The film "Reel Bad Arabs" is based on Jack Shaheen's extensive book and website with the same title -- the second edition of the book is over 600 pages long -- documenting the representation of Arabs in Hollywood film. Many Americans who view this film are struck by the new perspective it brings to them on movies they have seen many times, including Disney's Aladdin, raising profound questions about the way the movie represents Arabic people.
My daughter was in junior high school at the time of the 9-11 attacks. Her teacher, in an effort to create greater sympathy and understanding of the Arabic world in light of the attacks and aware of no other resources, showed the students "Aladdin." To me that is a powerful statement that teachers be able to find about better materials to help their students learn about the Middle East. Thus the focus of my teaching and work this semester.
In the film Shaheen makes clear that the racist and violent depictions of Arabs are tied to American foreign policy and military actions. In this sense his work on film can be seen as a continuation of Edward Said's 1978 study, Orientalism. Said, literature professor and former president of the Modern Language Association, writes:Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed otherwise to me (and I hope will convince my literary colleagues) that society and literary culture can only be understood and studied together.What can we learn, and what do we need to unlearn, from contemporary literature and film from the Middle East?
1 comment:
I have to agree with teachers today not truly trying to get their students to understand the true culture and ways the people in Middle East live. After 9/11 happened my teachers really didn't say much of anything, they allowed us to watch it on TV all day, but didn't really help us understand what was going on and that made it seem like that was what people in the Middle East were known for and that we just had to take on that idea ourselves. After our last class discussion I realize that I need to change my ideas and really try to understand this culture instead of just pushing it "under the rug" like most Americans seem to do.
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