Framing Arab Cinema

A close examination of the distorted reception of Arab cinemas in American film criticism over the last three decades

Framing Arab Cinema explores how Arab films have been received, interpreted, and ideologically recoded in American mainstream media and film criticism. Drawing on postcolonial theory, media reception studies, and critical political discourse, Malek Khouri investigates how U.S.-based film reviews have contributed to the re-narration of Arab cinema within hegemonic frameworks, often reducing Arab films to narratives of violence, religious extremism, or patriarchal repression, while omitting historical context and themes of anti-imperialist resistance, colonial repression, and pan-Arab national solidarity.

Through a detailed analysis of nearly four hundred American reviews of some seventy Arab films, this book reveals how critics frequently decode Arab cinematic expression in ways that reflect Western ideological preoccupations, often at the expense of the broader historical dynamics within which the films themselves take shape. Rather than merely reflecting Western misunderstanding, these patterns of reception illuminate the mechanisms by which global cultural hierarchies are reinforced through seemingly liberal and aesthetic engagements with non-Western cinema.