Content area
Full Text
Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 by Evelyn Alsultany. New York University Press. 2012. $23.00 paper; $9.99 e-book. 240 pages.
In Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11, Evelyn Alsultany provides a useful resource for those who are interested in thinking through our "postracial" social moment generally and in the representational strategies deployed against Arabs and Muslims specifically.1 An accessible yet theoretically sound work, this book was very well received by my students at Whitman College who were studying representations of the Middle East, and it provided substantial material examples, theoretical grounding, and room for productive discussion.
It is commonly held (at least among scholars) that the image of the Arab and/or Muslim has been rendered as distorted and monstrous in the affective wake of September 11, 2001. The most cursory of inquiries can confirm this belief. From the Islamic terrorists who stalk Iron Man ( Jon Favreau, 2008) to the comparison of Ebola to Islamic terrorism on Fox News in October 2014, the association of Muslims and Arabs with social dysfunction, irrational violence, disease, and illogical political extremes is right there on the surface of everyday culture.2 September 11, we've been repeatedly told, has changed everything.
However, for many scholars who work in fields that have been touched by the aftermath of this date (which very might well be all scholars), the notion that 9/11 was a transformative event is problematic. This "problem" is not that 9/11 didn't change culture but that 9/11 is used to limit discussion of historical transformation. Those who are interested in the Middle East or interested in race and representation in the American media (especially the representation of Arabs and Muslims) know well that the representations that dominate our contemporary public life have long taproots in the history of the American twentieth century. The political, social, diplomatic, cultural, and emotional problems that "9/11" is used to describe existed before September 11, 2001. An insistence on the primacy of 9/11 is also an insistence on a limited historical analysis, one that begins in 2001 and runs until the present: one that forgets a century of American involvement in the region and a century of negative stereotyping in our media, literature, and...