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Copyright of Journal of Babylon Center for Humanities Studies is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this post September 11 (9/11) climate of the “War on Terror”, Hollywood political-thriller films carry a new cultural currency. Drawing from literature in postcolonial studies and its engagement with representations in popular culture, this paper analyzes the film The Kingdom (2007)—a fictional political-thriller with a storyline inspired by real terrorist bombings in Saudi Arabia. This paper critiques and notes the film’s narrative practices, with particular attention paid to the racial and gendered discourses produced in it. In examining the representational codes and politics in the film’s construction of Muslim bodies post-9/11, it is argued here that a critical engagement with Hollywood cinema is necessary in order to reveal the complex ways in which Muslim bodies are scripted as dangerous, pre-modern and uncivilized in American popular culture. This analysis will expose how representations of Muslims in Hollywood not only are essentialized, but act simultaneously to discipline these bodies, which is grounded in the trope of the “War on Terror”, intimately linking it to the project of empire. A commitment to deconstructing Muslim bodies in Hollywood will illustrate the embeddedness of racialized and gendered imaginings of “Others” as they unfold not only “on-screen”, but also their relationship to violent colonial projects “off-screen”.

Gonçalo M. Tavares is a writer who follows the trend of contemporary Portuguese literature works universal themes through a philosophical bias, which aims to destabilize the reader's certainties and question the behavior of today's society. In his tetralogy The Kingdom, Gonçalo works with social, cultural, political and ideological questions, through a narrative that the war scenario, mix good and evil, morality and corruption, sanity and madness, breaking with the naive view that the man is intrinsically formed by benevolence qualities. Getting to know yourself, analyzing the past and evaluating the present, it is an action necessary to understand this multiplicity of human nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses Ingmar Bergman?s Smiles of a Summer Night and Lars von Trier?s The Kingdom. By means of evolution-and neurology-based humour theory it shows how the two directors ? who ordinarily make dark and tragic films ? use humour mechanisms from mainstream entertainment to transform tragic and painful situations into a social ritual of mirth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Global Media Journal: Canadian Edition is the property of Global Media Journal: Canadian Edition and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the application of radical dominical sayings outside the specific contexts that elicited them, and specifically looks at those sayings seemingly subverting the Law relating to the family when it is clear Jesus elsewhere accepted it and, moreover, confined his message to the Jews. It also notes the centrality of radical sayings about the problems of power and wealth and the marginality of those issues of sexuality and family that touch us most nearly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]