The changing profile of race in the United States: Media representations and racialization of Arab- and Muslim-Americans post-9/11

This dissertation examines representations of Arab- and Muslim-Americans in the U.S. mainstream media after 9/11. Through an intertextual rhetorical analysis of primetime television programs, news reporting, and non-profit advertising, I argue that race has been reconfigured in the United States since 9/11 through "momentary multiculturalism" and the racialization and criminalization of Arabs and Islam. Contending that the profile of race has changed, or rather, the target of racialization used to consolidate American national identity has temporarily shifted to a conflated Arab/Muslim category, I analyze how the "American" citizen came to be racially constituted by the media after 9/11. The first chapter provides a survey of post-9/11 TV dramas that represent the "War on Terror" and examines how positive representations of Arab-Americans operate alongside the trope of the Arab/Muslim terrorist. Chapter two furthers the analysis of primetime television dramas through demonstrating how even the most sympathetic portrayals of Arab- and Muslim-Americans can re-narrate government discourses of exceptionalism, which are used to justify racist views and practices against Arab- and Muslim-Americans. I further argue that TV dramas are a site for the practice of virtual citizenship and interpellation into government discourses as they bring viewers in to national debates through narrating, explaining, debating, and representing storylines about government initiatives post-9/11. In chapter three, I examine how non-Arab converts to Islam, such as John Walker Lindh, are represented in the news media and TV dramas, arguing that the media participates in "racing" Islam through explaining criminal behavior by constructing Islam as the compulsive, dangerous, and incomprehensible Other and an interlinked narrative of failed heterosexuality. In chapter four, I examine how the government, non-profit organizations, and civil rights groups used non-profit advertising campaigns after 9/11 to mobilize multiculturalism in a variety of ways. Demonstrating that the media plays a crucial role in producing the racial meanings needed to justify U.S. imperial practices, this dissertation also reveals how the positive representations of Arab-Americans that appeared after 9/11 (while they can reflect a counter-hegemonic effort), are often used in the formation of modern racism, whereby positive representations are used to cover racist practices.