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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 thematic foci of the Franco-Algerian war films of decolonization have shifted in the last few decades from evoking triumphalist discourses and redemptive fictional narratives to producing powerful transnational antiwar stories. While being critical of the violent history of colonization, defying earlier French governments' oppressive forms of censorship, and addressing the history of colonial barbarity in Algeria, many French documentarians and filmmakers have skillfully used moving images to critique and expose colonial transgressions. In their efforts to reimagine the horrors of violent encounters between the French army and Algerian guerilla fighters, their narratives cover daring eye-witness accounts of war crimes, including acts of torture at times described by the perpetrators themselves while catering to the expectations of a global audience. Florent Emilio Siri's L'ennemi intime (2007) and David Oelhoffen's Far from Men (2014) are among these transnational productions that accomplish both tasks. In the stories told by the two films, the plots show evidence of a fundamental thematic transformation in filmic representations that collapses the differences between colonizer and colonized, situating both as victims of colonization. The article argues that even though both films consistently reproduce the conventional portrait of the colonized as weak, passive, and deeply reliant on French guidance, Far from Men introduces the myth of the vanishing native, a theme that helps legitimize and normalize the settler's "right" to occupy the colonized space. [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]

Troubled by a history of misconceptions on Western silver screens, Arab and Muslim filmmakers have kept their cinematic productions thematically close to the reality of their postcolonial cultural and social conditions, while trying to represent their communities in complex ways. In many efforts of artistic excellence, the films they make aim to reverse the frisson of alterity upon which the conception of their disgraced images have been historically predicated; in the process, the films aspire to alter these images and representations. Rarely however does the work of these Arab and Muslim filmmakers reach a global audience. This article locates themes and creative forms in many cinematic narratives of representation, and recommends their interpretation and mediation to a global audience. The article responds to a recent "intellectual turn" in contemporary debate on Arab and Muslim films, calling for the invention of a category called "Muslim Cinema". The article contextualizes this turn within the contours of Western institutions as sites of epistemological authority and examines its epistemological, racial, and ideological implications and underpinnings in connection to representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centers on the influx of Western fighters joining ISIS and locates its root causes in systemic and structural forms of alienation, discrimination, and Islamophobia. In Western discourse, understanding this phenomenon is characterized by a sense of denial that limits the interpretive paradigms to one of two approaches: either a racial discourse that confines the debate to antagonistic minoritized citizens with ambiguous loyalties and an inherent vulnerability for radicalism, or the powerful "glamour" of ISIS's propagandist spectacles that western media cannot dispel. This article suggests a third approach by examining recruits as pathologized individuals, essentially the product of their own troubled environments and failed experiences in the West with subordinate and second-class citizens' status. Deprived of sharing the perks of western identity, they start fantasizing about ISIS as an ideal alternative. The purpose is to explain how the West responds to its failure by immediately mobilizing media and politics to project it on the other. By relying on the insights of current theories on alienation, radicalism, and discrimination, the article engages with the way recruits remain so grounded in their identity and upbringing while venting out their frustration with lack of commodities, cultural collisions, and disappointment with life in Raqqa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]