Arab, Arab-American, American: Hegemonic and Contrapuntal Representations

Arab, Arab-American, American: Hegemonic and Contrapuntal Representations, explores the US mainstream discourse on the Arabs in the 1990s in different cultural texts: academic, popular and media, including Hollywood. The project investigates how these representational practices participate in the reconfiguration of American public opinion vis-à-vis the Arabs. It also focuses on the ways in which the various discourses that produce or even invent the "Other" are undeniably linked to the local and global power relations associated with their specific locations. Inspired by Edward Said's contrapuntal methodology, Gayatri Spivak's anti-essentialist postcolonial critique, and Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's polycentric multiculturalism, the book also makes space to examine counter-narratives and Arab perspectives. Arab, Arab-American, American´s analysis of the representation of Arabs in the US dominant media and Hollywood unravels the limits of liberalism and the "vestigial thinking" of Eurocentrism, at the heart of which demonizing or patronizing Arabs is still the norm. The book also offers a rigourous analysis of US foreign policy in the Arab world and addresses both the reality of imperialism in relation to its enablers, and the economic terrorism of neoliberalism in its various linkages with Islamic fundamentalism