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Moustafa Bayoumi, "The Race Is On: Muslims and Arabs in the American Imagination" <http://feedblitz.com/r.asp?l=52612205&f=17475&u=22792232&c=3944463> The irony is that while Arabs and Muslims are increasingly racialized as black (in ways that approximate Cold War images of African-Americans), African-Americans are emerging in popular culture as leaders of the American nation and empire. Moreover, this depiction revolves fundamentally around the idea of black friendship with Muslims and Arabs, a friendship not among equals but one reflecting a modified projection of American power. This image appears to seek to transform the image of the United States itself. Consider two different films in this regard: The Siege (1998), again starring Denzel Washington, and The Kingdom (2007), starring Jamie Foxx. . . . Race, nation and empire. Their mixing, in the end, describes a complicated, if not confused, situation. On the one hand, as they suffer social exclusion, Arabs and Muslims are increasingly racialized. But the same gesture, in a post-civil rights era world, somehow manages to Americanize them. Arab and Muslim Americans signify both the incompleteness and the human triumph of the project of the American nation. African-Americans are cast at the same time in sheltering roles, protecting the nation, those vulnerable and good Arabs and Muslims, and the empire. Such representations simultaneously prove that true equality has been won and that there exists an enduring need for civil rights thinking in the United States. What is largely missing is the recognition that black heroism, for it to be truly noble, must not be staged on the backs of another people. What is required is the critical consciousness that would build an alliance between Arabs, Muslims and African-Americans against global and domestic aggression and terrorism. (To be fair, The Kingdom hints toward this consciousness at the end.) In the absence of that idea, such representations in fact coopt the struggle for racial equality into the project of an unequal nation and that of an expanding empire. http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/bayoumi_interv.html ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
