Hollywood and the construction of Islamophobia

Abstract

This study deals with the impact of the 9/11 attacks on the portrayal of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood movies with a particular interest in tracing the Orientalist discourse in four post- 9/11 released movies. For over a century, Arabs and Muslims have always been eroticized and targeted as the godless enemy in countless movies. Long before the 9/11 attacks, no single entertainment program had featured Arabs in a positive light away from being barbaric, and violent. Ever since the beginning of the twenty-first century, new representation of Arabs and Muslims has invaded the American motion picture industry. The 9/11 attacks had a profound impact on the Western perception of Arabs and Muslims and how they were represented on screen. This study reveals that Hollywood’s portrayal of Arabs and Muslims is extensively prompted by political events and American cultural interests in the Muslim world. The thesis argues that despite the emergence of a more balanced representation of Arabs and Muslims, this distinctive social group is still being portrayed within the terrorist theme as the enemy ‘Other’ reminiscent of the pre-9/11 representation. The research also traces how the old Orientalist clichés and the neo-Orientalist discourse have contributed to trigger Islamophobia and build today’s portrait of Arabs and Muslims in American popular culture. Notwithstanding that years have passed since the 9/11 attacks, yet derogatory stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims persisted, revived time and time again. The research shows that the death of Osama bin Laden neither signaled the end of the war on terror nor the break in the portrayal of Muslims as terrorists in Western movies. Such misrepresentation helped promote feelings of hatred and enmity toward Arabs, Muslims, and Islam in the Western world