Peter Morey - Stereotypes and Strangers: Muslims in Film and Television Drama since 9/11
Last Updated on Wednesday, 02 April 2008 14:21
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Peter Morey is Reader in English at the University of East London. He is the author of Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (Edinburgh UP, 2000), Rohinton Mistry (Manchester UP Contemporary World Writer’s Series, 2004), and co-editor of Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism (Rodopi, 2006). He has published widely in the fields of colonial and postcolonial literature, and is currently working on a new monograph, entitled Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation from 9/11 to 7/7, co-authored with Amina Yaqin, to be published by Harvard University Press.
Description:
Peter Morey examines Kenneth Glenaan’s 2004 film Yasmin, which explores the plight of one British Asian woman and her family after 9/11. Despite the film’s truth claims, he suggests that its documentary realism actually reproduces an anthropological perspective for the assumed (non-Muslim) viewing subject with links to much older traditions of colonial representation. At the same time, certain characters and situations introduce a tension that threatens to overturn the simplistic binaries the film elsewhere reinforces.
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written by Rita Jones , June 13, 2008
Peter Kosminsky’s bid to display dichotomies faced by Britain’s second generation Muslims in the 2-part drama Britz, (showing June 14th on MORE4 at 9:00 pm) is fraught with follies. The journey between the rational and the radical comes with no middle grounds, no flexibility, no half-way adjustment but only 180 degrees turn around. That is why at first the two central characters both start as open minded and progressive, though the brother is trying harder to out-British the Brits.
Kosminsky wishes to fit Britain’s second generation Muslims in very narrow and rigid categories which functions as follows:
* You are either indebted or ungrateful to the system
* Either a reformist or a rebel
* Either conformist or rejectionist
* Are there any subtle messages? Quite a few: What a Muslim young man has to do to be considered on the right (but not principally correct) track.
* You are expected to accord unquestioning support even if concerns your neighbours, relatives or peers.
* Compromises are the key if not a compulsory condition to a career that can be unthankful. Thus when Sohail decides to side with the just cause, he chooses not to object himself questioning a badly beaten person tortured in Romania
* In places, Britz appears as a combination of MI5 recruitment video, patched with a honour killing episode plus glimpses from the conflict in Caucasia. Life in the training came seems to be juxtaposed from the way some Russian dramas portray Chechnya (like Shahidka) making the representation of real life in Russia's frontier outposts both problematic and patchy.
How do you expect coherence from a patchwork of videos whose over eagerness to portray contrasts ends up with contradictions and confusion.
written by Madeline , May 09, 2008
It was intriguing to see a young Muslim character literally forced into an act of self-framing by a group of Nazis in this week's episode of the BBC One drama, Waking the Dead, (http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/wak...ory4.shtml).
What was the thinking behind this bizarre inversion, in which the cold case team had to struggle to prove that the martyr's video was a fake in order to 'bring the [Nazi] perpetrators to justice'?
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