film’s indebtedness to American imperializing myths is specifically lodged in the representation of Jerusalem and the narratives of redemption and conquest that drive Balian.

26 After returning from Jerusalem, Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson), is travelling through the French winter when he finds his illegitimate son Balian, a blacksmith in a village where the land is frozen and blueish. Godfrey invites Balian to leave behind the memory of his aborted infant and suicide wife and follow him to “a New World,” where one becomes “not what you are born but what you have in yourself to be… a better world that has ever been seen. A kingdom of conscience. A kingdom of heaven,” where, he also adds, “there is peace between Christian and Muslim. We can live together” (Kingdom). Godfrey’s words resonate with Thomas Paine’s “The Rights of Man,” describing America as a place where “all the parts are brought into cordial unison. There the poor are not oppressed, the rich are not privileged. Industry is not mortified by the splendid extravagance of a court rioting at its expense.” The Holy Land as “New World” captures an array of American foundational stories: from New Canaan and New Jerusalem to the rags to riches trope, the rise of the moral and hard-working, the desire to found a purified community, and, most importantly for the purposes of this study, the narrative of multiculturalism or religious coexistence, in line with the interreligious impetus of the film. Both “New Worlds” are geopolitical spaces as much as imagined geographies: The Baron of Ibelin’s Jerusalem is, as Richards puts it, “an idealised version of the USA” (Richards 26), a reverse projection of Islamophobic America with the possibility of interreligious tolerance at its core. This coalescence of “New Worlds” is remarkable in so far as it is also reminiscent of the mechanism at the

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basis of Orientalism, where the East is “imagined and constructed by the West relationally to its own identity” (Lau & Mendes 80).

27 The historical Balian was a prominent aristocrat,21 but the fictive Balian’s humble origins are central to the film’s “significant democratisation of the story” (Richards 27) and of its obvious investment in American mythology: They enable his “rags to riches” trajectory and ground the appeal of a world where one becomes “not what you are born but what you have in yourself to be” (Kingdom). Balian’s cursus honorum from blacksmith to almost-king of Jerusalem and his romance with princess Sibylla would not have been credible if he had not been at least part nobleman—but he starts off as an underdog. The hiatus between nobility of lineage and of morals Kingdom of Heaven’s characters recurrently address underlines that the aristocratic origins of the protagonist do not count as much as his technical abilities and morality. Once in Jerusalem, Balian is given the land of his late father, who does not survive the journey, “a poor and dusty land with 100 families of Christians, Jews, and Muslims” (Kingdom). The film does not tackle the topic of dispossession, as the Islamic architecture of the mansion Balian obtains, as his father did before him, makes one wonder whose land it was before the crusaders’ arrival. The land’s poor conditions evoke the bewilderment of the “cold, depressed, and disappointed” Pilgrim Fathers when confronted with the winters of Massachusetts (Boschman 39); but like constructions of early America, the Holy Land enables the rapid ascension of the morally upright and hard-working. Balian turns the land of the late baron into an oasis through a miracle of hydraulic engineering, and Sibylla seals the transformation of Balian’s “patch of dirt” into “a new Jerusalem” (Kingdom), animating the New Jerusalem vocabulary of the Puritan imagination.22 Kingdom of Heaven revives the discursive power of typology: like in a hall of mirrors, the geographical Holy Land serves as a refraction of the metaphorical Promised Land that was America, and at the same time projects the possibility of a “New World” of interreligious coexistence onto the lived reality of Western audiences. It is perhaps most significant that Balian’s land hosts families of “Christians, Jews, and Muslims,” as his success is based on interreligious coexistence and cooperation. The film’s ode to tolerance, however, is delivered within the violent framework of the crusade, and the very corrupt institution the film aims to critique allows the rise of Balian and the formation of his utopia. Balian’s project of renewal is therefore an all- too-familiar trajectory of “regeneration through violence” (in the sense of Richard Slotkin)23 and erased land-grabbing practices. The long siege of Jerusalem and Balian’s dedication to protecting it suggest that this promised land, which is Jerusalem and also the United States, is in need of protection against those whose point of view the film claims to be carrying.

4. Conclusion

28 As my analysis tried to show, the multimedial dissensus at the heart of these two films makes them reluctantly complicit in upholding Islamophobic discourses. This argument works with the assumption that a film is a dispositif constituted of different media, in which two or more of these may enter into contradiction with one another (see Foucault), generating multimedia dissensus and ambiguity. Contrary to Agora, where the critical potential of the screenplay was diluted by casting choices, Kingdom of Heaven’s casting choices and music tend towards fairness but are ambiguated by

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conservative moments in the screenplay. I recognize that branding these films as Islamophobic may appear dismissive of their conspicuous attempts to offer nuanced readings of cultural conflicts and educated historical parallels. As the film and television industry strives to move away from explicit stereotyping as a consequence of awareness movements such as Black Lives Matter, Me Too, and Oscars So White, racism and Orientalism have unavoidably reformulated themselves into “more enlightened form[s]” (Alsultany 15). The return to premodern societies, with their premodern class and race hierarchies, may offer a pretext to unravel normative scenarios of female subservience and culture clashes under the illusory premises of “safe distance.” Even in these cases, however, films and television embrace Orientalist, racist, and chauvinist tropes with an ancillary reluctance that needs to be thoroughly investigated. In these pages I exposed in-text dissensus—a coalescence of contradictory politics carried by different media—as one of the forms this reluctance may take.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alsultany, Evelyn. Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11. New York UP, 2012.

Agora. Directed by Alejandro Amenábar, performances by Rachel Weisz, Max Minghella, Oscar Isaac, Focus Features, 2009.

Altwaiji, Mubarak. “Neo-Orientalism and the Neo-Imperialism Thesis: Post-9/11 US and Arab World Relationship.” Arab Studies Quarterly, vol 36, no. 4, Fall 2014, pp. 313-323.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. U of Wisconsin P, 2012.

Boschman, Robert. In the Way of Nature: Ecology and Westward Expansion in the Poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Bishop and Amy Clampitt. McFarland, 2009.

Brooks, Brian. “Amenábar: Not Anti-Christian, but Crusading Against Fundamentalism with Agora.” IndieWire, 18 May 2009. Accessed 15 September 2020. https://www.indiewire.com/ 2009/05/amenabar-not-anti-christian-but-crusading-against-fundamentalism-with- agora-70448/.

Broxton, Jonathan. “Kingdom of Heaven – Harry Gregson-Williams.” Movie Music UK, 6 May 2005. https://moviemusicuk.us/2005/05/06/kingdom-of-heaven-harry-gregson-williams/.

Burt, Richard. “Cutting and Running from the (Medieval) Middle East: The Mises-hors-scène of Kingdom of Heaven’s Double DVDs.” Babel. Littératures plurielles, vol. 15, 2007, pp. 247-297.

Dabashi, Hamid. Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror. Routledge, 2017.

Dargis, Manohla. “An Epic Bloodletting Empowered by Faith.” The New York Times, 6 May 2005. Accessed 15 September 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/06/movies/an-epic- bloodletting-empowered-by-faith.html.

Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. Routledge, 2013.

---. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. Routledge, 2013.

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Edwardes, Charlotte. “Ridley Scott’s New Crusades Film ‘Panders to Osama bin Laden’” The Telegraph, 18 January 2004. Accessed 15 September 2020. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/northamerica/usa/1452000/Ridley-Scotts-new-Crusades-film-panders-to-Osama-bin- Laden.html.

Elliott, Andrew B. R., editor. The Return of the Epic Film: Genre, Aesthetics and History in the Twenty- first Century. Edinburgh UP, 2014.

Elleström, Lars. Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Fisk, Robert. “Modern Syria through Saladin’s Eyes.” The Independent, 27 May 2006. Accessed 15 September 2020. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk- modern-syria-through-saladins-eyes-479871.html.

---. “Why Ridley Scott’s story of the Crusades struck such a chord in a Lebanese cinema.” The Independent, 4 June 2005. Accessed 15 September 2020. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ commentators/fisk/why-ridley-scotts-story-of-the-crusades-struck-such-a-chord-in-a-lebanese- cinema-492957.html.

Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon, translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper, Pantheon Books, 1972.

Frank, Michael C., and Pavan Kumar Malreddy. “Global Responses to the ‘War on Terror.’” European Journal of English Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, 2018, pp. 92-102.

Hallet, Wolfgang. “A Methodology of Intermediality in Literary Studies.” In Handbook of Intermediality. Literature–Image–Sound–Music, edited by Gabriele Rippl, De Gruyter, 2015, pp. 605-618.

Higgins, Dick. Horizons: The Poetics of Intermedia. 1998. Roof Books, 2007.

Holsinger, Bruce. “Empire, Apocalypse, and the 9/11 Premodern.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 34, no. 3, Spring 2008, pp. 468-490.

Lewis, Bernard. What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. Oxford UP, 2002.

LoBrutto, Vincent. Ridley Scott: A Biography. UP of Kentucky, 2019.

Kingdom of Heaven. Directed by Ridley Scott, performances by Orlando Bloom, Eva Green, Ghassan Massoud, Jeremy Irons, 20th Century Fox, 2005.

Kalin, Ibrahim. “Roots of Misconception: Euro-American Perceptions of Islam Before and After September 11.” Islam, Fundamentalism, and the Betrayal of Tradition, Revised and Expanded: Essays by Western Muslim Scholars, edited by Joseph E.B. Lumbard, World Wisdom, 2009, pp. 143-187.

Konuk, Kader. “Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters: Reenacting Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.” Criticism, vol. 46, no. 3, 2004, pp. 393-414.

Kumar, Deepa. “Framing Islam: The Resurgence of Orientalism during the Bush II era.” Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 34, no. 3, 2010, 254-277.

Malreddy, Pavan Kumar. “Introduction: Orientalism(s) after 9/11.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 48, no. 3, 2012, pp. 233-240.

Meyer, Michael. “Intermedial Framing.” In Handbook of Intermediality: Literature–Image–Sound– Music, edited by Gabriele Rippl, de Gruyter, 2015, pp. 361-377.

Paine, Thomas. “The Rights of Man.” 1792. http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1786-1800/ thomas-paine-the-rights-of-man/text.php.

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Piña, Christy. “Oscars: Read Joaquin Phoenix’s Best Actor Speech.” The Hollywood Reporter, 2 February 2020. Accessed 15 September 2020. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ transcript-joaquin-phoenixs-speech-at-2020-oscars-1278278.

Rajewsky, Irina. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialités: histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques/Intermediality: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies, vol. 6, 2005, pp. 43-64.

Reavley, Morag. “Harry Gregson-Williams Kingdom of Heaven: Original Soundtrack Review.” BBC, 2005. Accessed 15 September 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/wr63/.

Richards, Jeffrey. “Sir Ridley Scott and the Rebirth of the Historical Epic.” The Return of the Epic Film Genre, Aesthetics and History in the Twenty-first Century, edited by Andrew B. R. Elliott, Edinburgh UP, 2014, pp. 19-35.

Said, Edward W. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine how We See the Rest of the World. Random House, 2008.

---. Orientalism. 1978. Vintage Books, 1979.

Scott, Ridley. “When Worlds Collide,” The Guardian, 29 April 2005. Accessed 15 September 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/apr/29/1.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. U of Oklahoma P, 2000.

---. “Dreams and Genocide: The American Myth of Regeneration Through Violence.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 5, no. 1, Summer 1971, pp. 38-59.

Waxman, Sharon. “Films on Crusades Could Become Hollywood’s Next Battleground.” The New York Times, 12 August 2004. Accessed 15 September 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/12/ movies/film-on-crusades-could-become-hollywood-s-next-battleground.html.

NOTES

1. Many thanks are due to the peer-reviewers for their accurate reading of my drafts; this essay draws on their inspiring thoughts in many ways. One reviewer understandably wondered about the relevance of Parasite’s Oscar to the general argument of this paper. I take responsibility for leaving this reference in as my own personal way to honor this historical moment. 2. I recommend looking at Mubarak Altwaiji’s definition of Neo-Orientalism in “Neo-Orientalism and the Neo-Imperialism Thesis” (2014) and Hamid Dabashi’s Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Times of Terror (2017). 3. Phoenix won the 2020 Oscar for best actor in Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019). He used his acceptance speech as a platform to speak up against “the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender or one species has the right to dominate, control and use and exploit another with impunity” (Phoenix in Piña). 4. See also Michael C. Frank and Pavan Kumar Malreddy’s “Global Responses to the ‘War on Terror’” (2018). 5. I will focus on film but I imagine my findings to be generalizable. 6. My understanding of intermediality draws from the work of: Lars Elleström’s Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality (2010), Wolfgang Hallet, “A Methodology of Intermediality in Literary Studies,” Michael Meyer, “Intermedial Framing,” both in Handbook of Intermediality. Literature–Image–Sound–Music (2015); Dick Higgins, Horizons: The Poetics of Intermedia. (1998), and

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Irina Rajewsky, “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” 7. See also Brigitte Georgi-Findlay’s and Mahmoud Arghavan’s use of Alsultany’s “simplified complex representations” in their articles in this special issue. 8. This essay tries not to coalesce Christianity with the West nor treat them as interchangeable, as I am aware of the religious diversity of “the West” as well as of the fact that “the West” is an imagined geography. This equation, however, is present in many of the sources I work with. 9. For a discussion on the pitfalls of presentism in Hollywood, especially in the epic films of the early 2000s, see Elliott, esp. page 10 and following. Elliott, via Martin Winkler, suggests that the controversy on presentism can be mediated by reading historical films “as in part a reflection of the present, but which does not preclude an earnest attempt to retell historical events” (Elliott 11). The author himself, however, decidedly sides with the presentists, who “believe that historical films can tell us far more about the period in which they are made than about the period in which they are set” (20). So does this article. 10. I begin with the analysis of the most recent film because I believe it is a more straightforward example of the dynamics I address than Kingdom. Bearing in mind Agora’s blatantly contradictory politics, one can better appreciate how similar phenomena resurface in Kingdom. 11. “Alexandria, in the province of Egypt, still retained much of its splendor. It boasted one of the seven wonders of the ancient world—the legendary lighthouse. It was also proud of the greatest library on earth.” Translation by the author. 12. Islam first arose in the eight century (Kalin 144), Hypatia died in 415 AD, hence the events in the film predate the birth of Islam. 13. Hence, Agora conspicuously adheres to Hollywood’s established tradition of whitewashing classic Egypt. 14. As opposed to a Westerner killing his fellow civilians (a “crazy loner” as in the coverage of the Breivik case in Norway) and an “Oriental” killing his fellow civilians (the “good old terrorist,” Malreddy 234). See Arghavan’s essay in this volume for an extensive reflection on new terrorism. 15. I quote from Bernard Lewis to give a sense of the kind of cultural simplifications Agora engages. I agree with Altwaiji that Lewis is one of “the best example[s] of American neo- Orientalism” (318); with this argument on the status of women “Lewis highlights the deterioration of Islamic values and… asserts the superiority of the Western civilization” (Altwaiji 318). 16. If George Bush was invested in crusade symbolism, his wife, Laura Bush, insisted on fighting the oppression of women: in 2001 she described the fight against terrorism as “also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” (Bush in Altwaiji 316). On the “taken-for-granted frame” (Kumar 254) of Islam as a uniquely sexist religion see also Deepa Kumar’s “Framing Islam,” esp. pages 261 and following. 17. Scott’s film Black Hawk Down, released in 2001, constitutes an even more immediate reaction to 9/11. Its interventionist narrative was sharpened after the attacks as the film was rushed to completion, in a way that leaves “no room for questioning US foreign policy” (Chapman in LoBrutto 137). Kingdom of Heaven seems to embody a more reflected and nuanced approach to American interventionism. 18. There would be volumes to speak about Hollywood’s habit of miscasting non-white actors by ignoring their nationality, creed, and country of provenance. Far from indicating that we live in a post-national world, interchangeable cultural backgrounds when it comes to actors of color or from non-Anglophone contexts replicate Orientalist modes by confusing non-white, non- Anglophone, and non-Christian cultures and showing they are equivalent. This tendency is bringing back disturbing new forms of blackfacing, e.g. in Ridley Scott’s later blockbuster Exodus. 19. The cup scene is based on archival records. See Fisk, “Why Ridley Scott’s Story of the Crusades Struck such a Chord in a Lebanese Cinema.”

