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This paper contributes to the theorization of how Orientalism has evolved after 9/11 and in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. I specifically address the multimediality of films and propose that post-9/11 Orientalism has fragmented into more digestible, more complex micronarratives dispersed throughout the interplay of different media which constitute the film experience. I recur to Foucault's concept of dispositif to illustrate how any of these media-such as music, screenplay, editing, acting, etc.-may "[enter] into resonance or contradiction with the others" (Foucault 195), ambiguating the film's politics. When the film's different media pursue diverging politics, I speak of multimedia dissensus. In order to test this hypothesis, I focus on two films which explicitly champion diversity and aim to reverse the logics of Islamophobia by presenting tributes to Muslim culture or denunciations of Eurocentric discriminatory practices: Alejandro Amenábar's Agora (2009) and Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (2005). A more detailed analysis of the films' multimedial complexity, however, shows that they do participate in the Islamophobic discourses that have dominated Hollywood cinema after 9/11. OA platinum

While psychiatry and the neurosciences have dismissed the concept of neurosis as too vague for medical purposes, in recent years literary studies have adopted the term by virtue of its abstractness. This volume investigates the verbalization of neurosis in literary and cultural texts. As opposed to the medical diagnostics of neurosis in the individual, the contributions focus on the poetics of neurosis. They indicate how neuroses are still routinely romanticized or vilified, bent to suit aesthetic and narrative choices, and transfigured to illustrate unresolved cultural tensions.

Since 1994 the American literary market has been taken by storm by what may be called the ‘Rumi phenomenon’: the posthumous literary success of the thirteenth-century Sufi poet and mystic, Muhammad Jalal ad-Din Balkhi, known to the Anglophone world as Rumi. Rumi has become the best-selling poet in the United States and a series of epigones fictionalising the poet’s biography and expanding on the impact of his poetry on American culture have been generated. This article focuses on Elif Shafak’s 2010 novel, The Forty Rules of Love, as one of the best known and most remarkable contributions to the Rumi phenomenon. In her domestication of the figure of Rumi for an American audience, the Turkish author not only succumbs to the oversimplification and decontextualisation of Rumi’s work perpetrated by the American initiators of the Rumi phenomenon, but also employs Orientalist strategies in the ways in which she positions the East as being instrumental to the West. Shafak’s advocacy of a cosmopolitan, global soci...