Cultural meanings emerge from convergences of multiple productions, not single sources

Evidence

Arabs and Muslims. Dominant meanings about Arabs and Muslims during the War on Terror are not produced by one television drama, one government speech, one news report, or one nonprofit advertisement alone but through the ways in which multiple cultural productions and messages converge. As Stuart Hall has written, “Ideas only become effective if they do, in the end, connect with a particular constellation of social forces.” What is particularly important about the PSAs is that they are not bound to profit-making. If they are not motivated by profit and the need to maintain the widest viewership possible, are they still subject to simplified complex representational modes, or do they diverge from the Arab American patriot and victim? I claim that after 9/11 an ideological moment emerged, supported by a range of individual and institutional discourses and practices, that reimagined U.S. citizens as diverse and united in the War on Terror. The imagined American community became carefully, intentionally multicultural—as if to make it clear that everyone was included. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1154

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets up the core analytic frame: dominant meanings emerge from convergence of messages rather than any single cultural production.
• XREF: connects to: Performance and culture emerge during interaction rather than preexisting it — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 14; All representations of culture are necessarily partial accounts — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 109