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20. Sibylla’s costumes would deserve a separate paper in terms of cultural appropriation and “ethnomasquerade” (see Konuk). 21. “The real Balian of Ibelin was the greatest feudatory in the Kingdom of Jerusalem after Raymond of Tripoli. He… spent his entire life in the Levant, dying there in 1193, and was married to Maria Comnena, widow of King Amalric of Jerusalem and stepmother of King Baldwin IV” (Richards 27). 22. See Berkovitch, The American Jeremiad 214 and passim. 23. Slotkin writes that “Puritans were inclined to a Manichean conception of universal war between Good and Evil; in their frontier situation facing the Indians they found a correlative of that archetypal confrontation.… Logically enough, the Puritan-Indian relationship finally resolved itself into one of overt race war” (41). In order to reach his full potential, regain his identity erased by dispossession, and rise as the virtuous hero of this tale, Balian has to undergo an ordeal by violence that takes the form of a culture war.

ABSTRACTS

This paper contributes to the theorization of how Orientalism has evolved after 9/11 and in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. I specifically address the multimediality of films and propose that post-9/11 Orientalism has fragmented into more digestible, more complex micronarratives dispersed throughout the interplay of different media which constitute the film experience. I recur to Foucault’s concept of dispositif to illustrate how any of these media—such as music, screenplay, editing, acting, etc.—may “[enter] into resonance or contradiction with the others” (Foucault 195), ambiguating the film’s politics. When the film’s different media pursue diverging politics, I speak of multimedia dissensus. In order to test this hypothesis, I focus on two films which explicitly champion diversity and aim to reverse the logics of Islamophobia by presenting tributes to Muslim culture or denunciations of Eurocentric discriminatory practices: Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora (2009) and Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005). A more detailed analysis of the films’ multimedial complexity, however, shows that they do participate in the Islamophobic discourses that have dominated Hollywood cinema after 9/11.

INDEX

Keywords: Orientalism, Multimedia, Islamophobia, Hollywood Premodern, Dispositif

AUTHOR

ELENA FURLANETTO

Elena Furlanetto earned her doctorate in American Literary and Cultural Studies from the Technical University of Dortmund in July 2015 and currently works as a researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She is the author of Towards Turkish American Literature: Narratives of Multiculturalism in Post-Imperial Turkey (2017) and a co-editor of A Poetics of Neurosis: Narratives of Normalcy and Disorder in Cultural and Literary Texts (2018). She has published on the influences of

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Islamic mystic poetry on Walt Whitman, on Islamophobia and the popularization of Islam in the US, and on the captivity narrative. Her research and teaching interests also include Orientalism, postcolonial literatures, comparative empire studies, and poetry. Elena Furlanetto is writing her postdoctoral thesis in the framework of the DFG Research Unit “Ambiguität und Unterscheidung: Historisch-kulturelle Dynamiken” (Ambiguity and Difference: Historical and Cultural Dynamics). Her focus are dynamics of ‘ambiguation’ in the early and nineteenth-century Americas.

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Islamophobia and Graphic Novels

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Holy Terror!: Islamophobia and Intermediality in Frank Miller’s Graphic Novel

Frank Mehring

Frank Miller—the iconic writer/artist of Sin City and 300 brings you a no-holds- barred action thriller for the modern era. Join The Fixer, a brand new, hard-edged hero as he battles terror in the inaugural release from Legendary Comics: Frank Miller’s Holy Terror—coming September. “Holy Terror,” Super Robot Mayhem1

1. Introduction

1 The graphic artist Frank Miller is next to Art Spiegelman and Alan Moore one of the most celebrated innovators of the comics medium. With what I have called elsewhere the “art of aesthetic omission,”2 Miller reduces his figures moving through space to their bare minimum paving the way to an iconographic storytelling that re-invigorated the medium in the 1980s. Via innovative storytelling and visual layouts he has changed the perception of the medium, making it fit for critical analyses in the New York Times and other high-quality media outlets (see Waid ix). Miller represents an original force in the field of graphic novels who pushes the medium into new territories thereby exploring “subject matter previously untouched” (Brownstein, flap, see also Duncan, Smith, Levitz 86). One such territory is Islamophobia and terrorism. Miller’s graphic novel Holy Terror, conceived in the wake of 9/11 and released on the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks is a revealing case in point. The graphic novel depicts a Batman-like hero who, after suffering from the explosion of a dirty bomb in Empire City—a thinly veiled version of Batman’s Gotham City3 which in turn functions as a fictionalized stand-in for New York City—turns to battling Islamic jihadists on American turf. The story follows the Fixer and his sidekick the cat burglar Natalie Stack (a version of Catwoman, the enduring enemy and love-interest of Batman) as they team up to stop the Al-Qaeda conspiracy to destroy Empire City. In the tradition of the famous Marvel comic of Captain America fighting Adolf Hitler in March 1941, 4 the cover of Holy Terror

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shows the white American superhero punching a terrorist with a turban. His fist hits the terrorist’s face, knocking out his teeth. On a metaphorical level, the iconographic cover pits determined American white men against violent Muslim terrorists whose facial markers are blackened out in a process of Othering. The violent response of the Fixer to a stereotypical cartoon of Muslim terrorist becomes embedded in the marketing campaign. At the time of its release, the publisher Legendary Comics advertised the graphic novel resorting to blockbuster promotion aesthetics and an online video trailer.5 The promotion tagline asked potential readers to join ranks with Miller’s novel crime fighter ten years after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center: “Join The Fixer, a brand new, hard-edged hero as he battles terror.”6

2 This article ties in with this special EJAS edition’s concept of “media agoras” to explore how Islamophobia has been mediated and how media systems of the twenty-first century forge Orientalism and Islamophobia into new shapes (see introduction) asking: How does Frank Miller’s aesthetics of silhouette bodies reframe Islamophobia in an interpictorial and intermedial discourse of images?7 To what extent do Miller’s graphic stylizations of Islamophobia remediate elements of his previous work on fictional (super)heroes and historical leaders from Batman to the 300 Spartans? I argue that Miller’s visual narrative participates in the Islamophobic discourse of American popular culture by appropriating a wide array of popular culture visual archives for a propagandistic call for Muslim “Othering.”

3 Holy Terror references news media, film makers, politicians, comic book heroes, 9/11 photography, and, of course, Miller’s own oeuvre with its specific stylization of “grace under pressure” Hemingway style,8 noir narratives, silhouette aesthetics, aggressive romanticism, and hard-boiled rhetoric in the vein of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler.9 The graphic novel represents what I conceive as a virtual agora where different media converge to negotiate public discourses on Islamophobia.10 The term ‘agora’ refers to an open space in ancient Greek cities serving as an assembly area and a place for commercial, civic, social, and religious activities. In its extended use, the term refers to an “assembly for discussion or decision; (hence) any environment or world of social intercourse, exchange, or commercial dealings” (OED2).11

4 Islamophobia emerged as an essential part of public discourse in the U.S. after 9/11. It became part of a culture of patriotic self-fashioning. In many cases, Americans defined themselves in opposition to Islam. The “highly emotive issue” (Allen 376) that informed the discourse over Islamophobia was fueled by a sense of fear of Islam. It became part of a variety of media including film, television, newspapers, books, and internet blogs.12 I will turn to the medium of graphic novels to first reveal how Miller’s narratives of (super)heroes have become complicit with Islamophobic responses to the crisis of 9/11, second, to trace the discourse of Islamophobia in the post-9/11 United States on Miller’s work and, third, to explore how it interlinks with the concept of terrorism.

5 To do so, I will offer an iconological reading turning to visual media including film and photography and graphic symbols. I will place particular emphasis on processes of mediation and remediation of silhouette aesthetics.13 As a form of visual art, graphic novels such as Holy Terror are part of a “network of repertoires and conventions,” as Udo Hebel argues in a different context (404). They allow us to identify moments of intercultural contact in different media environments and trace individuals (or groups) of cultural mobility, translators, and intermediaries. In order to understand the network, implications, and intermedial exchange (see Rajewsky 46) for the aesthetic

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construction of Miller’s visualization of a graphic “war on terror,” we have to understand the connection between the image and the premises underlying our frame of reference. “Islamophobia must be seen as a cultural phenomenon, crafted, disseminated, and circulated through medial practices such as television reports, films, literary texts, and the Internet,” as Brandt argues in “Fear of an Islamic Planet? Intermedial Exchange and the Rhetorics of Islamophobia.” If we understand the processes of mediation and remediation (see Bolter and Grusin 3) that take place in the Othering of Muslims, we can reveal racial narratives that have pervaded the discourse in the public sphere. The medium of graphic novels adds an additional dimension to the kind of media agoras mentioned before. As Derek Parker Royal explains in the preface to Multicultural Comics, “given its reliance on symbols and iconography, comic art speaks in a language that is accessible to a wide audience, transcending many of the national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries imposed by other media and giving it a reach that is as democratic as it is immediate” (Royal x). In the following, I will explore the confrontational rhetoric of Holy Terror and the limits of its democratic reach.

2. Frank Miller’s Visual Rhetoric of Aestheticized Violence

6 Frank Miller’s visual rhetoric of aestheticized violence in Holy Terror goes back to the beginnings of his career. Miller began to make his mark on superhero comics with his visual approach to Daredevil, written by Roger McKenzie in 1979. In Ronin, the six-issue miniseries he did for DC in 1983-4, he started to shift his attention to creative visual storytelling in order to foster a new narrative tone and level of drama. Here, Miller successfully blended Japanese manga techniques (particularly Katsuhiro Otomo’s work on Akira) with Franco-Belgian comic traditions (borrowing from Alain Saint-Organ, Hergé, and others) to evoke a dark, dystopic New York of the future. A few years later, in his epochal Dark Knight miniseries for DC Comics (1986), he found in Batman a superhero whose persona could be translated into an expressionist aesthetics of a shadowy doppelgänger. Miller emphasized the violent roots of the Batman character as markedly different from the campy TV show of the 1960s. The gritty and noir vision of vigilantism of the caped crusader lent itself to an exploration of the narrative potential of silhouette figures in dark urban environments. Emphasizing the criminal underworld, corrupt cops, bad guys, femme fatales, and heroes of the urban jungle in, for example, his highly lauded crime series Sin City (June 1991 and April 2000), Miller quickly emerged as an iconic artist who excelled in the use of silhouette aesthetics. Sin City explores the narrative potentials of silhouette bodies and urban landscapes, featuring a highly evocative textual and visual style that activates memories, fantasies, dreams, and nightmares associated with global cities.

7 While Miller honed his skills of story-telling via silhouettes, the issue of extreme visual and textual reduction has contributed to a controversial discourse on Islamophobia in the context of Holy Terror about the U.S. fight against terrorism after 9/11.14 My aim is to identify general visual patterns and intermedial references in Holy Terror in order to reveal opposite readings in Miller’s signature visual rhetoric: the use of silhouette aesthetics.15

8 The visual aesthetics of silhouettes often evoke a sense of kinetic energy, rebellious attitude, and performance styles as can be clearly seen in the opening pages of Holy

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Terror where we follow the Fixer chasing Natalie Stack in a rousing action sequence over the roof-tops of Empire City. To what degree can silhouettes contribute to a visual rhetoric in Miller’s graphic novels that both affirm American patriotism and undermine the intention of generating patriotism in times of crisis? As media critic W.J.T. Mitchell explains, “the power of images to influence human behavior” has received particular emphasis in academia.16 At the time of the release of Holy Terror, he identified the years after 9/11 as an “epoch of the war on terror” (xix). Regarding images, he argued that the most important question should not only be what images mean but what kind of cultural work they actually do (xix). After the end of the Obama presidency with its emphasis on a post-racial society, the U.S. moved towards an isolationist agenda of “America first” and a return to a whole-sale process of Muslim Othering. It is revealing to revisit and analyze Frank Miller’s Holy Terror as a graphic novel that might not have been lagging behind in its relevance to American cultural politics but rather a visionary product that captured a specific mood of people who were not necessary part of the traditional comic book fanbase of Miller’s revisionist Batman publications. The question then is: How do images of terror and Islamophobia evolve, mutate, and re-circulate? What kind of emotions and effects are produced that —and here I am referring to an expression that Mitchell used evoking Raymond Williams—animate “the structure of feeling that characterize our age” (xix)?

