Reclaiming Agency: Toward an Arab American Film Industry?

• In Event: From Furious Orientals to Funny Arabs: The Politics and Possibilities of Arab American Media Studies

Abstract

For decades, the Arab American image in motion pictures has been held hostage to politics of representation, mostly advanced by mainstream cultural producers in Hollywood and Egyptian cinemas. The two film industries have long commercially operated in response to binary-informed codes (read: veneration of Self and vilification of Other). While Hollywood extensively relied on the rhetoric of exceptionalism and orientalism in generating its demeaning stereotypes of Arabs, Egyptian cinema embarked on a postcolonial mission to counter western hegemony by perpetuating fixed images of Americans. In this context, the construction of the Arab American image since 1970s in Hollywood and 1990s in Egyptian cinema has foregrounded a sense of investment in promoting limited cultural citizenship; thereby rendering Arab Americans doubly-alienated.

This paper seeks to capture a post-9/11 emerging trend in independent film espousing a sense of agency among Arab American filmmakers to re-narrate and self-represent the complexity of the Arab American story. It presents a textual analysis of Hesham Issawi’s AmericanEast (2008), Cherien Dabis’ Amreeka (2009), and Rola Nashef’s Detroit Unleaded (2013) in an attempt to both depart from the cultural polarization often stressed in the aforementioned mainstream cinemas and highlight a process of negotiation for a transnational space alongside the US-Arab terrains. The analysis further engages with such identity particularities as generation, education, religion, nationality, and gender to complicate any sense of reference to the Arab American identity.

Author

• Waleed F. Mahdi, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (MN)