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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

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

Through the representation of two cafés, Elif Shafak’s 2007 novel The Bastard of Istanbul explores the function and significance of the Ottoman empire in the ongoing search for Turkish identity in the globalized era. It is Shafak’s contention that the former imperial Other can no longer be denied admission into the democratic, modern Self of the Turkish nation.