Arab Americans in Film: From Hollywood and Egyptian Stereotypes to Self-Representation by Waleed F. Mahdi (review)

Waleed Mahdi's Arab Americans in Film examines representations of Arab Americans in American and Egyptian film, drawing upon disciplines such as American studies, comparative literature, cultural anthropology, and history. An ambitious project, Mahdi's book argues for a transnational approach to consider how "Arab American cultural citizenship" is constructed in American and Egyptian film, before and after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Mahdi writes:

A major theoretical contribution of Arab Americans in Film, therefore, is in suggesting that Arab American Otherness cannot only be conceived as an outcome of US Orientalist and racialized histories. It rather imagines Arab American Otherness as an outcome of the polarized cultural imaginations of "Self" and "Other" that exist in both US and Arab state nationalist narratives, examined in this book through Hollywood and Egyptian cinematic experiences" (p. 5).

But it is never entirely clear that Mahdi does depart from the analytical framework of Orientalism or even why he understands Orientalism as relegated to a national sphere.

Chapter One, for instance, provides a compelling history of film in the United States to argue that the 1970s marked a turning point in how Arab Americans, Arabs, and the Middle East were constructed (the book's focus, while on Arab Americans, at times conflates or intermingles these categories in ways that make the object of study elusive). Building on the work of Edward Said, Melani McAlister, Jack Shaheen, and Evelyn Alsultany, the author explains that the earlier exotic and removed images that stood in for the Middle East were largely replaced by cinematic images of a domestically threatening, more menacing Arab codified as the terrorist or oil shaykh. Attributing this representational shift to Cold War politics, the oil embargo by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), American foreign policy, and the US alliance with Israel, this scholarly history deviates little from the analytical framework of Said's Orientalism (Vintage Books, 1978), which is, after all, a pioneering transnational study of how "the West" defines itself against "the East." And while it is a history that might be confined to the study of American films, it nonetheless illustrates how such representations of Arab Americans already rely on global events that extend beyond the nation-state. In addition, invoking and measuring an extensive catalog of dozens of American films (Chapter One) against a handful of relevant Egyptian films from a different and circumscribed period (the 1990s and 2000s) makes it difficult to accept that the cultural work these two cinemas participate in is somehow commensurate. As such, it is equally difficult to endorse the conclusion that they offer competing articulations of "Self" and "Other" or that they are equally reductive and othering in their constructions of Arab Americanness. It also seems arbitrary to expect Egyptian cinema to provide more complex representations of Arab-American identity, given this identity itself is an American category or formulation, and understandably outside the purview of Egyptian national imperatives or citizenship.

Even if we do accept that Hollywood and Egyptian cinema can be measured against one another in this way, the book still presents them as two national case studies rather than explicitly considering how these cinemas are in some kind of conversation with one another, or how the (unequal) circulation and reception of these films can account for some transnational basis for Arab-American identity. The book's foregrounding of Egyptian films is admirable and needed, given the hugely influential role the commercial Egyptian film industry has played in the Middle East and beyond, but to frame it in response to US film is to risk both reinforcing the primacy of Hollywood and perpetuating an East/West binary that the author is rightly working hard to dismantle.

In addition to the book's comparison of US and Egyptian films, its second major objective, and the one that occupies its subsequent three chapters, is to "identify...