Cinema, Geopolitics, and Power Surveillance: Screening Middle East in Post-9/11 Hollywood Films

This paper tries to investigate the ways in which American geopolitical hegemony operates through popular culture produced in the wake of 9/11. Specifically, it examines how American geopolitical anxieties and sensibilities are aesthetically, culturally and politically mediated and maintained via the cultural and politicized medium of film. It chooses The Kingdom (2007), a geographically informed and geopolitically framed film, as its primary source of analysis to interrogate the ways in which geopolitical anxieties and sensibilities manifest in the film's narrative through the use of geopoliticized rhetoric of screened landscapes and the specific narration of "Self"/"Other" identities. Drawing on literature from popular geopolitics, geocriticism, visual politics, and postmodernism, this research analyzes how the various interdependent registers of mapping intersect to geopolitically produce and imagine the Middle East. It maintains that the rhetoric discourse of "war on terrorism" is cinematically appropriated and geopolitically manipulated in order to diffuse and reproduce American global hegemony on the global stage. In so doing, it moves beyond the mere analysis of popular culture as only an object for analysis in world politics to how cinematic texts are sites wherein specific modes of geopolitical knowledge, geo-power and world politics are communicated and understood globally