Visual Representations of Arabs, Arab Americans, and Muslims in Multicultural Picturebooks: Using Critical Multicultural Analysis to Examine Picturebook Images

Within the field of multicultural children’s literature, the identity categories of Arab, Arab American, and Muslim are often conflated in the text and images of picture books. While scholars have long attended to analyzing stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, they focus predominantly on representations of characters and their culture. Few analytical approaches have utilized the history of Orientalist art to consider how current visual representations of Arabs, Arab Americans, and Muslims are informed by norms and conventions shaped by the colonial encounter. This study draws upon critical lenses from visual culture and visual Orientalism to examine the ideologies circulating in picturebook images of Arabs, Arab Americans, and Muslims. Critical multicultural analysis provides a framework to consider how social constructions of religion and ethnicity in picturebook imagery situate Arabs, Arab Americans, and Muslims in the margins of American society. This study argues for more critical analysis of visual images in multicultural picture books in order to show how illustrations continue to teach children to gaze upon the “Other”