Fascination and repulsion jointly drive American Muslim caricatures from cartoons to film

Evidence

Barbary villains informed the Muslim characters that become popular in film and other forms of entertainment. Cartoons like “Ali Baba the Mad Dog of the Desert,” “Hassan the Assassin,” and “Desert Rat Hordes” feature similar characters, influencing the ways Americans think about Muslims as violent, frightening, foreigners. The Muslim characters from films, cartoons, dime store novels, and television contribute to the archive of Muslim monsters, revealing both a fascination with the exotic as well as a repulsion toward Muslims. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 594

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘fascination and repulsion’ pairing echoes the self-other dynamic seen throughout the reader’s monster project — also the book’s own addict-fear frame from earlier chapters.