Search Results

This chapter maps out the representational strategies used by television writers and producers after 9/11 to represent Arabs and Muslims as terrorists while avoiding Arab/Muslim terrorist stereotypes. It identifies a list of representational strategies used to illustrate how schematized they have become, and discusses the ideological work performed by them through “simplified complex representations”—the appearance of seemingly complex images and storylines that are in fact quite predictable and formulaic. While some of these strategies are used more frequently and more effectively than others, they all help to shape the many layers of simplified complexity. Simplified complex representations are the representational mode of the so-called post-race era, signifying a new era of racial representation. These representations appear to challenge or complicate former stereotypes and contribute to a multicultural post-race illusion or colorblindness.

This chapter investigates how, in the post-9/11 period, the U.S. security state has collapsed the figures of Black criminal and Muslim terrorist into the term “Black Muslim”. By analyzing and combining the rhetoric and logic of the “War on Crime” and the “War on Terror”, this chapter explores the collapse of the domestic and foreign realms of U.S. power and views the prison as a site of violent containment for the Muslim International, revealing the intimacies between domestic U.S. prison regimes and the emergence of imperial imprisonment in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and other so-called Black sites. It also discusses how Blackness, Islam, and the Muslim Third World being front and center in the current political and popular debate within the United States of America, the U.S. continues to silence and resist the history of Black Islam and those who radically resist.

This chapter discusses the aesthetic and political dimensions of the Muslim International through hip-hop culture during a period when the “Black criminal” and the “Muslim terrorist” were viewed as fundamental threats to U.S. national identity. Through the resurgence of Malcolm X and the embrace of Black Islam, hip-hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s tapped into Black internationalism to challenge racial domination, militarism, and mass incarceration, imagining Black freedom beyond the United States and into Africa and the Muslim Third World. The hip-hop culture—like jazz and the Black Arts Movement—became a space where Black radicalism, Islam, and Muslim Third World politics would have a strong influence, interpreted through lyrics that have been expressed by various artists such as Rakim, Public Enemy, Mos Def, Ice Cube, and many others.

Chapter 4 shows how American sex scandals have a specifically national element inspired by evangelical thinking. How a politician is accountable for illicit sex depends on whether he typifies white masculine norms, and whether he symbolizes a protector who will keep white Americans safe from their enemies, both foreign (e.g., Muslim terrorists) and domestic (e.g., poor blacks). Politicians thus function like national fathers whose indecencies Americans tolerate so long as they can assure the white public of the nation’s strength. To chart this idea, the author explores the proliferation of family rhetoric in political speech across the 1970s and1980s (including that of Ronald Reagan), discusses the racialized gender norms that politicians follow to increase their public appeal, and shows how Americans see themselves as childlike citizens who need a father’s protection. These ideals are borne out in a comparison of the sex scandals of Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and John Edwards.