9 One can trace the ambivalent use of silhouette bodies in media culture in three stages. First, the emergence of silhouette cutouts in eighteenth-century Europe. Second, in transatlantic and inter-American processes of transmission in silhouette aesthetics over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a specific focus on the different styles of silhouettes used by artists to contribute to the project of cultural self-recognition during the Harlem Renaissance (such as Winold Reiss, Aaron Douglas, and Miguel Covarrubias). Third, understanding the palimpsest situation in the use and remediation of silhouettes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.17

10 By focusing on the intersection of American graphic novels, art history, media studies, and American studies, I will identify intermedial contacts; trace individuals of cultural mobility, translators, and intermediaries; and map interpictorial clusters (in the sense of Udo Hebel) in which racialized silhouetted bodies as represented by Muslim “Others” in Holy Terror (re)emerge.18

3. Silhouettes in Transatlantic Contexts

11 At the very time when silhouettes had become seemingly obsolete at the turn of the twentieth century, Emily Nevill Jackson called for a precise historical overview to bring to attention the art of silhouettes in the United States. In 1911, she argued: “Surely it is high time the art of black profile portraiture had a historian of its own and the great masters of silhouette portraiture were rescued from oblivion. Shadows are impalpable things which fade away almost before we are aware of their existence” (5). How can we describe silhouettes? The most general definition in the Oxford English Dictionary identifies a silhouette as a “dark outline,” for example, “a shadow in profile,” which appears “against a lighter background.” When it comes to the representation of human beings, silhouettes refer to “a portrait obtained by tracing the outline of a profile, head, or figure by means of its shadow or in some other way, and filling in the whole with black; an outline portrait cut out of black paper; a figure or picture drawn or printed in

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solid black.”19 The process of cutting a silhouette can also be reversed so that the portrait is cut as a hole and then placed on dark material to bring about the profile.20 During the period of romantic classicism with its interest in the classical past, the mythical story of the first silhouette artist and the artistic practice gained particular attention. Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s work entitled The Origin of Painting from 1785 is merely one of many artworks from the era to capture the romanticized version of shadow traces.21 In his successful book Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe, published in 1775, Johann Caspar Lavater argued that the silhouette was the most truthful and immediate reflection of a human being; in the profile, one could trace a person’s character. Lavater built on the theories of the Dutch physician Petrus Camper who showed via changes in the profile that human beings moved away from the world of animals. Lavater’s pseudoscience gained great popularity among many intellectuals. His work would later become part of a racist discourse on colonial cultural politics and racial profiling.

12 The connection between immigration, urbanization, and changing silhouette aesthetics can be traced to the growing preoccupation of publishers with pictorial media in the early twentieth century and the rise of urbanization on both sides of the Atlantic. As Jan Baetens has argued, “[v]isual print culture and visual storytelling [emerged] by way of engraving” (1138). The woodcuts of the early twentieth century are informed by Expressionism in the fine arts, the visual codes of Expressionist silent cinema, and the cartoons of newspapers and journals (Kuper 7-9). A striking example of visual storytelling in print media can be found in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century with so-called woodcut novels. The Belgian-born artist Frans Masereel (1889-1972) coined the term “roman in beelden” (novel in pictures). Masereel created stories about modern urban dwellers surrounded by cityscapes, which seemed to promise liberation but also embody a sense of claustrophobia, violence, and self- alienation.22 Like his preceding effort, The Passion of Man (1918), Masereel’s work influenced a number of artists working in other media such as writing, music, and film. For example, in the United States, the German-trained woodcut artist Lynd Ward (1905–1985) appropriated Masereel’s technique to provide an iconographic visual account of American urban life during the Great Depression in works such as Madman’s Drum (1930) and Wild Pilgrimage (1932).23

13 In the 1920s, silhouettes underwent a remarkable transformation. The collaboration between immigrant artists from Europe with Latin American and African American artists led to a reevaluation of silhouette aesthetics that became most prominently pronounced in works related to African American culture. The “New Negro” movement utilized silhouette figures to recodify associations of silhouettes by opening up new perspectives on African American music, literature, theater, and dance. Following aesthetic strategies of the German immigrant artist, designer, and teacher Winold Reiss, Aaron Douglas, the so-called “dean of African American painters” and leading visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance, set out to counter stereotypical, often degrading images of African Americans with the very visual genre that is prone to stereotyping because of its radical omission of detail: silhouettes.24 Turning to mural art and illustration, Douglas wanted to portray African American lives, dreams, and realities to provide a new sense of racial uplift, self-recognition, and general appreciation of the contributions of African Americans to modern American culture. Silhouettes played a key role in his artistic vision. One could argue, as I have done

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elsewhere,25 that in the context of the so-called New Negro Movement during the 1920, silhouettes became “black,” that is, they became associated with a mask-like coolness of African American urbanites. The silhouette aesthetics of Frank Miller draw on this cultural process of recoding, recycling, and reframing silhouettes as can be seen for instance in his work on Sin City.

4. Silhouetted Stereotypes of Terror and Islamophobia

14 Stereotypes represent a recognizable generalization of a type. Particularly in caricature, as Duncan, Smith, and Levitz claim, generations of characters are quickly established via physique, hair, posture, clothing or facial expressions (114). Miller’s appropriation and modification of silhouette aesthetics is related to extreme forms of male violence and hyper-sexualized female bodies.26 He follows a different venue than, for example, the artist Kara Walker who has almost single-handedly brought new attention to the complex frames of reference of silhouette cutouts. “The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that’s also what the stereotype does. So I saw the silhouette and the stereotype as linked,” says Walker.27 Her work highlights the potential of silhouettes to intervene in the current discourse on race, class, and gender. 28 In Walker’s work, black silhouettes critically address the trauma of slavery in drastic exaggerations of violence and sex. Provocative images are intrinsically linked to an American narrative of painful exploitation and what Toni Morrison has described as a white success story realized “on the backs of blacks.”29

15 Provocation is a key concept in the black-and-white silhouette aesthetics of Miller’s oeuvre. “I love to provoke, because part of the purpose of art is provocation. And part of my job is to wake people up” (Itzkoff, NYT). In Holy Terror, we can see how racially coded silhouetted stereotypes are transferred from the iconography of African Americans to that of Muslims.30 In the following I will map, analyze and evaluate four stereotypical patterns of visualizing Islamophobia in Miller’s graphic novel via interpictorial readings: 1) visualizations of terror 2) visualizations of terrorists, 3) violence against terrorists, and 4) visualizations of torture. I will end by putting the work in context with Miller’s racist comments in his weblog.

5. Visualizations of Terror

16 The black and white aesthetics often reflect the world-view of Miller’s characters that live in urban environments dominated by brutality, violence, sexual thrills and situations in which heroes need to take up arms against monolithic adversaries. While Holy Terror features similar tropes of violence, vigilantism, and the fight for freedom and justice with Miller’s earlier work, particularly on the Batman figure, the references to Islamophobia appeared first in his epic work on 300 (1998). The ancient battle from September 480 BC at the arrow coastal pass of Thermopylae (the so-called “Hot Gates”) is turned into a mythical tale of heroism at the birth of ancient democracy against the army of the Persian king Xerxes. THE LAW. WE DO NOT SACRIFICE THE RULE OF LAW TO THE WILL AND WHIM OF MEN. THAT IS THE OLD WAY. THE OLD, SAD, STUPID WAY. THE WAY OF XERXES AND EVERY CREATURE LIKE HIM. A NEW AGE IS BEGUN. AN AGE OF GREAT DEEDS. AN AGE OF REASON. AN AGE OF JUSTICE. AN AGE OF LAW AND ALL WILL KNOW

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THAT THREE HUNDRED SPARTANS GAVE THEIR LAST BREATH TO DEFEND IT. (300, unpaginated)

17 Rather than historical accuracy and realist conventions, Miller follows a different path. The approach can be described as a visualization of “emotional truth” (Zachar 4) that transforms a specific historical event into a universal narrative of heroism, sacrifice, and patriotism. The stylized historical narrative focusing on ethnic identity and hyper- violent battles against Middle-Eastern enemies for the cause of democratic Sparta becomes even more defined in Miller’s prequel/sequel entitled Xerxes (2019) where the Greek leader Aeskylos reflects on the cause and rightfulness of the bloody fight against the Persian invaders: “THOUSANDS DEAD. HUNDREDS OF THEM OURS. ALL FOR AN IDEA. AN IDEA, AN EXPERIMENT WE CALL DEMOCRACY. COULD IT BE WORTH ALL THIS? IT HAS TO BE WORTH IT. IT HAS TO BE” (unpaginated). The ensuing battles in both 300 and Xerxes resonate strongly with the political agenda to reframe American foreign policy as a War on Terror, and to fight two wars in the Middle East after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.31 In 300, Xerxes is visualized as an effeminate exotic warrior with slit eyes and protruding lips making him a stark counterpart to the hypermasculine Spartans. Compared to the muscle-packed Spartans, his tight silhouette is drawn like a slender female actress who is in awe with her looks.

18 With Holy Terror, Miller makes his stylized figures explicitly complicit with a specific patriotic agenda re-defining what appeared to be battles against crime and criminals as a form of vigilante revenge against terror and terrorists.32 On a textual level, Holy Terror opens with an Islamist call for battle in large white letters over a black background: “IF YOU MEET THE INFIDEL, KILL THE INFIDEL.—MOHAMMED” (unpaginated).33 While taken out of context, Miller reduces the Quran, the central religious text of Islam, to an attack on the religious and political values of the United States within the framework of 9/11. Presented within the covers of a graphic novel entitled Holy Terror, the phrase is linked to the public discourse on Jihad which is often translated as a “holy war” (against the infidel).34

19 In Miller’s work, “KILL THE INFIDEL” becomes a call for terror visually emphasized by coloring the letters in red. By implication, this reference at the beginning of Holy Terror suggests that Islam is a religion of violence that supports terrorism. This connection between terror and destruction is preceded by a double-page of black nails exploding over the entire layout suggesting a nail bomb. The red background implies the bleeding of the victims and sets an emotional tone by activating news images of American terror attacks from 9/11 via the Times Square bombing to the Boston Marathon bombing.35 After the call to “kill the infidels”, Miller zooms in on the visualization of terror. The following double page shows a stylized combination of a silhouetted Statue of Liberty and the statue of justice. Instead of the torch, the blind-folded female figure raises a symbolic balance of justice in front of the skyline of an imaginary version of New York evoking the silhouettes of the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building. While the statue of justice would hold a sword in her right hand, Miller alludes to the Declaration of Independence suggesting that the following account of Holy Terror judges the enemy of the U.S. without prejudice purely on the basis of American values. The sky is filled with debris of a large-scale explosion. The references to nails and debris of an explosion appear throughout the graphic novel as a kind of leitmotif for visualizing what could be called “Muslim terror.” The text blurbs emphasize the nature of

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unexpected terror. “THE AIR BURNS.” “THERE’S NO WARNING.” “NO WARNING AT ALL” (unpaginated).

20 The stark black-and-white scenery evokes the kind of scattered debris that filled the air after the planes flew into the World Trade Center. This image immediately implies the kind of “us vs them” and “you are either with or against the terrorists” narrative that informed the weeks and months after the attacks on 9/11. The collection of photographs of The Atlantic magazine on icongraphic images of 9/11 that entered cultural memory allows us to understand the remediation of documentary photography and video sequences into the graphic novel’s visualization of terror.36 The majority of panels of Holy Terror continue the pattern of debris flying through the air as a metaphor that terrorist attacks have shaken the whole way of life of Empire City’s inhabitants—it feels as if the attacks have “polluted” the very air they are breathing. This visual device connects all of the action of the Fixer with what appears to be a reminder of the constructed connection between Muslims and terror on the U.S. at the beginning of Holy Terror. The visual pattern can be traced in The Atlantic photographs titled “Smoke pours from a gaping hole and the upper floors of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, shortly after hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the building on September 11, 2001 in New York City” (ill. 2), “Flames erupt from the South Tower of the World Trade Center, after it was struck by hijacked United Airlines Flight 175, in New York City, on September 11, 2001. The aircraft crashed into the tower traveling at a speed of approximately 586 miles per hour” (ill. 4) or “Debris rains down on the street as the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapses after hijacked planes crashed into the towers on September 11, 2001 in New York City” (ill. 21).

21 On the pages of Holy Terror, the Fixer and Natalie are repeatedly thrown through the air and get hurt due to explosions. Onomatopoetic expressions such as “SKAK”, “THUNK” or “THUD” phonetically imitate the sounds that the comic panel tries to suggest in stark black and white colors. While on the one hand, these sound effects are reminiscent of sonic effects in films, the figures resemble and evoke, on the other hand, the haunting photographs that show people jumping from the World Tower such as “People hang from the windows of the North Tower of the World Trade Center after a hijacked airliner hit the building September 11, 2001 in New York City” (ill. 10), “A man leaps to his death from a fire and smoke-filled North Tower of the World Trade Center, on September 11, 2001 in New York City after terrorists crashed two hijacked passenger planes into the twin towers” (ill. 11), or “A man jumps from the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center on Tuesday, September 11, 2001” (ill. 13). Other large-scale panels highlight the destruction at the site of explosion and the human toll. Like photographs that reveal familiar items of everyday-life at unlikely locations, Miller transforms the photographic archive in his signature black and white renderings by showing a green car facing upwards or an oversized red shoe in-between heaps of rubble in the destroyed city center. Film director Steven Spielberg has successfully explored a similar aesthetic technique in his black and white movie Schindler’s List (1993). In one scene, a little girl with a colorized red dress walks through the street depicting the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto. When later Schindler sees her exhumed dead body, he recognizes her among the many victims of the Nazi terror regime. Like Spielberg, Miller uses the occasional appearance of color to personalize and humanize the horror of terrorist attacks but, in contrast to Spielberg, serve a very different political purpose. Due to the abstract nature of silhouette aesthetics, the black and white silhouettes in Holy Terror allow readers to project their own fears, anxieties, and

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mediated fantasies of Islamophobia onto the masterful examples of what I call the “art of omission.”37 This aesthetic strategy invites readers to fill in blanks and—in the case of Holy Terror—thus compels them to become complicit with the racist discourse of Islamophobia it promotes.

22 On the following pages, the reader will join the heroic fighters in the tradition of Marvel comics. Instead of battles against fictitious supervillains, Miller’s heroes set out to take revenge, to insult, to torture and to destroy cartoonish versions of the actual terrorists responsible for attacks on the United States. The violent, propagandistic, and racist example of Islamophobia in the graphic novel has, as I will reveal in the following pages, larger repercussions on the work of Miller.38

6. Visualizations of Terrorists

23 Much like the confrontations in other works of Miller,39 Holy Terror pits its heroes against an enemy that outnumbers the self-acclaimed fighters for peace, freedom and justice by far. One of the tools Miller employs is a list of racial profiling embedded between images of extreme mayhem. The detonation of a bomb in Empire City is visualized by abstract black and white renditions of debris, nails and razor blades. Like a phoenix out of Empire City’s ashes the American heroes rise to engage in their vigilante fights. In between, Miller injects profiles of Empire City’s victims—men and women, young and old. The two figures in black hunched together on the lower left page surrounded by beams and havoc of destruction offer a stark contrast to the caricatures of citizens on the opposite page. The inked outlines fade to gray and white until they become empty signifiers on the following double page. The empty squares invite the reader to fill in the blanks with their own projections and to answer the question “How many of my neighbors have they murdered?”—a question actually asked by one of the silhouetted heroes. Miller turns to a style of illustrations that takes its cues from journalistic photographs depicting the destruction of ground zero and collages of portraits of 9/11 victims which circulated on social media and television. The clear-cut silhouettes become integrated in the visual language of destruction by adding white noise to the characters thereby increasing the level of abstraction.40

24 Silhouettes, more than other visual stylizations, function along the lines of offering a sense of closure. “Closure is a term you learn in art school. It is the teasing of the viewer’s eye to complete the image you not-so-entirely present. You, the storyteller, leave your piece of work deliberately incomplete, so that the viewer becomes an active, creative participant, finishing the job and thereby enjoying it all the more,” Miller argues in his blog on “When in Doubt, Black it Out” (http://sequart.org/magazine/ 7644/frank-miller-controversy/).

