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Abstract: Post-9/11 American neo-Orientalist representations pervade today's politics and journalism about the Arab World. Since the first emergence of the Middle East representation in American writings of the nineteenth century, one can assume that nothing has changed in representations of the Middle East in the US. This article explores a twenty-first century phenomenon called "neo-Orientalism," a style of representation that, while indebted to classical Orientalism, focuses on "othering" the Arab world with the exclusion of some geographic parts, such as India and Turkey, from the classical map of Orientalism. Although neo-Orientalism represents a shift in the selection of its subject and locale, it nonetheless reproduces certain repetitions of and conceptual continuities with its precursor. Like classical Orientalism, neo-Orientalism is a monolithic discourse based on binarism between the superior American values and the inferior Arab culture.
Keywords: post 9/11, terrorist attacks, neo-Orientalism, imperialism, terrorism, Arab, America, culture
A Move from Orientalism to Neo-Orientalism?
The East is a career
Benjamin Disraeli
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 had and continued to have an enormous impact on global politics in general and Arab-American relationship in particular. Some critics suggested the year 2001 a "year zero" or a "transformative moment" in Arab-American relationship in which the Americans see Arab Muslims as fanatical, violent, and lacking in tolerance. On the other hand, Arab Muslims see the Americans as selfish, immoral, and greedy as well as violent and fanatical (Barzegar, 2005: 115). 2001 has inaugurated a century of practicing symbolic power on the perpetrators, the Arab world.1 This symbolic power usually refers to a power used by the empire to create a hegemonic version of reality (Bourdieu, 1996: 41). The production of reality in this sense is the means to produce distorted images of dominated people, and because of generalizing the term "terrorism," Arab Muslims are victims of symbolic power in two ways. The first is the "terrorist" propagation, with which the imperial stereotyping power has labeled all Arab Muslims, if not all Arabs including the Christian Arabs. The second way is described by Ishmael, a major Arab character in Leon Uris' (1984: 15) novel The Hay.
So before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother...