The “Innocent” Other: Hollywood’s Post 9/11 Muslim Child and Childhood


Author: Hajar Eddarif, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco
Email: hajareddarif@gmail.com
Published: July 5, 2023
https://doi.org/10.22492/ijcs.8.1.04

Citation: Eddarif, H. (2023). The “Innocent” Other: Hollywood’s Post 9/11 Muslim Child and Childhood. IAFOR Journal of Cultural Studies, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.22492/ijcs.8.1.04


Abstract

The present article interrogates the ways in which Hollywood cinema articulates the exclusion of the Muslim child from popular discourses of childhood and how such exclusion continues to condition the cultural identity of children and most importantly how it defines the notion of childhood. This paper opts for a textual and discursive analysis of Hollywood’s post-9/11 film through a cultural and postcolonial studies’ lens. The main purpose behind this is to scrutinize Hollywood’s cultural conceptualization of children, how it represents different childhoods, in what way it categorizes children and who is perceived as a child.

Keywords

Arab, children, Hollywood, innocence, Islam, popular culture, postcolonial theory, race, Orientalism, 9/11