No abstract

Until the Arab uprisings occurred, many Arab first ladies and queens feted by US media received exceptionally favourable coverage that celebrated their physical appearance and western sense of fashion. Grounded in the context of neo-liberal politics which considers them objects of cultural identification, this article studies western media’s representations of Suzanne Mubarak, Queen Rania of Jordan and Asma al-Assad who are framed as virtuous house wives, western by ethnicity, birth place or education, and sophisticated upper-middle class ladies with panic-trigger for both Arab elites and western observers: Egypt’s veiled Naglaa Mahmoud and the architype of a working-class seductress with lust for power, Tunisia’s Leila Trabelsi. Using qualitative textual and visual analysis of narratives and images from media coverage, reports and fashion magazines, the article presents a comparative content analysis of their representations through a set of three dichotomies: the first one pays careful attention to the intersection of neo-liberal politics and the deployment of ethnic hybridity as an ideological apparatus that sets up a binary between Arab and Caucasian or half-White women who emerge as the new ‘saviour’ of Muslim women; the second is a close pairing between the sexualization of the westernized and fashionable first lady and the de-sexualization of her veiled ‘backwards’ counterpart sister; the third entails a juxtaposition of the good and desired seductress with the promiscuous and bad one. Findings show how media discourses of modernity impose neo-liberal and neo-Orientalist demarcations to define Arab Muslim women’s agency, femininity, bodies and status according to western standards.

Palestinian cinematic productions have historically attempted to alter biased perceptions of their identity, experience of dispossession, and struggle for liberation, using films to communicate the harsh realities of Israeli occupation. While preserving a pluralistic and hybrid character, and blending different genres from Third and Second films (experimental, neorealist, and transnational), Palestinian cinema – as examined through a close reading of Tawfik Saleh’s 1972 film The Dupes, Hany Abu-Assad’s Rana’s Wedding from 2002, and Najwa Najjar’s 2014 Eyes of a Thief – contests monolithic tropes and representations of Palestinians as either victims or terrorists in Western media and films. Drawing on Edward Said’s analysis of representation and its ties to occupation, the goal of this article is to engage with the idea of film narratives as a form of intervention that demystifies racial bias against colonized people, transforms viewers’ political consciousness, and devises strategies to keep resistance legitimate and ongoing.

Released during a period of heightened racial tension over the impact of racism in the United States and Europe, the 2021 films Stillwater and Dune Part One reveal the pervasiveness of Arab Muslim misrepresentations in Hollywood and the subtilty of white supremacist ideology as it re-emerges in new cinematic productions. With many symbolic and pronounced references to the delusions of the “great replacement” theory, the foundational blueprint of white supremacist identity in both stories, this article contends that these films recentre whiteness to either villainise Arab Muslims or totally erase them. Stillwater disguises the stereotypes on which Arab racialisation is predicated by embedding them in the details of a subplot. Dune, by contrast, is set in an imaginary Arab space with no Arabs, and yet portrayals of Arabs and Islam are front, and centre and it imagines a world with fierce but “generic” coloured people serving their great white leaders.

The thematic foci of the Franco-Algerian war films of decolonization have shifted in the last few decades from evoking triumphalist discourses and redemptive fictional narratives to producing powerful transnational antiwar stories. While being critical of the violent history of colonization, defying earlier French governments’ oppressive forms of censorship, and addressing the history of colonial barbarity in Algeria, many French documentarians and filmmakers have skillfully used moving images to critique and expose colonial transgressions. In their efforts to reimagine the horrors of violent encounters between the French army and Algerian guerilla fighters, their narratives cover daring eye-witness accounts of war crimes, including acts of torture at times described by the perpetrators themselves while catering to the expectations of a global audience. Florent Emilio Siri’s L’ennemi intime (2007) and David Oelhoffen’s Far from Men (2014) are among these transnational productions that accomplish both tasks. In the stories told by the two films, the plots show evidence of a fundamental thematic transformation in filmic representations that collapses the differences between colonizer and colonized, situating both as victims of colonization. The article argues that even though both films consistently reproduce the conventional portrait of the colonized as weak, passive, and deeply reliant on French guidance, Far from Men introduces the myth of the vanishing native, a theme that helps legitimize and normalize the settler’s “right” to occupy the colonized space.