Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People - Softcover

Shaheen, Jack G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566563887 ISBN 13: 9781566563888

Publisher: Roundhouse Publishing Ltd, 2001

Synopsis

Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People is a groundbreaking book that dissects a slanderous history dating from cinema's earliest days to contemporary Hollywood blockbusters that feature machine-gun wielding and bomb-blowing "evil" Arabs.

Award-winning film authority Jack G. Shaheen, noting that only Native Americans have been more relentlessly smeared on the silver screen, painstakingly makes his case that "Arab" has remained Hollywood's shameless shorthand for "bad guy," long after the movie industry has shifted its portrayal of other minority groups. In this comprehensive study of nearly one thousand films, arranged alphabetically in such chapters as "Villains," "Sheikhs," "Cameos," and "Cliffhangers," Shaheen documents the tendency to portray Muslim Arabs as Public Enemy #1-brutal, heartless, uncivilized Others bent on terrorizing civilized Westerners.

Shaheen examines how and why such a stereotype has grown and spread in the film industry and what may be done to change Hollywood's defamation of Arabs.

About this title

Review

Caricatured villains are as vital to the movie business as car chases and shoot-outs. But the spotlight of derision shifts. When blacks were no longer shiftless jokes, the Asians no longer the Yellow Peril, and good Indians no longer had to be dead Indians, Arabs became the all-purpose bad-guys. Countless movies have portrayed them as loathsome lechers who terrorize, murder, and finally die in droves. In 'Reel Bad Arabs' scholar Jack Shaheen exposes in appalling detail this nightmare side of the Hollywood dream machine. --Christopher Dickey, Middle East Editor for Newsweek Magazine

About the Author

Jack G. Shaheen, a former CBS News consultant on Middle East affairs, is the world's foremost authority on media images of Arabs and Muslims. He is the author of 'Guilty: Hollywood's Verdict on Arabs after 9/11, Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture', 'Nuclear War Films', and the award-winning 'TV Arab'.

Edition details

• Publisher: Roundhouse Publishing Ltd
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566563887
• ISBN 13: 9781566563888
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 584