25 One can trace many interpictorial references to Islamophobia to understand how Miller’s work ties in with other media. For example, a cover of season 4 of the television series Homeland shows dark silhouetted women wearing a burka. These are nameless masses in black with no eyes and personality. Only the white female protagonist in red turns to the viewer with a nervous look. The striking image draws on interpictoral and intertextual references to the little red riding hood fairy tale. Like the innocent girl in the Brother Grimm story, Carrie Mathison, the CIA officer with bipolar disorder, needs to fight the terrorist mastermind Haissan Haqqani in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Other post-9/11 series such as The West Wing and 24 follow intermedial aesthetic strategies to

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create a specific sense of disorientation and paranoia. However, in contrast to Holy Terror, these series offer an ambivalent space for “interpretation, consent and dissent” that transcends a clear-cut visualization of Islamophobia as Brigitte Findlay has shown in this special issue.

7. Visualizations of Violence against Terrorists

26 Let me turn to another image that shows the Fixer and Natalie taking on Muslim terrorists that—among other visual points of reference—reflect the theme of the battle at Thermopylae. Instead of the Spartans with their shields and arrows we see the two heroes shooting and clawing at the enemy in full-blooded anger driven to destroy the enemy. The drawing on the opposite side offers a gruesome fantasy of brutality, rage, and revenge coupled with a reference to the intersection of violence and sexuality. In a key panel of Holy Terror, we see the Fixer hovering over a crowd of terrorists. He shoots them down in a fit of fury. Standing next to him, Natalie Stack engages in a fistfight with terrorists who have bomb belts around their waists. Her silhouetted body emphasizes her large breasts while she manhandles the terrorist. The scene is accompanied by a single blurb that frames traditional diplomatic approaches to conflict of past administrations as weak, appropriate and ineffective. The textual reference can be read as a sick joke on the failure of finding a diplomatic solution. “WE ENGAGE IN POSTMODERN DIPLOMACY” (unpaginated).

27 The caricatures of the Muslim Other are in line with stereotypes that have been part of Hollywood representations of the “Arab Other” best described by Sut Jhally in his documentary Reel Bad Arabs (2006), based on Jack G. Shaheen’s 2001 book of the same title. Based on the analysis of Hollywood films of the last more than hundred years, Jhally and Shaheen conclude that there are patterns to present Arabs as “brute murderers, sleazy rapists, religious fanatics, oil-rich dimwits, and abusers of women” (ebook unpaginated). The one-liners of “postmodern diplomacy” are appropriated from Hollywood action films of the James Bond franchise or violent entertainment that became a staple for Schwarzenegger films in the 1980s and 1990s, such as the action revenge film Commando (1985), the sci-fi-horror blend Predator (1987), or the big-budget action-comedy True Lies (1994). For example, in True Lies, Palestinian Muslim terrorists detonate an atomic bomb in the Florida Keyes. When the Schwarzenegger character, the U.S. special agent Harry, receives the order to kill the terrorists, he quips: “OK, marines. It’s time to kick ass.” Such incitements to violence, implicitly targeting Muslims, have been used repeatedly in similar movie plot situations (e.g. Navy Seals, 1990; Iron Eagle, 1986; The Delta Force, 1986; Death before Dishonor, 1987).41

28 Compared to the caricatures of citizens of Empire City—the innocent victims of the bombing—the representations of the terrorists show a racial profile with specific patterns of a turban, beards, or bad teeth. The only women depicted are female terrorists wearing a black head scarf. The center of the image shows a silhouette firing at the viewer with the onomatopoeic sound effects of a threefold repetition of the word BLAM. “WE GIVE THEM EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT / MINUS THE INNOCENT VICTIMS.” Visually, Miller seems to answer Jack Shaheen’s rhetorical question “what is an Arab” (ebook, unpaginated). For the viewer, the identification of terrorists via 14 caricatures creates a kind of index of racial profiles that are likely to incite racism, prejudice and fear.

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29 The stereotyping has a clearly discriminatory function in the sense of Walter Lippman who described the term in the following fashion: A pattern of stereotypes is not neutral. It is not merely a way of substituting order for the great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality. It is not merely a short cut. It is all these things and something more. It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense of our own value, our own position and our own rights. The stereotypes are, therefore, highly charged with the feelings that are attached to them. They are the fortress of our tradition, and behind its defences we can continue to feel ourselves safe in the position we occupy. (qtd. in Dyer 11)

30 However, as Richard Dyer argues, “power relations between a dominant and marginal social group need to be taken into consideration. While stereotypes are essential defined… by their social function” (13), Dyer argues that fictional characters are constructed as archetypes, with typical, recognizable and defining traits. The role of stereotypes is “to make the visible invisible, so that there is no danger of it creeping upon us unawares; and to make fast, firm and separate which is in reality fluid and much closer to the norm than the dominant value system cares to admit” (16).

31 Miller uses stereotypes of the Muslim “other” as a kind of “short cut” (Dyer 11) in order to take away complexity from the historical, political and cultural encounters surrounding 9/11 and its traumatic aftermath. The negative stereotyping allows Miller to strengthen the values and beliefs of the implied white, Christian, democratically inclined, American readership.

32 The fourteen caricatures to identify stereotypical Muslim terrorists interact visually with an earlier index of people that represent the victims of the terror attack in the stylized city of New York. Following an abstract site of destruction with the Fixer and Natalie crouching on a platform among the ruins, the speech blurb says: “THE BASTARDS.” “HOW MANY OF MY NEIGHBORS HAVE THEY MURDERED?” (unpaginated). What follows on the next three pages are 20, 30, 30, 48, 48 and 160 panels that are supposed to be filled by portraits of neighbors. While the first two sets of panels offer a wide array of white people of various gender and age groups, with each portrait fading more and more into lighter gray colors, the remaining panels are left empty to activate the imagination of the readers based on the first 50 visual references.

33 The fading panels of Miller’s graphic novel interplay with the archives of American visual culture of 9/11. In newspapers and news media, charts of portraits of missing or dead victims circulated. The appropriation and transformation of powerful cultural photographs in the medium of graphic novels show how Miller resignifies conventions, repertoires and visual traditions for the purpose of spreading a sense of Islamophobia. Miller activates what scholars of iconography have called “Bildgedächtnis” (Poeschel 7, Hebel 416). The photographic portraits of victims of the World Trade Center attacks from the website http://americanbuilt.us are a case in point. On first view, the sheer number and small size of images does not allow to differentiate and identify the individuality of the portraits. The viewer needs to zoom into the collage if he/she wants to recognize individual faces. A similar case can be made for those readers who visited the gallery at the National September 11 Memorial Museum, on the trade center site in Lower Manhattan. Here we find nearly 3000 faces of 9/11 victims. The collection has been called a “tapestry of Grief, Loss, Life and Joy” (David W. Dunlap and Susan C. Beachy). The goal of the museum is to achieve an overwhelming effect on the viewer.

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The gallery’s walls are filled from floor to ceiling with 3000 5-by-7-inch portraits, arrayed in 250 columns and 12 rows. Only when the viewer moves closer to the walls, he/she can identify individual personalities. Miller reverses this process by starting from simplified black-and-white portraits to ever smaller images until they become empty signifiers. At that state, the viewer is invited to draw on his/her visual media memory to fill in the blanks. Thereby, the identification of the reader with the victims via an emphatic process of filling in the gaps complicates the interpictorial reading. Miller’s technique prepares the reader for an emphatic identification with the brutal revenge of the main characters.

34 While the portraits of the victims suggest diversity, the index of terrorists draw on the stereotype of the bearded Arab who deserve to be killed. The other prominent stereotype not part of the 14 panels, the terrorist with a turban, is featured on the opposite page. The opposition of panels depicting Muslims as terrorists and ethnically diverse Americans provides the basis for an illusory sentiment of multicultural unity in the U.S. with Muslims as the racialized “Other” that should be excluded due to their stigma of terrorism. Islamophobic hatred directed at the Muslim “Other” is paradoxically recruited to reinforce paradigms of American multiculturalism.

35 When the speech bubble says “WE GIVE THEM EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT” the reader becomes complicit in the marketing campaign of Legendary Comics mentioned at the beginning of this article: to actively join the Fixer to battle terror on the streets of Empire City aka New York City.42 The reference to the group of rightful vigilante terrorist fighters—we—functions therefore as a recruitment call to stop the kind of “holy terror” made explicit in the graphic novel. In 2011, when Holy Terror was published, the New York Initiative—and hundreds of people around the world—called itself “real life superheroes” to engage in real-life action. Dressed in superhero costumes such as Batman, a group of crime fighters in New York and other American cities patrolled the streets of the city “to make life better for everyone.”43

8. Visualizations of Torture

36 In the final part of Holy Terror, Natalie gets caught by the terrorists while she tries to infiltrate the cell dressed like a stereotypical Muslim woman in a black burqa. When captured, she is tied up and appears like a figure about to engage in sadomasochistic practices, as the Muslim terrorists are about to inflict physical pain on her for the sake of pleasure. “THEY USE A LOT MORE ROPE THAN THEY NEED TO,” as Natalie observes. She is tied up in a way to emphasize her protruding breasts while she kneels on the ground. A turbaned terrorist leaves no doubt that the sexual undertones are intended. “AND NO, I DIDN’T KEEP YOU ALIVE JUST TO GLOAT. YOUR BEHEADING WILL MAKE A BITCH OF A VIDEO. MAYBE WE’LL DO YOU NUDE” (unpaginated). The sexualization of the hostage situation in which an attractive white woman is about to be tortured by a cartoonish Arab terrorist has been remediated from Hollywood blockbuster films. For example, James Cameron’s action comedy True Lies shows the terrorist Salim Abu Aziz, leader of the “Crimson Jihad,” in a pseudo-romantic posture using a knife to tease the film’s female star, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. She wears a tight black dress which emphasizes her breasts. Like the panel in Holy Terror, the movie scene is set up to humiliate the female star in front of the terrorist fighters.

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37 Miller’s reference to sadistic Arabs torturing Americans is reversed in an earlier part of the story. One of the most controversial sequence of images in Holy Terror relates to a scene of torture in which the Fixer and Natalie act as revengeful perpetrators. A terrorist with a belt of explosives is strung up on arms and legs with ropes, his face distorted with pain. His body is horizontally dangling in the air while the Fixer is standing on his back. The pressure is particularly strong since Natalie playfully sits on the Fixer’s shoulder. Natalie is holding the remote control for the detonator searching for the correct frequency. Since the terrorist does not talk, the Fixer breaks his spine. “YOU’LL NEVER WALK AGAIN.” “YOUR EYES ARE NEXT” (unpaginated). Unable to endure the torture any longer, the terrorist reveals the frequency of the detonator. The body is thrown off the roof of a building while Natalie aims the device and presses the red button. Drawn in silhouette, the Fixer and Natalie chat cynically above the letters BOOM: “YEESH. THAT’S A LOT OF CHUNKS OF TERRORIST,” to which the Fixer responds “AT LEAST WE KNOW THEY’RE THE SAME SPECIES” suggesting that it is hard to believe that terrorists can be part of the human race (unpaginated).

38 In a way, Miller’s Holy Terror can be considered an aestheticized response to the photographic language of terrorism emerging after 9/11 in the news media. The point of terrorist violence is, as media critic W.J.T. Mitchell points out, “not the killing of the enemy as such, but the terrorizing of the enemy with a traumatizing spectacle” (64). The war of images and words produces an American vigilante who engages in the battle with tactics that evoke the kind of “fire and fury” President Donald Trump threatened to unleash on states who would potentially endanger the United States.44

39 This double page is part of an interpictorial cluster that relates to what W.J.T. Mitchell calls the Abu Ghraib Archive (112)—a body of texts and images, recordings and remembrances that is centrally constituted by, but not limited to, the “279 photographs and nineteen video clips gathered by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command (CID)” (112). Two images stand out and have been remediated in many ways, becoming part of our collective memory: the pyramid of seven naked Iraqi men and the Hooded Man on the Box with electric wires tied to his hands. The combination of sex and violence is clearly visible in the visual style of Holy Terror. The stress position of the Hooded Man is part of the Fixer’s torture repertoire. The images reflect a kind of pathos formulae that is part of Western painting: a mixture of “obscenity and uncanny holiness” in which imperial powers are glorified and torture is aesthetically justified (Mitchell Cloning, 116). The images of violence and torture from Abu Ghraib are not so much exceptional but rather, as the film maker Errol Morris argues in his documentary film on the genealogy of the Abu Ghraib photographs, represent “standard operating procedures.” As such, the violence in Miller’s graphic novels, his visual style, the onomatopoetic framing and “regeneration through violence” (Richard Slotkin)45 become linked with a sense of empire and self-righteousness complicit with a specific political agenda.

40 While Miller worked on his graphic novel, public and social media engaged with and disseminated the Abu Ghraib photographs, critical scholarly analyses by Susan Sontag and Mark Danner, Stephen Eisenman, Barbara Ehrenreich and David Levie informed public discourse, and two successful documentary films brought the archive to the attention of a large public: Rory Kennedy’s The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Errol Morris Standard Operating Procedure (both 2007). The image of “the hooded man,” in particular in Morris, gained an iconic status. As cultural critic Rob Kroes reminds us, “[f]rom the

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moment that photographs acquire iconic status and enter the realm of the mass circulation of images, they begin to affect history rather than merely reflecting it” (30). The photograph in question shows an Arab prisoner standing on a box with electric wires attached to his hands and genitals. Should he move or fall off the box, he was told he would be electrocuted. The strategy is to lay the human body in a position of self-torture since any movement to ease the stress is supposed to cause an increase in pain. The image is resonant of Christian iconography with the crucifixion as its iconic tableau (114). By many in the Arab world, the invasion of Iraq was seen as a continuation of the Christian Crusades and a thoroughly imperialistic act. The image of the hooded man seemed like a cynical comment on the link to this part of history.

