Articulated values, affecting figures: Liberal tolerance and the racialization of Muslims/Arabs
Item
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Title
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Articulated values, affecting figures: Liberal tolerance and the racialization of Muslims/Arabs
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:dbd253c5c56f:11237
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identifier
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11583
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Creator
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Rastegar, Mitra,
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Contributor
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Patricia Ticineto Clough
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Ethnic studies | Mass communication | Islamic studies | Affects | Arabs | Media | Muslims | Racism | Tolerance
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Abstract
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This dissertation analyzes the relationship of articulations of tolerance and sympathy in US liberal media and activist discourses towards Muslims and Arabs to the process of racialization of Muslims and Arabs. These discourses produce "Muslims/Arabs" as racialized category, even as they emphasize the diversity within this category. Building on the work of scholars who have argued that anti-Muslim/Arab racism produces a homogenous Other locked into a cultural heredity, I argue that this cultural determinism actually works at the level of the population rather than the individual. I use "population racism" to refer to the racialization of Muslims/Arabs as a distinct, yet internally differentiated population perceived as having a specific distribution of characteristics. The coherence of this racialization process is evident in the relative consistency with which Muslim/Arab individuals are assessed, as more or less trustworthy or threatening, in relation to a particular set of interconnected variables. These variables include religiosity/secularism, views on gender and/or sexuality, views on tolerance, and perceived alliance with "Western" interests and values. Representations of sympathetic or tolerable Muslims/Arabs contribute to this racialization because they legitimize, reinforce, and circulate these variables of assessment.;This analysis is based on four case studies of distinct media events where particular figures of tolerable or sympathetic Muslims/Arabs are constituted and contested: (1) New York Times human interests stories on Muslim/Arab Americans in the six months following the September 11, 2001 attacks, (2) the reception of an Iranian woman's memoir, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, about teaching Western literature in Iran, (3) Western lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activist responses to the executions of two youths in Iran, and (4) center-left media responses to a campaign against Debbie Almontaser, founding principal of a New York Arabic/English-language public school. I consider how narratives, images, and words associated with Muslims/Arabs resonate with particular histories, sensibilities and assumptions. These circulate in an affective media milieu to produce forms of identification with and disaffiliation from Muslims/Arabs, along with different assessments of trustworthiness or threat.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Sociology
