REIMAGINING THE ORIENT: REVISITING THE ONTOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MIDDLE EAST IN POST 9/11 AMERICAN LITERATURE

Abstract

After the attacks on September 11, 2001, the Arab and Middle Eastern American communities gained a new social status as hypervisible and hyphenated citizens. Sensationalized stories about the Middle East as a terrorism and violence hub prevail in American television. Hollywood broadcasts films and T.V. shows that exhibit stereotypical representations of the Middle East and Muslim women, mirroring the Orientalist legacy in the colonies dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before 9/11, the American perception of the Middle East was inherited from the European fascination and romanticization of the Orient, causing to reproduce Orientalism aesthetics to contribute to the proliferation of capitalism and the amplification of consumerist culture in America. Since the attacks, a new rhetoric has emerged pertaining to the portrayals of Muslim women in primetime American T.V. The optics of Muslim women as exotic, hypersexualized, and oppressed have been broadcasted to provoke sentiments of sympathy and fear. The dehumanization of the Middle East by adopting the rhetoric of Muslim women’s victimhood has been utilized as a soft weapon to promote the War on Terror and the US expansionist projects in the Middle East. Arab American literature post-9/11 attempts to demystify the vagueness of conflicting identities and the emergence of discourse that focuses on the depiction of Muslim women. Arab American fiction authors internalize the Orientalist discourse, implement the Arabesque narration style, and reproduce dichotomies to create subdivisions within the Orient to appeal to Western sensibilities and to mediate finding common ground with the dominant culture.