MUSLIMS IN THE AMERICAN MEDIA: FROM TEXTS TO AFFECTS

Much scholarship on Islamophobia has offered helpful analyses of the ways that news media, film, television, and even political cartoons represent Muslims generally and Arabs specifically as threating, dangerous, and entirely foreign. In contrast, I argue that analysis of Islamophobic media also requires moving from content analyses to explore why, when, and to whom these representations matter. This article draws on studies of affect to analyse the social and online media that proliferated around both Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai and the film American Sniper (2014). Media events such as these, I argue, mark nodes in the rise of modulated Islamophobic publics, which come together through distinct understandings of what it means to be American and/or modern. In this sense understanding Islamophobia requires attention not merely to media representation, but also to the structures of affective investments that give rise to very particular Islamophobic publics. © The Author(s) (2018). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved.