Hollywood codes Muslim dress and Arabic script as racialized resistance markers

Evidence

The brilliance of Children of Men lies in its ability to present a future saturated by the present; it foretells encounters with the police state and dissenting protesters in permanent struggle. For example, it portrays members of a resistance group, ”The Uprising,” wearing Islamic dress; gra≈ti and placards in Arabic are visible, and recognizable, as forms of protest associated with the Palestinian struggle. In fact, the Arabic word ”Intifada” is written on the walls in a detention-center scene, pointing to the transformation of Muslim bodies into racialized groups of resistant agency in the context of a militant police state. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 417

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on racialization of Muslims post-9/11 and to The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s theme of Muslim identity read as threat. — connects to: National Geographic and Hollywood were prime twentieth-century vehicles of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 216
• SEED: Potential essay: how the visual grammar of ‘Islamic protest’ (dress, Arabic graffit, Intifada) functions as shorthand for racialized resistance in Hollywood dystopias.