41 Despite the public outcry regarding the use of torture and inhumane treatment of Abu Ghraib prisoners, Miller seems to endorse torture as a means to respond to terrorist attacks suggesting that this practice is part of the so-called “postmodern diplomacy” his heroes are engaging with. Director Kathryn Bigelow’s Hollywood film Zero Dark Thirty (2012) extends the use of torture in a filmic re-enactment suggesting that with the help of torture Osama bin Laden was tracked down by U.S. military forces. In addition, Miller’s remediation of silhouette aesthetics which emerged in the 1920s visual culture of the Harlem Renaissance and has been appropriated by modern media campaigns such as Apple’s advertisements for the iPod (see Mehring, “Visual Rhetoric” 182) can be associated with what Thomas Cripps identified as an aesthetic du cool: “outward detachment, composed choreographic strides, and a self-possessed enigmatic mask over inner urgency” (9). Miller merges an American comic code of communication related to (super)heroes fighting criminals with a political agenda to justify violent responses against terrorism and make it look cool.

9. The Long Shadow of Holy Terror

42 While Miller’s use of silhouettes helped to turn him into a widely respected and celebrated visual artist, his work on combining silhouetted narratives with the “war on terror” marked a turning point in the reception among many of his fans. Reviews of the book were consistently negative. A blogger on Unleash the Fanby website complains about the change of attitude in Miller’s work: “The once astute social observer has been replaced by a racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, paranoid nutcase” (see Paul Young). The reception of the book has been overshadowed by Miller’s blog and an entry on the Occupy movement which he posted before the book appeared.46 It is worth quoting it at length since it induced a critical reaction to the book suggesting that many commenters did not care to read the novel but turned to the blog and a few images to disavow the product. For example, Miller described the Occupy movement as consisting of a “pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock- era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness,” claiming that the movement is no “popular uprising. This is garbage… Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy.”47 He further criticized the attitude of the protesters charging them with ignorance, narcissism and lack of patriotic dedication: Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you’ve been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you’ve heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism. And this enemy of mine—not of yours, apparently—must be getting a dark chuckle, if not an outright horselaugh—out of your vain, childish, self-destructive spectacle.

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In the name of decency, go home to your parents, you losers. Go back to your mommas’ basements and play with your Lords of Warcraft. Or better yet, enlist for the real thing. Maybe our military could whip some of you into shape. They might not let you babies keep your iPhones, though. Try to soldier on.48

43 The racist agenda that is part of Holy Terror by pitting the rightful white American heroic representatives of the democratic land of freedom against the stereotypical brutal, barbaric, inhuman Muslim “others” in a fictional graphic novel resonates with what a key Bush aide explained as the agenda of framing historical events. He argued that the “judicious study of discernible reality” should no longer be the basis of the U.S. after 9/11. Rather, he claimed: That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality— judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, while you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. (Mitchell xviii)

44 The advertisement for the then new book addressed comic fans expressively by asking them to “join” the main character on his rampage against stereotypical Muslims in the “war on terror.” The sad irony of the marketing campaign suggests that Miller is fighting the terror attacks of 9/11 2001 with a new call for counter-terrorism in 2011, now in the disguise of the kind of heroes he has helped to revitalize such as the figure of the Dark Knight, Batman. With its provocative nature in the medium of the graphic novel, Holy Terror does not recognize transcultural processes, for example in the field of literature, music or comedy, where “notions of Muslimness are negotiated in ways that can broaden reader’s understanding of the contributions of Muslims to US culture” (Marr 267). As a matter of fact, Holy Terror and its vigilante hero offer an intermedial narrative that erases transcultural processes related to Muslim Americans.

10. Conclusion

45 The power of images and the rhetoric of violence are means to offer closure in intercultural confrontations where the “West”—or western ideals of freedom and democracy—ultimately prevails. The concept of regeneration through violence permeates visual narratives, in particular the world of Frank Miller’s graphic novels. Aesthetically, Miller’s Holy Terror builds on a transatlantic and transnational media history of appropriating silhouette aesthetics of self-empowerment. His work is in line with Lavater’s silhouetted racial profiles, which became part of a racist visual rhetoric in western cultures.49 In the realm of comic book narratives, Miller uses mask-like silhouettes in order to frame the heroic struggles of a select few or a single hero against an overbearing system of injustice or a force of evil. Holy Terror does not encourage readers to engage with Islam as a religion but rather foregrounds a cartoonish association of Muslim stereotypes as a threat to the American Way of Life. Silhouetted narratives of Islamophobia became embedded in Miller’s creative output including his Batman series The Dark Knight III: The Master Race (2012-15) or the heroic fight of Spartans in 300 or Xerxes. My intermedial reading reveals that the shift from fantasy stories published by Marvel, DC or Dark Horse without an explicit reference to recent historical or political events to a clear-cut propagandistic framing of Holy Terror in order to inspire hatred against the Muslim “Other” created a polarized response. Miller

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is not concerned with what Alsultany has described as a trend in popular television series: “the standardization of ‘positive,’ sympathetic representations of Arab and Muslim identities” (16). While she sees “antiracism and multiculturalism on the surface” producing “the logics and affects necessary to legitimate racist policies and practices” and projecting “the United States as an enlightened country that has entered a postracial era” (16), Miller sets a strong signal against post-racial fantasies which foreshadows the racist rhetoric of the Trump administration.

46 Race, as media theoretician W.J.T. Mitchell argues, is not so much a myth and illusion, which we have successfully identified as artificial constructions, but rather it continues to stay with us and informs the way we perceive our environment. If race is not only a reality (visible in texts and images) but also a medium, the iconographic silhouetted narrative of Holy Terror represents a visual language of Islamophobia that functions as a lens rather than a visual object.50

47 Holy Terror exemplifies how the production of images and the framing of war have undergone a radical transformation in entertainment culture. The circulation of the so- called “hooded man” of Abu Ghraib, often represented in silhouette shape in aestheticized versions of the original photograph, has become an iconic image that “undermined the last remaining alibi for the war on terror in Iraq, namely, that it was a moral crusade to liberate Iraq from tyranny” (Mitchell 4). Miller, in turn, uses images of torture, vigilantism, and lustful revenge to counterbalance the use of the hooded man as a kind of recruiting poster for jihadists throughout the Arab world. In Holy Terror, he creates an intermedial discourse with current political images bringing an “emotional truth” to the fight against terrorism. The use of extreme violence, exaggerated forms of stereotyping through silhouette aesthetics, the celebration of vigilantism, sexism and an endorsement of right-wing approaches to a law-and-order mentality place Holy Terror in a continuity of Miller’s creative output from Ronin, Batman, Sin City and 300 rather than positioning the work as a remarkable racist exception.

48 The patriotic agenda behind Holy Terror, however, has changed the perspective on the visual and textual framing in Miller’s previous work. Miller’s oeuvre must be seen in a new light of radical right-wing agendas to endorse nationalism, a racist agenda regarding immigration policies, extreme forms of violence, and states of exception including the use of torture. Silhouettes are successfully employed and exploited in order to reduce complex socio-political, historical and cultural contexts. Post 9/11 Islamophobia in the graphic novel Holy Terror, with its use of silhouettes to reference a tradition of patriotic superheroes and its built-in counter-narrative of stereotyping media images of terrorism, begs us to modify Richard Dyer’s statement that “the effectiveness of stereotypes resides in the way they invoke a consensus” (14) to make room for stereotypes that thrive on in-text dissensus. In the age of fake news, the visual program of “postmodern diplomacy” of Holy Terror turned out to become a visionary tale about a country being pushed towards a politics of “fire and fury.” The use of graphic novels as a call to arms to fight terrorism vigilante-style puts limits on Royal’s assessment that this visual medium has a remarkable democratic fabric woven into its texture.

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NOTES

1. See https://www.superrobotmayhem.com/comics/the-fixer/holy-terror/. 2. See Frank Mehring “Hard-Boiled Silhouettes: Transnational Remediation and the Art of Omission in Frank Miller’s Sin City.” 3. Miller originally intended to write a Batman installment about him fighting against terrorists but decided to introduce a new character while working on the topic. See Stefan Pannor, “Neuer Comic von Frank Miller: Der dumpfe Ritter kehrt zurück.” 4. For discussion of this iconic cover see Mark Fertig’s book Take That Adolf! The Fighting Comic Books of the Second World War. 5. In an interview from 2005 with Will Eisner, Miller pointed out that he considered it problematic that a certain blockbuster mentality from the world of film translated more and more into the world of comics. “I think comic books are too obsessed with the same blockbuster mentality that makes bad movies” (149). The blockbuster marketing campaign was enhanced by a 1:46 min trailer to announce the upcoming book in sensational fashion with booming sound effects and animated panels from the graphic novel. See https://www.legendary.com/comics/frank-millers-holy-terror/. 6. See https://www.superrobotmayhem.com/comics/the-fixer/holy-terror/. 7. Intermediality as a theoretical concept has been most widely used with reference to “multiple discourses and modalities of experience and representation, as examined in aesthetic and other humanistic traditions of communication research” (Paech and Schröter, 10, see also Jensen). I agree with W. J. T. Mitchell that “all media are mixed media” (211). This is particularly obvious for the medium of graphic novels with its peculiar blend of text and visuals. I am building on the work of American Studies scholars such as Astrid Böger, Christof Decker, Winfried Fluck, Udo Hebel, Gabriele Rippl, and Daniel Stein (among many others) to investigate the complex dialogues of

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textual studies with visual studies with a specific focus on the interpictorial and intermedial discourse of the silhouette aesthetics in Miller’s propagandistic work on terrorism in Holy Terror. 8. See Philip Young, American Fiction, American Myth: Essays, 127. 9. As a matter of fact, Miller wrote a three-issue comic book mini-series called Hard Boiled (drawn by Geof Darrow) about a dystopian future Los Angeles, published between 1990 and 1992 by Dark Horse Comics. 10. For a general overview of theoretical and conceptual aspects of comics and graphic novels, see Daniel Stein’s article “Comics and Graphic Novels.” In my analysis of Holy Terror I understand graphic novels not only as a “combination of images and words as they unfold in sequences of panels… determined by the materiality of the page as well as different publication formats” (420) but also add references to interpictorial sources (or “clusters” in the sense of Hebel) as a key element intermediality. 11. See the introduction to our EJAS special guest-edited edition on “Media Agoras.” 12. See also Stefan L. Brandt, “Intermedial Exchange and the Rhetorics of Islamophobia.” 13. My understanding of remediation indicated a process that Bolter and Grusin describe as media “continually commenting upon, reproducing and replacing each other” (22). Turning to Jacques Derrida’s argument that there is nothing prior to writing, they claim that correspondingly that for visual culture “there is nothing prior to mediation. Any act of mediation is dependent upon another, indeed many other, acts of mediation and is therefore remediation” (Bolter and Grusin 18). If we agree with Marshall McLuhan that new media often make us more self-conscious of their predecessors, we should as in which ways Miller draws on “residual media” (Charles R. Acland xx) by reconfiguring, renewing, and recycling visual styles that have been neglected, abandoned, or thrashed over the course of time. 14. The issue of Islamophobia became visible in Miller’s graphic novel 300 (1998) about the historical battle between Sparta and Persia. However, this work did not produce a controversial discussion on cultural Othering and racism at the time. 15. While 300 received generally positive reviews, Holy Terror and Xerxes were criticized for their racist, anti-Muslim stereotyping and muddled plot structure. See e.g. www.goodreads.com. The visual approach to framing the action remains surprisingly consistent. 16. He also reminds us of an earlier model of “the image as a living thing” due to its metaphorical qualities (Cloning Terror, xix). 17. See in this context my essay “How Silhouettes Became ‘Black’: The Visual Rhetoric of the Harlem Renaissance.” 18. Silhouettes offer a remarkably rich, unexplored corpus of images emerging from ancient Greece and China, transmitted via the Western culture of portraiture and twenty-first-century advertising to the digital age of remediation and global image distribution processes. The novel functions of silhouettes in American modernist advertisement and art create unforeseen opportunities of intercultural communication. Because of their close relationship to stereotypes, it is of central importance to also analyze how silhouettes can lead to misunderstandings and intercultural confrontations. In the first case, silhouettes signify a democratic promise of aesthetic empowerment transcending national and cultural boundaries. In the

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second case, silhouettes can trigger projections that rely on colonial fantasies, asymmetric gender power relations, or contribute to a feeling of national exceptionalism via an iconographic mythical textual-visual narratives. This paradoxical effect needs explaining. 19. See Oxford English Dictionary, online version, https://www-oed-com. 20. Sometimes we also encounter portraits that are cut on white paper and mounted on black. While the roots of silhouettes can be traced to Paleolithic times in which vases from ancient Greece show black figures in profile, Pliny the Elder connects silhouettes in his Natural History (AD 77-79) with the very origins of art. Pliny describes how in 600 BC Dibutades, the daughter of a Corinthian potter, traced the profile of her lover on a wall before he left on a journey 21. In Germany, silhouette art reached its climax in the second part of the eighteenth century, with its centers in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. In 1779, Friedrich C. Müller provided the first overview in his book Ausführliche Abhandlung über die Silhouetten und deren Zeichnung, Verjüngung, Verzierung und Vervielfältigung. With the silhouette chair and the so-called Storchschnabel, a technical device created by the Jesuit Christoph Schreiner in the early seventeenth century, silhouettes could be created in a mechanical fashion. For a comprehensive analysis of the genealogy of silhouettes in western art, see my essay “How Silhouettes Became ‘Black’: The Visual Rhetoric of the Harlem Renaissance” (2017). 22. Masereel’s influential work Mon livre d’heures: 167 images dessinées et gravées sur bois (1919, later published under the title My Book of Hours in 1922 and afterward as Passionate Journey in 1948) traces the arrival of a young man in a prototypical European metropolis after World War I. The black-and-white images tell of moments of crisis and tragedy and the isolation of urban life. Weary of civilization, the protagonist embarks on a quest for redemption and inspiration in “primitivist cultures.” After his return to the city, the young man assumes a carefree attitude of complete freedom and independence. Masereel’s visual style is intrinsically linked to the fine arts. It would soon be appropriated by the commercial arts in the field of advertisement. 23. In the latter, Ward uses the Expressionist techniques of woodcut prints to confront his protagonist with the practice of lynching, contrasting the more detailed figures of the aggressors in white with the black silhouetted body of an African American with a rope around his neck hanging from a tree. Woodcut novels are thus one of the “missing links” in the circulation of images that triggered a renewed interest in the art of silhouettes to advertise the African American naissance in literature, art, and music in the United States. 24. For an example of the period’s many distorting representations of African Americans as “savage” and “carnal,” see e.g. Paul Colin’s lithographs of the caged, half- naked Josephine Baker (1927) for the revue Le Tumulte Noir in Paris. For a discussion of the relationship between Winold Reiss and Aaron Douglas, see Frank Mehring, The Democratic Gap: Transcultural Confrontations of German Immigrants and the Promise of American Democracy. 25. See e.g. my essay “Remediating Silhouettes: What We Can Learn from Advertising the Harlem Renaissance in the Digital Age.” 26. Miller shares a tradition of silhouettes as artistic provocation with Karen Walker. Walker’s silhouettes most often reference African American people. She builds on a

