Event overview
Ellen Seiter (Professor of Critical Studies, School of Cinematic Arts University of Southern California)
“The Suicide bomber as Aberrant Decoding: Viewing Arab Cinema with American and Trans-national Students”
At the beginning of Henri Barakat’s 1962 film, a Man in Our House, Cairo students stage a protest in a recreation of events in 1948-52, as Egyptian nationalists sought to expel British colonial control. After the police fire in to the crowd, a young man dies in the arms of his brother (played by Omar al-Sharif). “Long Live Egypt” are the young man’s dying words. The film, like many Egyptian films of the “Golden Age” is a staple of Arab satellite TV offerings, Ramadan schedules, and inter-generational film viewing in Arab families.
In this film reception study, several American students produced what Umberto Eco called “aberrant decoding” of the film. Instead of seeing al-Sharif as an outraged freedom fighter, a grieving brother and star-crossed romantic lead, a hero of Egyptian nationalism, who regretfully turned to violence (“I wish there was another way…”)--- in short, the film’s encoding—they described al-Sharif, as a suicide bomber, and read his every dramatic action unsympathetically. They rejected al-Sharif’s encoding as a star and the film’s use of classical Hollywood style to convey his inner turmoil and heroism. In focus groups, the American students explained that their impression was formed in the film’s earliest scenes, when the student protesters chanted “Death to Our Enemies” with raised fists, and thus embodied for them the innately violent nature of Arab Muslims, as seen on CNN and Fox News.
The elite university at which this study was conducted boasts the largest international student population in the United States. Based on a five-month study of twelve university students, the group included Muslims and non- Muslims, US-born and Transnational Students, red and blue state Americans, men and women. The study design combined oral and written responses (email and web-based discussion boards), group and individual interviews, and both extensive group contact time (40 hours) and a five-month study period to capture how their communication environment corresponded to their opinions about three Hollywood and three Egyptian films.
What are the parameters of free speech about political Islam in the post 9-11, networked American university? The researcher followed a model of action research, by inviting students to seek out information on the Internet related to news occurring during the study period (from a ferry crash of Egyptian guest workers to the publication in Denmark of the politics cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammed). Yet dramatic differences characterized the US and transnational students (of Egyptian and Pakistani origin) in terms of their comprehension of news bias and news sources, and their knowledge of US policy and history. Even in the supportive environment of this study, there were strict limits to what Muslim students were willing to say in a focus group or the project’s web-based discussion board, for fear of being perceived by their peers as terrorist sympathizers. These information gaps, although apparent in the discussions, did little to unsettle the confidence of conservative American students to dominate the discussion with their ideas about the origins of nonstate terrorism. The paper uses the work of Mahmood Mamdani, Zachary Lockman and Rashid Khalidi to analyze how Cold War ideology endures in American classrooms.
This lecture will be given in association with the Goldsmiths Media Research Programme. All are welcome. Please contact Guinevere Narraway (g.narraway@gold.ac.uk) if you wish to attend.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 28 Apr 2008 | 12:00pm - 1:30pm |
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