Cinema, Geopolitics, and Power Surveillance: Screening Middle East in Post-9/11 Hollywood Films

This paper tries to investigate the ways in which American geopolitical

hegemony operates through popular culture produced in the wake of 9/11.

Specifically, it examines how American geopolitical anxieties and sensibilities

are aesthetically, culturally and politically mediated and maintained via the

cultural and politicized medium of film. It chooses The Kingdom (2007), a

geographically informed and geopolitically framed film, as its primary source of

analysis to interrogate the ways in which geopolitical anxieties and sensibilities

manifest in the film's narrative through the use of geopoliticized rhetoric of

screened landscapes and the specific narration of "Self"/"Other" identities.

Drawing on literature from popular geopolitics, geocriticism, visual politics, and

postmodernism, this research analyzes how the various interdependent registers

of mapping intersect to geopolitically produce and imagine the Middle East. It

maintains that the rhetoric discourse of "war on terrorism" is cinematically

appropriated and geopolitically manipulated in order to diffuse and reproduce

American global hegemony on the global stage. In so doing, it moves beyond

the mere analysis of popular culture as only an object for analysis in world

politics to how cinematic texts are sites wherein specific modes of geopolitical

knowledge, geo-power and world politics are communicated and understood

globally.