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Immerwahr, Daniel. How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. ISBN13: 9780374172145 -- a book review by Elena Furlanetto

Contains fulltext : 225665pub.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) This special issue will concentrate on Islamophobia as a public narrative that became ubiquitous in American mainstream media since the early 2000s and penetrated all channels of modern communication in the Western world. We understand Islamophobia as a cultural phenomenon, crafted and circulated through medial practices such as television shows, films, literary texts, performances, videos, and Internet blogs. The term has been associated with at least two implications: it can function as a) a signifier for fear of Islam and its followers (see Lee et al., Abbas, Zúquete); b) a cultural marker for Muslimness related to dress, rituals, language etc. (Iqbal, Love). Islamophobia leads to a perception and reaction that identifies Muslims with the potential danger of terrorist attacks. Zafar Iqbal underscores that the notion of Islamophobia is by no means a passive response to a threat, but an irrational fear generative of aggressive behaviors and offensive actions (91). Since Islamophobia nowadays is for the most part triggered by mediation and remediation (Bolter and Grusin), studying the function, construction, and circulation of Islamophobic markers in and through media is imperative (82). In the early months of 2020, episodes of racial violence in the U.S. against African Americans like Ahmaud Arberry, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor caused worldwide upheavals and even mainstream voices appeared ready to denounce the American media landscape as overwhelmingly racist. The focus on racially motivated violence has also encouraged reflections on racism as a problem that exceeds blatant macro-aggression, seeping into everyday-life interactions and automatic reflexes. In the realm of cultural criticism, while openly racist cultural products are met by many with uncompromising rejection, the ambivalence of other texts that parade progressive politics and proverbial “good intentions” also calls for urgent scrutiny. As we write, Donald Trump, who has made hatred against Islam a propeller of his campaign, still holds the presidency. 63This special issue will concentrate on Islamophobia as a public narrative that became ubiquitous in American mainstream media since the early 2000s and penetrated all channels of modern communication in the Western world. We understand Islamophobia as a cultural phenomenon, crafted and circulated through medial practices such as television shows, films, literary texts, performances, videos, and Internet blogs. The term has been associated with at least two implications: it can function as a) a signifier for fear of Islam and its followers (see Lee et al., Abbas, Zúquete); b) a cultural marker for Muslimness related to dress, rituals, language etc. (Iqbal, Love). Islamophobia leads to a perception and reaction that identifies Muslims with the potential danger of terrorist attacks. Zafar Iqbal underscores that the notion of Islamophobia is by no means a passive response to a threat, but an irrational fear generative of aggressive behaviors and offensive actions (91). Since Islamophobia nowadays is for the most part triggered by mediation and remediation (Bolter and Grusin), studying the function, construction, and circulation of Islamophobic markers in and through media is imperative (82). In the early months of 2020, episodes of racial violence in the U.S. against African Americans like Ahmaud Arberry, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor caused worldwide upheavals and even mainstream voices appeared ready to denounce the American media landscape as overwhelmingly racist. The focus on racially motivated violence has also encouraged reflections on racism as a problem that exceeds blatant macro-aggression, seeping into everyday-life interactions and automatic reflexes. In the realm of cultural criticism, while openly racist cultural products are met by many with uncompromising rejection, the ambivalence of other texts that parade progressive politics and proverbial “good intentions” also calls for urgent scrutiny. As we write, Donald Trump, who has made hatred against Islam a propeller of his campaign, still holds the presidency. This special issue will concentrate on Islamophobia as a public narrative that became ubiquitous in American mainstream media since the early 2000s and penetrated all channels of modern communication in the Western world. We understand Islamophobia as a cultural phenomenon, crafted and circulated through medial practices such as television shows, films, literary texts, performances, videos, and Internet blogs. The term has been associated with at least two implications: it can function as a) a signifier for fear of Islam and its followers (see Lee et al., Abbas, Zúquete); b) a cultural marker for Muslimness related to dress, rituals, language etc. (Iqbal, Love). Islamophobia leads to a perception and reaction that identifies Muslims with the potential danger of terrorist attacks. Zafar Iqbal underscores that the notion of Islamophobia is by no means a passive response to a threat, but an irrational fear generative of aggressive behaviors and offensive actions (91). Since Islamophobia nowadays is for the most part triggered by mediation and remediation (Bolter and Grusin), studying the function, construction, and circulation of Islamophobic markers in and through media is imperative (82). In the early months of 2020, episodes of racial violence in the U.S. against African Americans like Ahmaud Arberry, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor caused worldwide upheavals and even mainstream voices appeared ready to denounce the American media landscape as overwhelmingly racist. The focus on racially motivated violence has also encouraged reflections on racism as a problem that exceeds blatant macro-aggression, seeping into everyday-life interactions and automatic reflexes. In the realm of cultural criticism, while openly racist cultural products are met by many with uncompromising rejection, the ambivalence of other texts that parade progressive politics and proverbial “good intentions” also calls for urgent scrutiny. As we write, Donald Trump, who has made hatred against Islam a propeller of his campaign, still holds the presidency. 02 oktober 2020 9 p.

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

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...