Article: “Muslims in the American Media: From Texts to Affects”

Author: Kathleen M Foody

Published in: Journal of Islamic Studies, Vol. 29, Issue 2, May 2018, pp. 230–251

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Publication Date: January 5, 2018

Much scholarship on Islamophobia has offered helpful analyses of the ways that news media, film, television, and even political cartoons represent Muslims generally and Arabs specifically as threating, dangerous, and entirely foreign. In contrast, the author argues that analysis of Islamophobic media also requires moving from content analyses to explore why, when, and to whom these representations matter. This article draws on studies of affect to analyze the social and online media that proliferated around both Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai and the film American Sniper (2014).

Media events such as these mark nodes in the rise of modulated Islamophobic publics, which come together through distinct understandings of what it means to be American and/or modern. In this sense understanding Islamophobia requires attention not merely to media representation, but also to the structures of affective investments that give rise to very particular Islamophobic publics.

Source: Oxford University Press