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cultural memory in which representations of blackness are tied to stereotypical silhouettes. This is remarkable considering that during the heyday of their popularity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, silhouettes represented the likeness of mostly white bourgeois sitters. For example, Endless Conundrum, An African Anonymous Adventuress (2001) shows a tableau of various silhouettes, which in some form or another critically engage with issues of slavery, sexual exploitation, violence against African Americans, and deconstructing modernist aesthetics. “My works are erotically explicit, shameless. I would be happy if visitors would stand in front of my work and even feel a little ashamed because they have… simply believed in the project of modernism,” explains Walker (62). Hence, Walker’s silhouettes are both beautifully attractive and shockingly repulsive. 27. Kara Walker, quoted in Alexander Alberro, “Kara Walker,” 25. See also Kara Walker, My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. 28. The appropriation of silhouette aesthetics in the murals of Walker has inspired new scholarship on negative or thoughtlessly stereotyped representations of blacks in the context of American minstrelsy. See the work of scholars such as Philippe Vergne, Sander Gilman, Kevin Young, Thomas McEviley, Robert Storr, and Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw. 29. Toni Morrison, “On the Backs of Blacks.” 30. This transfer is even more complicated considering that prominent African Americans such Muhammed Ali and Malcolm X, among many other, identified themselves as Muslims. See in this contexts Khaled A. Beydoun’s American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear, 152 ff. 31. George W. Bush called for a “coalition of the willing” (consisting of nations that are either “with” or “against us”) to expand “international trade policies in the name of fighting terrorism and spreading freedom” (Juhasz 4). The so-called Bush agenda expressed in his Address to the United Nations General Assembly on 14 Sep. 2005 “for freer trade” as part of a “free world” called for a simplified albeit compelling vision of division US vs. Them (Bremmer 2). 32. This approach is notably different from Miller’s revisionist work on The Dark Knight Returns where Gotham City’s authorities have often been highly critical of Batman’s vigilante killing sprees calling him a “menace” to society (unpaginated). 33. The name “Mohammed” is in and of itself kind of silhouette. It de-humanizes and de-personalizes the terrorist (and the Muslim other) by depriving him of cultural and personal specificities, similar to what the silhouette does on paper. 34. The discourse on the propoer translation of jihad and the reference to infidels has sparked numerous interpretations and needs to be seen in the specific historical context in which the Quran was written. For a discussion of the different meanings, translations, and interpretations, see e.g. Hamed Abdel-Samad, Der Korean. Botschaft der Liebe Botschaft des Hasses. 35. The fact that a widely mediated event such as the Boston Marathon bombing happened two years after the appearance of Holy Terror makes the reading experience all the more powerful today. 36. In the following, I will refer to the photographs indexed by The Atlantic from 50 iconic images. Alan Taylor “9/11: The Day of the Attacks.” The following numbers of illustrations refer to the photographs collected on the website of The Atlantic.

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37. See Mehring “Hard-Boiled Silhouettes” (2013). 38. I follow the 1991 Runnymede Trust Report’s definition of Islamophobia as “unfounded hostility towards Muslims, and therefore fear or dislike of all or most Muslims.” See the ISLAMOPHOBIA RESEARCH & DOCUMENTATION PROJECT. 39. For example, 300 traces the Battle of Thermopylae and the events leading up to it from the perspective of Leonidas of Sparta. The series won three Eisner Awards in 1999 including “Best Limited Series,” “Best Writer/Artist” for Frank Miller and “Best Colorist” for Lynn Varley. It was turned into a successful Hollywood film by Zack Snyder in 2006. Miller first came into contact with the ancient history of Sparta through the medium of film. As a young boy he saw Rudolf Mathé’s epic history drama The 300 Spartans on the Battle of Thermopylae in cinemascope. This left a particular impression on the young man’s mind. What struck him most was the representation of heroism which did not lead to a happy ending with decorations but rather death for the cause of freedom and patriotism. 300 represents a remarkable visual accomplishment that departs from the traditional letter size format in favor of a large horizontal framing that reflects the viewing traditions of widescreen films. This format has also been chosen for Holy Terror suggesting an aesthetic and narrative link between the defense of heroic Greek values and what Miller defines as American “core beliefs.” Prior to his work on 300, Miller already included a reference to the Hot Gates in his hard-boiled noir graphic novel series Sin City. In The Big Fat Kill, Miller foreshadows his efforts to bring a silhouetted noir aesthetics to the classic battle in which the underdogs show extraordinary strength and courage in a seemingly hopeless situation or war. Afterwards, Miller followed a double strategy: 1) learning as much as possible about the historical events, including a three week-trip to the Aegean to study the Greek environment and visit the Hot Gates to absorb the atmosphere, 2) to transcend historical accurateness in order to convey a universal narrative. Miller explained that he was touched by the terrific, glorious events that happened at the hot gates. He recognized that at the epicenter of the historical battle one could deduct something about the quintessential nature of western civilization (see booklet). Miller was interested in creating a narrative which would connect the courage of the 300 Spartans with a sense of American freedom. In that sense, 300 could be read as a kind of homage to those resistance fighters who, in Miller’s mind, form the basis for the vigilante warriors of 21st century narratives in Holy Terror. Rather than approaching the events historically, the graphic novel is interested in a kind of emotional truth (Zack Snyder, 21). While supremacist narratives of pride, glory, power, aggression and violence are the ultima ratio for Miller’s aestheticization of the Spartans, it becomes problematic when similar concepts are projected on the “war on terror” in twenty-first-century American democratic frameworks. 40. The sparse use of color, particularly green and red, emphasizes a human dimension within the distorted image of the ruins caused by the detonations. 41. For an overview of Muslim stereotypes in True Lies, see Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs. 42. See epigram of this article. 43. See Dave Howard, “‘Real life superheroes’ fighting crime in New York.” 44. See in this context Peter Baker and Choe Sang-Hun, “Trump Threatens ‘Fire and Fury’ Against North Korea if It Endangers U.S.” The term became the title of the book

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Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (2018) by journalist Michael Wolff to describe the political rhetoric and work of President Donald Trump. 45. Slotkin argues that the mythological figure of the American hero formed a new national identity in violent, wilderness regeneration in the white—Indian encounter. 46. Despite the explicit agenda of being a piece of propaganda to arouse patriotism, the critical reception of Holy Terror went along with an appreciation for Miller’s earlier work. 47. See http://frankmillerink.com/. 48. See http://frankmillerink.com/. 49. See Mehring 2017. 50. I have shown in another context that the use of silhouettes in American advertisement has established a visual language of race that exploits stereotypical assumptions about “blackness.” See “Remediating Silhouettes,” 36 and 52.

ABSTRACTS

The graphic artist Frank Miller represents an innovative force in the field of graphic novels who pushes the medium into new territories. One such territory is Islamophobia and terrorism in his graphic novel Holy Terror (2011). This article explores how Islamophobia has been mediated and how media systems of the twenty-first century forge Islamophobia into new shapes asking: How does Frank Miller’s aesthetics of silhouetted bodies reframe Islamophobia in an interpictorial and intermedial discourse of images? To what extent do Miller’s graphic stylizations of Islamophobia remediate elements of his previous work on fictional (super)heroes and historical leaders from Batman to the 300 Spartans? I argue that Miller’s visual narrative participates in the Islamophobic discourse of American popular culture by appropriating a wide array of popular culture visual archives for a propagandistic call for Muslim “Othering.” Holy Terror references news media, films and television series, 9/11 photography, familiar comic book heroes, and, of course, Miller’s own oeuvre. Thus, the graphic novel represents what I conceive as a virtual agora where different media converge to negotiate public discourses on Islamophobia. I will turn to the medium of graphic novels to first reveal how Miller’s narratives and silhouette aesthetics of (super)heroes have become complicit with Islamophobic responses to the crisis of 9/11; second, to trace the discourse of Islamophobia in post-9/11 America in Miller’s work; and, third, to reveal how this discourse interlinks with the patriotic logic of the fight against terrorism.

INDEX

Keywords: Islamophobia, Intermediality, Frank Miller, Graphic Novels, Holy Terror (2011)

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AUTHOR

FRANK MEHRING

Frank Mehring is chair and professor of American Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He teaches twentieth- and twenty-first century visual culture, music, and theories of transatlantic studies. In 2012, he received from the European Association for American Studies the biennial Rob Kroes Award for his monograph The Democratic Gap (2014). His publications include Sphere Melodies (2003) on Charles Ives and John Cage, Soundtrack of Liberation (2015) on WWII sonic diplomacy, Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music (2018, with Erik Redling) The Mexico Diary: Winold Reiss Between Vogue Mexico and the Harlem Renaissance (2016), The Multicultural Modernism of Winold Reiss (2020), and The Politics and Cultures of Liberation (2018, with Hans Bak and Mathilde Roza). Frank is the co-founder of the European Digital Studies Network and the online journal AmLit – American Literatures (together with Stefan L. Brandt and Tatiani Rapatzikou). Frank is a board member of the International Committee of the American Studies Association, the European American Studies Association and the Netherlands American Studies Association. He organized the first international symposium on Winold Reiss in Berlin and co- curated exhibitions on Winold Reiss, the Marshall Plan, and Liberation Songs in New York, Nijmegen and The Hague.

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Islamophobia and Performance Art

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Challenging Islamophobia through Intermediality: Anida Yoeu Ali’s Performance Art

Martina Pfeiler

1. Introduction

1 Within the framework of American Studies, Anida Yoeu Ali’s work is of immediate relevance as it embodies a feminist, transnational critique of an unprecedented “undermining [of] Muslim voices” (Azam 125). Her performance art not only deals with the impact of the aftermath of 9/11 on Muslim Americans. It is also relevant to a globally growing Black Lives Matter movement in view of Donald Trump’s presidency that has curtailed the rights of ethnic Others and thus participates in acts of racism. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor highlights systemic racism within the current U.S. government as follows: Republicans, led by Trump, have referred to Black activists as ‘identity extremists’ and they have referred to the Black Lives Matter movement as ‘terrorist,’ while simultaneously minimizing, if not ignoring, the President’s repeated sympathetic gestures towards racists who espouse hate speech towards African Americans, Muslims, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and other victims of racial and ethnic discrimination. (103)

2 In view of these alarming realities for ethnic minorities, this article investigates Anida Yoeu Ali’s performance art as that of a Muslim, Khmer-American feminist global agitator. As I suggest, Ali challenges Islamophobia in the United States and transnationally by expanding her work “into ever-widening arenas” (Fraser, Justice Interruptus 82). Ali confronts America’s frequent monolithic representations of Muslim American identities in mainstream media. And, in doing so, she is creating counterdiscourses that formulate oppositional interpretations of Muslim “identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser, Justice Interruptus 82). Drawing on theories of convergence culture and intermediality, this article closely analyzes Ali’s performance projects in terms of how they challenge Islamophobia in today’s digitized, transnational, and

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intersectional world: The first example is titled 1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim (2010), a performance poetry clip that was directed by the Japanese American filmmaker Masahiro Sugano and which widely circulates on various platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo on the Internet. The article also includes an exploration of a selection of performance acts from The Red Chador Series (2015; 2018; 2020). I argue that by establishing discursive counternarratives the two works highlight the cultural potential of using intermediality to challenge private and public Islamophobia in a globally connected world. Thus, these works will be explored as a performative engagement with national, transnational, and gendered dimensions of Islamophobia.

2. Islamophobia and Intermediality in the Context of Twenty-First Century Convergence Cultures

3 According to Khaled Beydoun, the term Islamophobia cannot be considered without its dialectical dimension, i.e. “the ongoing dialogue between state and citizens” (29). Among other things, new social media networks and a changing national and transnational media landscape have accelerated this dialogue, which is not without bigotry, racism and hatred against marginalized peoples.

4 These mediatized forms of hate speech include Islamophobic statements by politicians, for instance on Twitter, where they are subsequently commented on, contested, or supported by followers. Donald Trump’s preelection statement “I think Islam hates us” (09:35-09:37) in an interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN on March 10, 2016, which was also posted on the Internet, serves as just one flagrant example of how influential politicians with a wide media reach not only create but reinforce a hegemonic white supremacist viewpoint. In fact, Trump strategically constructs Islam as a threat to U.S. value systems. The overall effect with regard to the representation of Muslim identities in digital media, as coming from the President of the United States, is one that continues to reinforce a white, hegemonic U.S. American society that is molding public and private images of ethnically marked Muslims as the Other.

5 In order to assess this profound cultural shift of creating new audiences and new media cultures on the Internet, it is helpful to briefly turn to Henry Jenkins’s essay “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence” from 2004, in which he states: [m]edia convergence is more than simply a technological shift. Convergence alters the relationship between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres and audiences. Convergence refers to a process, but not an endpoint. Thanks to the proliferation of channels and the portability of new computing and telecommunications technologies, we are entering an era where media will be everywhere and we will use all kinds of media in relation to each other. (36; emphasis added)

6 Put simply, new audiences and genres not only emerge but also converge and thus put media, and the content of media, in relation with each other. This change is facilitated by technical appliances such as through the use of smartphones, digital cameras, and laptops, etc. in the production and distribution process, generating new media cultures.

7 Equally relevant, Jens Schröter’s useful categorization for intermediality as a result of the shift from analogue to digital, foregrounds the question of media archeologies that rely on analogue and digital technologies, or both. Schröter differentiates between synthetic intermediality (i.e. art happening), transmedia intermediality (i.e. computer

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simulation), transformational/ontological intermediality (i.e. remediating a medium through another medium). The last two categories, according to Schröter, involve digital media (Schröter 579-601). While this overview of various operational dimensions of intermediality highlights the forms and technical applications, all of which play an important role in Ali’s work, an additional focus on the discursive strategies of intermediality bears significance. Drawing on Klaus Bruhn Jensen’s definition of intermediality, the term “denotes communication through several discourses at once, including through combinations of different sensory modalities of interaction, for instance music and moving images” (1; my emphasis).

8 Thus, I would like to investigate the discursively mediated strategies that are involved in challenging Islamophobia through intermedia art and convergence media. The first aspect draws on the use of the term Islamophobia itself, which according to Steven George Salaita’s article “Beyond Orientalism and Islamophobia: 9/11, Anti-Arab Racism, and the Mythos of National Pride” (2006) requires a more transparent geopolitical focus. He prefers the term Anti-Arab racism, suggesting that “Islamophobia… has ambiguities that limit its clarity” (249). Salaita adds: “Not all victims of Islamophobia are Muslim, and while fear of Muslims, as the word’s suffix implies, certainly inspires hatred of them in some cases, we must take much more into account historically in order to accurately delineate a context for the hatred” (249).

