Don't Take Your Body to the West

Abstract

What do the narratives of the West(ern) say about which bodies are celebrated and which bodies are warned away in the West(ern)? And how do such narratives echo globally while reinforcing American patterns of racist violence against nonwhite bodies? In this autoethnographic cultural analysis, I interweave songs and visuals with personal narratives of growing up in the Middle East and with continued incidents of racial violence in America. I seek to show how West(ern) ideologies celebrate a narrow kind of white masculine vigilantism that affords most white people the luxury of seeing themselves nostalgically and sympathetically portrayed as individuals in West(ern) narratives while condemning members of nonwhite races as collectively criminal.