The Muslim Other: an Analysis of American Filmic and Televisual Representations of Muslims and Arabs

The Muslim Other: An Analysis of American Filmic and Televisual Representations of Muslims and Arabs By Sahar Al-Nima Humanities, University of Colorado at Boulder Defense Date: April 4, 2018 Thesis Advisor: Annjeanette Wiese, Humanities Defense Committee: Annjeanette Wiese, Humanities Paul Gordon, Humanities Sabahat Adil, Asian Languages and Civilizations 1 Abstract When Edward Said published his book Orientalism, he revolutionized academia, changing the way that the Middle East is studied and perceived by academics. However, several decades later, Orientalist visions and tropes have yet to change in popular imagination, the rise of terrorism allowing for the reinforcement of the dichotomous relationship between the East and the West that Said criticizes. Popular narratives, especially those projected by Hollywood, regurgitate the same representations that Orientalist art during the Colonial period popularized, underscoring the endurance of Orientalism as a system of knowledge. Through the lens of Edward Said’s conceptualization of Orientalism and its relation to narrative and race theory, this study analyzes movies and TV shows produced by Hollywood post-9/11 to showcase the persistent idea of the so-called Orient as an eternally existentially threatening Other. The study primarily focuses on the narratives of 24, Homeland, American Sniper, Sand Castle, and Lost, contextualizing those works in relation to each other and in relation to other, similar narratives. 2 Table of Contents Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………… 4 Theoretical and Historical Framework ………………………………………………………….. 6 Muslims and Arabs in the Context of War and Homeland Security …………………………… 28 The Good Arab ………………………………………………………………………………… 98 The Orient’s Reactions to Images of Orientalism ……………………………………………………… 114 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………………... 123 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………………… 126 3 In 2014, Homeland, a TV show produced by Showtime, released the poster for its fourth season. At the heart of the poster, Carrie Mathison, the main protagonist, is looking back at the audience, her face a mixture of alertness and concern. Her hair is half-covered with a bright red shawl, styled purposely to indicate a hijab. And she stands amidst a flock of burqa-clad women, all dressed in black, all with their backs to the viewer. Carrie becomes a defiant, bright, and slightly threatened figure in the middle of a sea of faceless black Muslims. There is hardly any question about the topic of the show: faceless Muslims and defiant Americans. Homeland’s poster best embodies Hollywood’s general attitudes toward the so-called Muslim world. A distinct American figure, stark, bold and defiant, against swathes of faceless (presumably Arab) Muslims. The figure is both strikingly different, and threatened to be engulfed, fighting against the dark and dangerous path that the black burqas lead towards. The image of the East, then, which has become synonymous with the concept of the Muslim world, synonymous with the politically charged Middle East, and collapsed to mean Arab and Muslim always and at the same time regardless of its gross overgeneralization, is set up as an opposite of sorts, a looming, but curious, threat. Much like other contemporary depictions of Arabs and/or Muslim characters, Homeland’s poster has strong overtones of Orientalism. Far from being a long gone historical concept, Orientalist tropes continue to manifest themselves in pop cultural narratives involving the East. In 1978, Edward Said published his infamous book Orientalism, in which he defines Orientalism as a system of knowledge that allows only certain ideas about the vague Middle East and its peoples to trickle to Western imagination. Indeed such ideas are so persistent that it seems difficult even for well-intentioned writers and artists to break out of their mold and imagine an Arab and/or Muslim individual outside of such perceptions. The post-9/11 era illustrates with 4 reinvigorated force the system of knowledge that Said speaks of. The persistence of images of the middle-east, the persistence of such a system of knowledge, generates a cultural understanding of the West in opposition to the East. It creates a democratic, free, sexually liberated, gender-egalitarian West in sharp contrast to an authoritarian, oppressed, sexually prude, patriarchal East. The West, then, engages in a master narrative that creates, and maintains, its image not only of itself but also of the Arab and the Muslim world, an image that it has the power to project, to represent, to maintain and to narrate. This image, then, engages in a cycle with the Arab and Muslim world as it reacts. The West’s core identity becomes heavily dependent on an understanding of itself in opposition to the East, in opposition to what it perceives as backwards values. It understands itself as being in a heroic battle against yesterday’s primitive religious fundamentalism, a holder of tomorrow’s secular, enlightened ideals. Orientalism, then, becomes far more relevant to the West’s identity of itself than it is concerned about a truthful or factual representation of the East. It is through this lens of Orientalism and its relation to narrative and race theory that I analyze contemporary Hollywood narratives and their representation of Muslims, Arabs, and Islam. My particular choice of movies and TV shows coming from Hollywood might seem odd. After all, much of what Hollywood produces is oftentimes considered as merely passable. However, Hollywood’s influence cannot be dismissed. People consume popular media on a daily basis, whether in the United States specifically, or in the rapidly booming global market. Popular media has become an integral part of many people’s lives. They create reference points and make up an agreed upon cultural capital. They also have the ability to change minds and shape understandings of the world and one’s self, regardless of what might be thought of their artistic value. And since Orientalism tells us more about the West’s perception of itself, then examining 5 what these narratives have to tell us about the way we perceive the world around us is of utmost importance. This project is divided into four sections. The first lays out the theory through which the narratives at hand are examined, borrowing from Lyotard’s ideas in The Postmodern Condition, Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract, and, of course, Edward Said’s Orientalism. The second section deals with depictions of Arabs and Muslims in the context of thriller TV shows about terrorism and homeland security and war movies, focusing primarily on 24, Homeland, American Sniper, and Sand Castle. This particular section is the longest and most detailed simply because it is this genre that involves the Middle East most often. The third is a close examination of the Good Arab trope, looking at narratives that do not explicitly involve the region, and therefore are not necessarily about war, but that include a Muslim and/or Arab character. Lost’s Sayyid Jarrah is a primary example of such depiction, and his character showcases the difficulty of breaking out of the Orientalist framework even for well-intentioned writers. The last section is a brief analysis of the East’s reactions to Orientalist images. I give an overview of intellectual trends, and look at the implications of recent mainstream narratives coming from the East. I. Theoretical and Historical Framework In his work on The Postmodern Condition, in which he challenges the continued relevance of metanarrative, Jean-Francois Lyotard argues that knowledge is a question of government (9). “Knowledge and power,” then, “are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided?” (Lyotard 9). The phrasing of knowledge as a question of “government” rather than just power is particularly interesting. It takes the argument from the generic idea of knowledge as power, or possessing 6 knowledge means you are in possession of power, to make it a question directly related to government, i.e. an institutionalized and legitimized power structure. Knowledge, then, becomes a question of how to govern and how to use knowledge to further one’s government. Further, government is an institutionalized, legitimized form of power. The power of knowledge is not only politicized but also institutionalized. This relationship of knowledge to power makes it so that it is power, or institutional power, that not only decides what knowledge is but also what, in the first place, needs to be studied and therefore “known”. Indeed, Lyotard makes explicit the relationship between knowledge and institutions. An institution constrains its statements, The constraints function to filter discursive potentials, interrupting possible connections in the communication networks: there are things that should be said. They also privilege certain classes of statements […], whose predominance characterizes the discourse of the particular institution: there are things that should be said and there are ways of saying them. (Lyotard 17) In other words, institutionalized knowledge systemizes knowledge, dictating what is to be considered knowledge, what is necessary to look into, and how it must be formulated in order for it to be considered knowledge. The institutionalization implies a hierarchy that decides what is, or is not, valid. Further, institutionalized knowledge creates a closed system, one that operates within its own internal logic, barring forms of knowledge

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