Islamophobia without Islamophobes: New Strategies of Representing Imperialist versus Suicide Terrorist Necropolitics in Homeland and Syriana

Abstract

This paper investigates the geopolitical context of the emergence of “suicide terrorism” to propose that terrorism in its various forms has less to do with religious ideologies in general and with Islamic faith in particular, and more to do with the colonial and neocolonial politics of Empire in the colonies, postcolonies and occupied territories by the U.S. army and its allies in the Middle East in the post-9/11 era. Two representations of the figure of the suicide terrorist will be analyzed as they are presented in the narratives suggested in the Showtime series Homeland (2011-) and the film Syriana (2005). I argue that even though the Islamicate world and Muslims in the post-9/11 era have generally been portrayed in a differentiated fashion, these media productions have had almost the same effects on the public as earlier Orientalist productions. Although they appear to endorse antiracism and multiculturalism on the surface, these current narratives simultaneously produce what Evelyn Alsultany calls “the logics and affects necessary to legitimize racist policies and practices” (Alsultany 162). A “dialectical Islamophobia” (Beydoun 40) that is at play in the West and Western media productions legitimizes and values imperialist necropolitics while delegitimizing its opponent, namely the religious necropolitics of suicide terrorism.