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Released during a period of heightened racial tension over the impact of racism in the United States and Europe, the 2021 films Stillwater and Dune Part One reveal the pervasiveness of Arab Muslim misrepresentations in Hollywood and the subtilty of white supremacist ideology as it re-emerges in new cinematic productions. With many symbolic and pronounced references to the delusions of the "great replacement" theory, the foundational blueprint of white supremacist identity in both stories, this article contends that these films recentre whiteness to either villainise Arab Muslims or totally erase them. Stillwater disguises the stereotypes on which Arab racialisation is predicated by embedding them in the details of a subplot. Dune , by contrast, is set in an imaginary Arab space with no Arabs, and yet portrayals of Arabs and Islam are front, and centre and it imagines a world with fierce but "generic" coloured people serving their great white leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unfinished Arab revolutions produced unsettling conditions, sectarian wars, counter-revolutionary wars, proxy wars and transitional democracies. US and Arab media responses could not find effective words to describe them and their underlying geopolitical implications. Whether to name them 'protest' or 'unrest', American mainstream media initially welcomed the events with a cautious curiosity while Arab media favoured a romanticized coverage. But as the protests spread fast and continued, a more dominant popular narrative in the US shaped by the 'exceptionalist' perspective about the Middle East emerged. This article explains how dominant discursive framings deployed a form of 'nature talk', specifically through names, phrases and locutions such as 'Arab Spring', 'Jasmine revolution', 'Arab transition', and horticultural words like 'flower', 'rose' and 'blossom' to describe the Arab uprisings. Because of an intellectually limiting media-produced racial vernacular during the period of mass protest, this dominant mainstream narrative spoke about the events either by using neo-imperial language that characterized the revolutions as an Islamist threat or by employing culturally reductionist vocabulary which infantilized protesters. The goal here is to place specific media frames and images that such linguistic constructions create and disseminate within the context of power relations, the politics of naming and knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]