Film Scholars, Set your TIVOs

 

Jack Shaheen will be on C-SPAN2 this weekend, discussing his most

recent book on stereotypes of Arabs in film and TV.  Jack is a  mature

scholar with an important message for those who care about the ways

in which films shape our perceptions.

 

Broadcasts are on C-SPAN 2, both EST

    Saturday, 1 March at 1:00pm

    Sunday,   2 March at 8:00am

Set your TIVO

 

Peter Rollins

Former Editor-in-Chief, Film & History: An Interdisciplinary  Journal

    of Film and Television Studies _http://www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory/_ 

(http://www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory/) 

 

_____________________

 

 

Guilty:

Hollywood's Verdict on Arabs After  9/11

Jack G.  Shaheen 

6" x 9" • 198  pages

ISBN 978-1-56656-684-1 • paperback • $18.00 

 

"Nothing will be  the same again." Americans scarred by the experience of 

9/11 often express this  sentiment. But what remains the same, argues Jack G. 

Shaheen, is Hollywood's  stereotyping of Arabs. Before 9/11, Shaheen dissected 

Hollywood's equation of  Islam and Arabs with violence in Reel Bad Arabs, his 

comprehensive  study of over a thousand movies. Arabs and Muslims, he showed, 

were used as  shorthand for the "Enemy" and the "Other." In his new book about 

films made  after 9/11, Shaheen finds the same malevolent stereotypes at play. 

Nearly all of  Hollywood's post-9/11 films legitimize a view of Arabs as 

stereotyped  villains-sheikhs, Palestinians, or terrorists. And this happens in 

every type of  film imaginable: one out of four of the movies profiled here have 

absolutely  nothing to do with the Middle East, yet producers toss in weird, 

shady,  unscrupulous Arabs.  

Along with an  examination of a hundred recent movies, Shaheen addresses the 

cultural issues at  play since 9/11: the government's public relations 

campaigns to win "hearts and  minds" and the impact of 9/11 on citizens and on the 

imagination. He suggests  that winning the "war on terror" would take shattering 

the century-old  stereotypes of Arabs. He calls for speaking out, for more 

Arab Americans in the  film industry, for fresh films, and for a serious effort 

on the part of our  government to tackle this problem.  

Jack G.  Shaheen is author of the  bestselling encyclopedia of Arabs in 

Hollywood: Reel Bad Arabs: How  Hollywood Vilifies a People. He is professor 

emeritus of mass communication  at Southern Illinois University, a former CBS News 

consultant on the Middle  East, and the world's foremost authority on media 

images of Arabs. The Media  Education Foundation has released a film based on his 

Reel Bad Arabs.  









**************Ideas to please picky eaters. Watch video on AOL Living.      

(http://living.aol.com/video/how-to-please-your-picky-eater/rachel-campos-duffy/

2050827?NCID=aolcmp00300000002598)



----

Learn to speak like a film/TV professor! Listen to the ScreenLex

podcast:

http://www.screenlex.org