9 At the core of his critical reflection lies the risk of homogenizing all forms of Islamophobia, which requires a nuanced historical articulation of the cultural contexts in which Islamophobia occurs. Salaita considers the term Anti-Arab racism as a “more accurate replacement for the traditional descriptors Orientalism and Islamophobia in relation to the negative portrayal of Arabs in the United States” (245). Yet, I will stick to the term Islamophobia precisely because of the ambiguity it raises in Anida Yoeu Ali’s art. In light of the global outreach of her performance art, her work complicates the boundaries of a “transnational transposition of a large variety of Islamic practices” (Mas 125).

10 Secondly, when investigating representations of Muslim identities, an intersectional approach is key. Ali situates herself within a “gendered side of Islamophobia” (Jamal 472). Amaney A. Jamal views the aspect of gender as follows: “Chief among the targets of this Islamophobic tide are Muslim women identifiable to the public as Muslims because they wear hijabs. Muslim women have seen hate crimes against them escalate since the electoral campaign and election of Donald Trump” (472). Thus, it becomes clear that Islamic feminism, just like Islamophobia, cannot be generalized as one monolithic, ideological global fight by Muslim women. In the strategic fight against discrimination, racial signifiers put Muslim women at a higher risk. This is particularly noteworthy in a U.S. context, where Islamophobia clashes with “the Constitution’s protection of religious freedom” (Feldman 142). Thus, the question of how to counter Islamophobia involves Muslim women’s decision of wearing, or not wearing, the hijab as an integrative part of the feminist Islamic protest. From a Muslim perspective, this runs deeper in view of attacks on Muslim women as “women” and as “Muslim,” who are immediately seen as oppressed and forced into veiling. Indisputably, this stereotypification disregards a deeply rooted theological Muslim feminism that seeks to reconcile gender equality based on a feminist reading of the Qu’ran (Hassan 87).

11 Given that these intersectional issues frequently arise from structural, private, and gendered Islamophobia within and beyond the United States, I would like to explore in

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the remainder of this article how Anida Yoeu Ali’s multifaceted performance art intermedially challenges Islamophobia.

3. Islamophobia and Intermediality in 1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim

12 Anida Yoeu Ali is a first generation Cambodian American artist, who grew up in a Muslim community in Battambang, Cambodia. At a young age she fled with her family from the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, forcing them to restart their life in Chicago in the early 1980s (Schlund-Vilas 58). As a nationally emerging spoken word poet and performance artist, Ali studied graphic design at the University of Illinois and completed an M.F.A. at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011 she left for Cambodia on a Fulbright, where she pursued her art in collaboration with the Japanese American filmmaker and partner Masahiro Sugano. Together they founded the collaborative multimedia lab Studio Revolt, producing performance poetry clips and the award- winning documentary Cambodian Son (2014). It features the exiled Khmer American spoken word artist Kosal Khiev and his exceptional life journey from refugee to prisoner to poet and selected representative of Cambodia at the 2012 Cultural Olympiad in London.

13 In 2016 Ali accepted a teaching position at Trinity College at Hartford, Connecticut. Today she teaches at Bothell University, where she is a Senior-Artist-in-Residence, “whose works span performance, installation, video, images, public encounters, and political agitation” (Bothell U bio; Web). Her performance art has received international recognition by winning the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2015, “the most established and prestigious annual art award in Asia-Pacific” (Web). Ali has also received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, and, more recently, she was invited to a Global Salzburg Seminar titled “The Art of Resilience: Creativity, Courage and Renewal” (Abellan 2017).

14 Anida Yoeu Ali’s 5-minute color performance poetry clip, 1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim, was directed by Masahiro Sugano in 2010. As a product of media convergence, not only the digital camera work, but also various editing decisions made by the filmmaker via computer software and adding sound layers play a crucial role in the overall film-poetic concept.

15 Although I will focus on the clip in my analysis, the poem originated as part of an installation project titled Otherance (2010) by Ali in the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Next to a polyvocal performance of the poem, the installation included a wall art piece that, according to Ali, ended up being vandalized. In response to the vandalism Ali invited the larger community into the performance space to raise awareness and psychologically process the hate crime (Schlund-Vials 64). This aspect is crucial to mention as the stylized performance clip that followed the installation is also decidedly community-based.

16 Verbally, the spoken word poem is constructed as a cento, which translates from Latin as patchwork. Traditionally, a cento is a “verse composition made up of lines selected from the work or works of some great poet(s) of the past” (Preminger 180). In fact, its tradition reaches back to Greek and Latin literature. It regained popularity in Renaissance literature such as in “the Engl[ish] Cicero Princeps (1608), which was a

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treatise on government compiled from Cicero” (ibid.). As the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics further states, today they are “almost invariably humorous, the humor arising from both the clever juxtaposition of famous lines into a new semantic matrix and also recognition of the diversity of their sources” (180). In Ali’s case, the cento is based on a series of “[f]iled hate crime reports on people who were perceived to be Muslims or Muslim” (Project Website).

17 As Schlund-Vilas states, the poem includes “excerpts from Federal Bureau of Investigation and police reports filed by South Asian American, Arab American, and Muslim American victims of hate crime violence” (63). Ali embeds these state reports about Islamophobic hate crimes in the cento tradition. Rather than staying factual about them, she uses irony to the effect of exposing the absurdity of the racially motivated hate crimes. Thus, she reframes these statements in the form of a mash-up and reconstructs them to not only expose Islamophobia in the United States but to formulate a counternarrative with them. As I would like to suggest, the postmodern performance poetry clip follows the cento tradition not only verbally, but also in the form of its diverse visual ethnic representation of more than one-hundred community members from the Chicago area. Each one of the participants counters “monolithic stereotypes of a ‘Muslim’ identity while acknowledging the significance of historical persecution” (Web).

18 Turning to the performance poem itself, its verbal dimension is inextricably intertwined with these visual shots as well as extradiegetic sounds. As an intermedia art form, the result is a performance poetry clip, in which sound layers and visuals may be added as part of a concept video featuring a poet performing his or her work in front of a camera (Pfeiler 172-176). Although the spoken word poem is the genre-defining element of the digital clip at hand, media play a decisive role in its multi-layered, discursive construction.

19 Already within the first few seconds of the clip “several discourses merge at once” (Jensen 1). In effect, this comes from a “combination of different sensory modalities of interaction” (Jensen 1), in this case from sound and moving images. Synchronous to its symbolic establishing shot in the outskirts of Chicago, one hears a polyphonic sound collage of several male and female Anglophone American voices. In this chaotic soundscape, fragmented commentaries stand out audibly, most notably about New York’s Major Giuliani and President Bush’s response after the attacks on the Twin Towers (0:00-0:27). Evocative of a conspiracy theory in its lowered tone, one hears a piece of advice as voiced by a male speaker to not only stay “conscious” (0:05), but “to remain critical of this government” (0:07-0:08).

20 In fact, a potential danger coming from the U.S. government itself in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks is made clear by way of an epigraph on a black intertitle with white font. This epigraph draws an immediate connection to acts of state-based racism. It reads: “February 12, 1942. Executive Order 9066 authorized to U.S. military to incarcerate 112,000 Japanese Americans into ten internment camps” (0:07-0:12).

21 With these written lines, the rhythmic beat continues and just less than two seconds before cutting to a second epigraph, one receives a bird’s-eye glimpse of several superimposed shots of contemporary Khmer dancer Prumsodon Ok (0:41-0:44):

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Fig. 1 Prumsodon Ok in 1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim. Photo Credit: Masahiro Sugano.

22 In this scene, the viewer’s gaze is drawn into the superimposed, visual representation of Ok’s severed body, which is wrapped in a white cloth around his loins. As the image conveys, he is reaching for his back with one arm in a cramped pose, while being couched in a fetal position attempting to protect his head. In effect, this not only expresses vulnerability, but the white chalk on his skin symbolically suggests oppression by white supremacy, i not internalized racism.

23 A hard cut to a second epigraph reads: “March 28, 2003. Following the events of 9/11, the FBI created an Arab American Advisory Committee after hate crimes against people perceived to be ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim’ increased by 1700%” (0:15-0:23). And while a historical comparison would be uneven, the epigraph highlights that xenophobia against Muslim Americans is not only at a record high, but it could potentially reverse to the extent that Japanese Americans had to endure it in the 1940s. Thus, the first epigraph exposes the reality of America’s historical connection with racist political agendas as a nation, while the second epigraph serves to highlight the alarming degree of private Islamophobia in the United States.

24 These introductory, politicized scenes set the tone for the performance poet’s first appearance in the clip. The viewer is confronted with a fade-cut to Ali’s body filmed in a high angle shot. She is laying on the ground in open daylight to evoke a burial, with plain earth being removed from the artist’s body by way of a stop-motion technique. In effect, the scene alludes to the Khmer background of the artist in a powerful visual statement. In this scene, Ali wears an orange dress that evokes a Buddhist robe, which links itself to the long historical period of Theravada Buddhism in Cambodia. As Richard F. Gombrich explains: “In Cambodia… the Khmer Rouge government of Pol Rot in the late 1970s massacred most of the monks and defrocked the rest” (2). It becomes immediately clear that the burial scene symbolizes the historical dimension of genocide as connected to the Buddhist past. Therefore, these visuals make a strong point about religion as a high-risk factor for people to become victims of oppression and violence to the extent of their elimination.

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25 Subsequent to the title “1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim,” the shot fades out to a scene which captures Ali in a rotated eye-level shot, staring upside down at the viewer:

Fig. 2 Anida Yoeu Ali carried through metropolitan Chicago on a snatcher. Photo courtesy of the artist; Photo Credit: Masahiro Sugano.

26 It is crucial to note here that the image above requires a different reading of the orange robe: within this new urban context, Ali has changed her clothes from a Buddhist robe into a prison jumpsuit. As well known, the latter is used by the U.S. government for non-compliant Guantánamo detainees as a tool of control (Van Veeren 125). In fact, in this associative transformation from the burial of the Buddhist to the rebirthing of a Muslim Guantánamo prisoner, Ali begins her spoken word recitation as follows: Awoke to signs, ‘TERRORISTS’ sprayed in red paint across their family’s driveway, ‘TERRORIST ON BOARD’ written on their white car. Awoke to find, freeway sign says, ‘KILL ALL ARABS’ elevator sign says, ‘KILL ALL TOWEL HEADS’ (0:35-0:59)

27 By listing one instance of Islamophobic hate crime after another, Ali’s Guantánamo prison persona calls out violence against Muslims, ranging from verbal assault and vandalism to brutal murder to expose the connection between systemic and private racism. For instance, she enumerates the fate of “[a] Pakistani living in L.A.” (1:00-1:02), whose “car is scratched along the right side with the words ‘NUKE ‘EM!’” (01:03-1:08). She also calls awareness to an “Egyptian American, 48, killed point-blank” (2:34-2:27), “a South Asian American, Sikh, chased by a group of four men yelling ‘TERRORIST’” (01:46-1:53), a “Muslim student at Arizona State University attacked” (3:26-03:28) and “[t]wo women at a bagel store, attacked for wearing a Quranic charm around her [sic] neck” (3:40-3:32). This long enumeration shows that these incidents are not isolated cases. Rather, the selection of quotes from several states in America reveals that Islamophobic racism is an all-pervasive phenomenon. With the exception of two incidents, these reports do not mention whether the perpetrators are white. Thus, it also becomes clear that these FBI reports shift the focus on the victims, rather than dealing with the actual source of the Islamophobic hate-crime.

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28 Whiteness is, however, made visible when Ali is carried by two blond women in addition to four dark-hooded people who are shouldering the prisoner on a stretcher through a commercial district of metropolitan Chicago. As I would like to suggest, this rotated scene draws on Middle Eastern funeral scenes, in which the corpse is wrapped in shrouds and carried by mourners through streets on a stretcher. Thus, they allude to the aftermath of terror on Muslim people via airstrikes and, simultaneously, place the stylized audiovisual image of a Muslim victim directly on U.S. soil. In effect, these scenes intermedially express an awareness of a multilayered geopolitical context, in which the United States are inextricably linked to the killing of people in the Middle East.

29 Ali’s agitated voice humanizes the factual FBI reports. While the spoken word poem is persuasive by itself, 1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim achieves its most profound intermedial critique of systemic racism in relation to the figurative dance act by Ok. As mentioned earlier, his performance physically translates the psychological threat to Muslim Americans into choreographed dance movements. Ok interprets these crimes in several shots when Ali, for instance, states, “[a] vehicle of white males, followed and harassed a 21 yr old female. Attackers yelled: ‘Go back to your own country’” (2:05-2:28). Here the dancer’s abrupt movements intermedially cut into the non- diegetic voice-over.

30 Stylistically, it is important to note here that while many stanzas of the poem begin with the anaphoric “Awoke to…,” which emphasizes the daily routine of waking up to hate-crime reports, the repeatedly used phrase “back up” from the situation above encapsulates a strategic device to counter ongoing racism against all ethnic minorities who potentially might be mistaken for being Muslim. As the presence of the volunteers makes clear as well, it affects Native Americans as much as Hispanic Americans, who are yelled at for “speaking Spanish at a doctor’s office” (02:56-02:58). While vocally registering these incidences, Ali responds to this situation by exposing its absurdity through the use of irony. For instance, a scene when Ali recites the line “a man pushes a baby stroller” (02:44-02:46) evokes the notion of innocence. Yet, this notion is subverted when the same person uses the word “mosquito,” an insect that is generally considered a blood-sucking nuisance, as a racist slur to condemn the presence of mosques in his neighborhood. The racist dimension of the incident gets even clearer when the father is “yelling, / You Islamic mosquitoes should be killed” (02:46-02:48), announcing a death-threat to the Muslim Americans. This act of racism is directly challenged, as Ali’s now prison persona calls out the absurdity of the comparison, asking the viewer by way of an eye-level shot: “Mosquitoes mistaken for Muslims?” (02:52-02:54).

