| This dissertation explores how Arab media, cinema and fiction especially after the election of President Barack Obama, assert the value of America as a potential source of 'change' while attempting to renegotiate the Arab and Muslim worlds' positions in the international system. Unlike many previous studies, my dissertation presents a full-fledged comparative perspective on the field. My work focuses on those works, mostly Egyptian, that manage to ask pointed questions about how cultural stereotypes produce new forms of political "sight" and thus create the binary of 'us' and 'them.' This dissertation proposes a contrapuntal perspective, to borrow a Saidian term, by examining Egyptian/Arab cultural representations of the US and its foreign policy. My reading of Egyptian/Arab fiction, for example, argues that contemporary Egyptian/Arab writers put forward a fictional counter-telling and a complex understanding of US-Arab encounters. Moreover, what Arab novelists convey in their works about Arab societies is still part and parcel of the discourse about the East-West encounter. This is evident in the way Arab novels convey details of Arabs' daily lives that assert the superficial differences between "us" and "them," yet remind us ultimately of our deep similarities.;The dissertation also analyzes Egyptian/Arab filmic representations of the US which explores how Egyptian/Arab cinema is and has always been under the impact of Hollywood. Arabs, who are enamored of American cinema-making, are at odds with American foreign policy.;Moreover, this dissertation indicates how fast news media have increasingly contributed in an instant communication among peoples and nations all over the world. Arabs and Americans are forcefully directed and shaped by the powerful impact of mass media. It deals with selected incidents that have occupied the Arab intellectual climate in the post-9/11 era, and contributed to a cultural encounter between US and Middle East. These incidents that may seem small or isolated are able to reflect the whole intellectual climate in the Arab world within a historical and political context often neglected, misunderstood, or ignored by proponents of "clash of civilizations" argument.;This dissertation also demonstrates Arab-Americans' cultural response to 9/11 and their forced move from invisibility to being visible. Historically, negative images of Arabs and Muslims trot out whenever Middle East crises emerge. Arab-Americans who already suffer from double identity face double burden of feeling sorrow for their country's catastrophe and attempting to disprove the stereotypes about their Arab heritage. |
