A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the Representation of Arabs and Americans in Sand Castle (2017)

Abstract

The representation of Arab people in American media has been a topic of considerable scholarly interest (Auge, 2002; Michalak, 1988; Ramji, 2016; Riegler, 2010; Said, 1978; Semmerling, 2006; Shaheen, 2012). Given the relations between the US and the Middle East since the Second World War, American war films provide a particularly significant environment for the construction of ideas about Arab people. The immersive and multimodal nature of film allow the creation and projection of certain ideological content; yet, only a handful of studies have examined the role of film in creating dominant stereotypes about Arab people. This thesis takes an American war film, the semi-autobiographical Sand Castle (2017), to examine the ways in which the combination of modes in film, specifically the visual and the linguistic, come together to express what Bateman calls the “underlying logic” of a film (2013, p. 248). Two scales of analysis are combined: two selected scenes from the film in which Arab characters are central are analysed in detail with regards to their visual and linguistic modes. This analysis, together with a description of key themes within the film, provide a wider context for the micro analysis of the two scenes. Two methods of analysis are adopted: the first is the Multimodal Social Semiotic Approach (SSMA) proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen developed in their book Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2021). This approach offers a toolkit for the analysis of “interactive meaning”, where the focus is on: type of participants, camera angle and frame size as well as social distance. The linguistic framework used to analyse the verbal communications between American and Arab characters in the film is from Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics, drawing on Halliday and Matthiessen (2014). The findings of the SSMA analysis as well as the linguistic analysis of the two selected scenes, together with the analysis of key themes in the film, are interpreted in relation to the ideology of Orientalism proposed by Edward Said (1979) who defined it as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (1978, p. 3). The study contributes to our understanding of the ways that ideologies are incorporated into the micro-patterning in film, and how such patterns accumulate to create the “underlying logic” of an ideological position such as Said’s Orientalism.