31 Another noteworthy strategy unfolds in an increasingly fast-paced vocal, musical, and visual rhythm, in which the cento poem achieves its full effect. The prisoner unleashes her critique of the absurdity of Othering people and even objects as follows: Flags wave in an Afghan restaurant 300 march against Spanish spoken at a doctor’s office Spanish mistaken for Muslim 300 march on two women at a bagel store

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Bagels mistaken for Muslim 300 wave cherry Bombs march on 300 Sikhs hitting a 3-year-old in the head. LOOK! what you people have done! (0:35-0:59)

32 As mentioned earlier, the humorous effect of a cento poem is achieved here by “arising from both the clever juxtaposition of famous lines into a new semantic matrix” (180). These lines reveal that any object, even an American bagel, which is clearly punning on the American Eagle here, can become the target of Islamophobia if associated with Otherness. Thus, these lines carry the striking notion that American culture itself is under attack whenever Muslim Americans have been attacked.

33 To counter this reductionist and dangerous view, the performance poetry clip highlights a diverse picture of Muslim identities. For instance, not all of the Muslim American women from this group wear scarfs around their necks as well as hijabs, while Muslim American men are featured in turbans as well as topi caps that are worn in Muslim praying services. The group of volunteers are of various ages and ethnicities, some wear hoodies, caps, or no head-cover at all.

34 Although an airplane is just barely visibly flying in the horizontal background for less than two seconds (4:15-4:16), the scene clearly alludes to the negative effect of 9/11 on the lives of Muslim Americans, who are anything but a monolithic part of U.S. American society and deserve to be seen as such. In short, many of these scenes do not only intersect with the urban shots, but with the filmic portraits of Muslim Americans, who are depicted as sad and stoic in their facial expressions but who query the viewer’s potentially racist gaze. As mentioned, they all refrain from speaking, while a frequent low angle shot empowers their position.

35 These increasingly fast-paced, dissolving scenes that alternate between Ali and the community intersect with Ok’s revival of the Khmer classical dance, which provides a surprisingly hopeful turning point to the audiovisual narrative and the way it strategically makes use of intermediality. Even prior to the airplane scene, Ok’s dance movements slowly reverse the heightened physical chronicling of racism that is expressed in Ali’s spoken word poem. The dancer is moving and stretching his fingers in a semi-upright position. His joyful and deeply relaxed facial expression defies the verbal death-threat in a non-diegetic voice over. Thus, while the dramatic tension on the audio level increases, visual medium shots and close-ups of the faces of Muslim Americans begin to mildly lighten up as well. This symbolic ethnic thriving is supported by Ok’s physical hand movement (4:04ff.). It includes the Khmer dance sign of a tree that transitions from bearing fruits to blossoming. Ok communicates this hopeful sign with his hand gesture and fingers (Ok, TED Talk).

36 In its final two scenes, the clip fades out to a medium shot of Ali, is who dressed in her Buddhist robe. Standing in solidarity with Muslim Americans (03:12ff.), she has regained her vitality just like the tree behind her that now has grown green leaves on previously bare branches. Directly facing the camera, she once more calls out the viewer stating: “Look what you people have done” (4:34-4:37). This statement can be read as an act of verbal opposition to the very foundations of the “Preamble” of The Constitution of the United States that famously states, “We the People.” Ali’s affront is met

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with a visual response. By way of a fade out, she is rendered conspicuously absent from the scene within a second, emphasizing the uncertain existence that ethnic Others are exposed to, who “refuse to end in violence” (4:52-4:57). Thus, through a range of discursive strategies and collective effort, 1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim as a performance poetry clip serves as an appeal to end systemic and private Islamophobia in the United States.

4. The Red Chador: Countering Islamophobia in National and Transnational Spaces

37 In Anida Yoeu Ali’s second performative engagement titled The Red Chador, the artist continues her creative fight against Islamophobia by responding to hate-crimes in a series of performances. As an activist piece, The Red Chador radically foregrounds Ali’s gendered Muslim identity in national and transnational contexts. As mentioned in the opening section of this article, Islamic feminism has become a strategic form of identity politics in the United States, underscoring an important intersectional aspect in the fight against Islamophobia.

38 Ali first performed The Red Chador in Paris a few months after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo on November 13, 2015. At the time controversial public debates broke out in France about maintaining the Burqa ban first implemented in 2010 for an initially planned five years. As the photo below reveals, Ali’s transnational border-crossing and the fact that she came to Paris for her art performance reflects what Nancy Fraser calls a “transnational politics of representation” (Fraser, Scales of Justice 100-101).

Figure 3. “Red Chador: Beheadings.” Anida Yoeu Ali. Live performance at Palais de Tokyo; Paris, 2015. Photo courtesy of the artist; Photo Credit: Simon Martin.

39 Performing a reversal of power relations, “Red Chador: Beheadings” negotiates the decapitations of 99 French baguettes with a small but sharp meat ax. As part of her performance, she is making various claims on her audience in exchange for the safety

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of each baguette—symbolizing white supremacy—that she is capable of destroying. It also evokes France’s colonial past that extends to Ali’s country of birth, Cambodia. Thus, The Red Chador politicizes the moment. Dressed in a deep, blood-red burka, Ali’s performance elicits images of the guillotine as a form of capital punishment in France from the eighteenth-century until as late as 1977. And, synchronously, the performance draws on what CNN broadcast journalist Jim Clancy referred to as “Syrian Savagery” and “barbarism” in July 2013. Thus, in The Red Chador, Ali is building on layers of associations that both agitate and provoke her audience as a female Muslim.

40 Among other performance events, The Red Chador was part of an exhibition on Memorial Day weekend at the Smithsonian Art and Industry building in Washington, D.C. in 2016 (Schlund-Vials 71). In “The Red Chador: Threshold,” Ali challenged the audience’s perception of Muslim Americans as unpatriotic, or even enemies of the state, asking on a printed boardsign: “Can we accept a Muslim woman as American?” Ali’s feminist revolt is both engaging and upfront. As Beydoun states: “Although Muslim Americans are bona fide citizens, their religious identity induces scrutiny of their citizenship status, patriotism, and belonging” (119). This complicates the question of “constitutional patriotism” over “ethnic nationalism” (Fraser, Scales of Justice 135), provoking a response from the audience as to how they view her citizenship status within American society.

41 In fact, just one day after Trump’s election on November 8, 2016, Anida Yoeu Ali took to the streets in Seattle wearing a completely veiled, sparkling full-body dress in a performance act titled “The Red Chador: The Day After.”

Figure 4. “Red Chador: The Day After.” Anida Yoeu Ali Live performance US Courthouse; Seattle, 2016. Photo courtesy of the artist; Photo Credit: Masahiro Sugano.

42 The catchphrase “Ban Me” on her sign in the photo above is not merely a provocative statement against Islamophobia, which found its expression in Executive Order 13769 signed by Donald Trump on January 27, 2017, banning citizens from seven Muslim- majority countries (Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen) from entering

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the US for a period of 90 days. As Beydoun puts it, the ban “was more than just a stand- alone policy that wrought mayhem in American airports, broke up families and ushered in a heightened form of structural Islamophobia.… The ban was part and parcel of a broader, stark Islamophobic vision that tied Muslim identity directly to terror suspicion” (176).

43 According to Rebecca Gould’s essay “Punishing Violent Thoughts: Islamic Dissent and Thoreauvian Disobedience in Post-9/11 America”: “it is only the latest in a long series of attempts to represent Islam as inherently alien to American culture” (2). The performance also uses the type of protest sign that has iconically been connected to the Civil Rights Movement.

44 Specifically, Ali’s sign materially references and extends the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike. As part of the famous protest that Martin Luther King participated in, African Americans held up signs stating: “I AM A MAN.” Ali’s sign reads “BAN ME” on the front and “I AM A MUSLIM” on the back. As Kaufer and Al-Malki put it, “[c]ounterpublics are materially embodied. They express themselves in the discourse and power relations of historical individuals and groups in particular locations and on a particular topic” (Kaufer and Al-Malki 50). Thus, the signal the performance sends is unmistakably one of civil justice for Muslims in general, and Muslim women in particular, who are frequently attacked in public spaces. In other words, not only does Ali align herself with a non-violent form of dissent and protest, but with her courageous performance she put herself on the spot as a Khmer American Muslim feminist.

45 By way of reframing her art and adapting it in new cultural contexts, including performances in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur in 2017, Ali demonstrates that Islamophobia does not stop at the state border. It is a transnational phenomenon that Muslim women, who wear hijabs or chadors, are even more likely to experience than Muslim men. In fact, following an exhibition as part of the 1st Palestinian Performance Arts Network Conference in Ramallah in December 2017, the Red Chador was, according to Ali, lost. It disappeared, as the artist claims, in transit at Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv, on her way home to the U.S. To mourn its loss, Ali created three memorial services (Ali, “The Red Chador Proposal Deck”).

46 In May 2018, she streamed the event as part of the Asian Arts Initiative Celebration Weekend in Philadelphia, for which Ali prepared a eulogy, a digital altar, and a website titled redchadorisdead. The website asks visitors to leave comments, map their experiences, offer condolences, and provide eye-witness reports of past performances.

47 Using media convergence, the artist is reaching out to new audiences as an inherent part of her “agitational activities directed toward wider publics” (Fraser, Justice Interruptus 82) frequently “bypass[ing] state controls” (Fraser, Justice Interruptus 82). In short, the performance artist creates “transnational publics from which to mobilize international opinion” (Fraser, Justice Interruptus 82) against Islamophobic racism.

48 While the mourning for the loss of The Red Chador went on for more than one year, Ali began expanding herself into ever widening arenas. Most recently The Red Chador was rebirthed in Honololu, Hawaii. It reappeared on the Polynesian island in a variety of social contexts as part of Ali’s artist residency at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture, and Design in Honololu in March 2020. Most strikingly, it not only came back

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as the same sparkling red dress: The Red Chador was accompanied by six women wearing the same sequin chador, each of them woven in another rainbow color:

Figure 5. “Red Chador: Genesis I”. Anida Yoeu Ali. Live performance at Waikiki Beach; Honolulu, 2019. Photo courtesy of the artist; Photo Credit: Masahiro Sugano.

49 As the image above signals, the collective appearance in a range of colors expresses a diversified and pluralistic image of Muslim women. As Ali explains her feminist goal: “to rebirth her [The Red Chador]… meant she had to come back to life in an epic way and that meant that she wasn’t going to be alone” (01:05-01:14; emphasis added).

50 Not only does the rainbow draw on a long precolonial tradition of the Polynesian island as a “a pathway for celestial bodies to reappear” (01:24-01:27), but through this symbol she also aligns herself with Hawaii’s legislative attempts to push back against the Muslim ban from 2017 (01:35-01:38). In view of a globally growing Black Lives Matter movement, the LGBTIQ+ movement, and most recently the Covid-19 pandemic health crisis, the symbol of the rainbow as a pluralistic and protective force is inextricably interwined with the artist’s “transnational politics of representation” (Fraser, Scales of Justice 100-101).

5. Conclusion

51 Bringing back Jens Schröter’s definitions of intermediality, Ali’s performances not only thrive from synthetic intermediality as in “Red Chador: Beheadings” in the form of politicized art happening s in museums. It is also partially present as transmedial intermediality in 1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim, formally extending the cento tradition by using media convergence to fuel the poem’s potential for resistance. And, Anida Yoeu Ali’s work also reveals transformational intermediality in the interactive narrative mourning of the death of The Red Chador on the website redchadorisdead.com, which becomes and integral part of the morning process.

52 As Francisco J. Ricardo confirms in Literary Art in Digital Performance: “[w]hile human expressive force remains vibrant, electronic media have made it possible to create work that spans traditional distinctions at key junctures, to include the aesthetic and the poetic; the entirely participatory and the entirely receptive” (2). Finally, rather than

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using state media or private corporate media, Studio Revolt’s independently produced art creates “subaltern counterpublics” (Fraser, “What’s Critical” 81).

53 1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim uses multilayered media expressions, combining sound, spoken word poetry, dance, and film art to discursively counter Islamophobia. By arousing various “sensory modalities of interaction” (Jensen 1) in the viewer, the clip calls out hate crimes against Muslim Americans and those perceived as such to expose the dehumanizing function of ethnic Othering in the United States, in its past and present global repercussions.

54 In this transnational context, The Red Chador reimagines the public sphere from a feminist Muslim American perspective, adding a transnational layer of participation and the creation of a counterpublic that intermedially extends its activist resistance from the street to the Internet. Creating visibility of Muslim women on a global scale, The Red Chador performances highlight the public sphere as both an empowering and vulnerable space for Muslim women in the twenty-first century. They invite a global audience to confront systemic racism and private Islamophobic acts of hate crimes against women who refuse to end in violence.

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---. “Red Chador. Proposal Deck”. Unpublished pdf. provided by the artist in August 2020.

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Beydoun, Khaled A. American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear. U of California P, 2018.

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Cambodian Son. Directed by Masahiro Sugano, featuring Kosal Khiev, 2014. Accessed 5 August 2020. http://cambodianson.com.

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ABSTRACTS

This article investigates Anida Yoeu Ali’s performance art as that of a Muslim, Khmer-American feminist global agitator, who challenges Islamophobia in the United States and transnationally by expanding her work “into ever-widening arenas” (Fraser, Justice Interruptus 82). Her performance projects formulate oppositional interpretations of Muslim “identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser, Justice Interruptus 82) in an increasingly Islamophobic era from the aftermath of 9/11 to Donald Trump’s presidency. Drawing on theories of convergence culture and intermediality, this article provides a close analysis of Ali’s performance projects. The first work is titled 1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim (2010), a performance poetry clip that was directed by the Japanese American filmmaker Masahiro Sugano in 2010 and which widely circulates on the Internet. It stands out as a feminist, transnational critique of an unprecedented “undermining [of] Muslim voices” (Azam 125). The article also includes an exploration of a selection of performance acts from Ali’s The Red Chador Series (2015; 2018; 2020). I argue that by establishing discursive counternarratives the two works highlight the cultural potential of using intermediality to challenge private and public Islamophobia in a globally connected world. Thus, these works will be explored as a performative engagement with national, transnational, and gendered dimensions of Islamophobia.

INDEX

Keywords: Islamophobia, intermediality, performance art, hate crimes, Muslim feminism

AUTHOR

MARTINA PFEILER

Martina Pfeiler currently acts as interim chair of American Studies (Kommissarische Lehrstuhlvertretung) at Ruhr-University Bochum. In her research and teaching she focuses on the cultural intersections and creative border crossings of 19th to 21st centuries U.S.-American

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literature, film, and digital media. In 2017 she completed her Habilitation at TU Dortmund University with a thesis titled Ahab in Love: The Creative Reception of Moby-Dick in Popular Culture. Results of this research have appeared in Leviathan. A Journal of Melville Studies, Literature/Film Quarterly,and are forthcoming in A Companion to Herman Melville in 2021. She is also the author of Poetry Goes Intermedia: U.S.-amerikanische Lyrik des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts aus kultur- und medienwissenschaftlicher Perspektive (2010) and Sounds of Poetry: Contemporary American Performance Poets (2003).

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