L’altro razzializzato. Arabi e musulmani negli Stati Uniti prima e dopo l’11 settembre

This essay explores the ways in which American culture, post 9-11, has depicted Arabs and Muslims as the new enemy around which to polarize fears relative to its national security, a racialized other whose status has shifted from invisible subjects to contested “problem minorities”. Carosso looks at the way in which the racialization of Arabs and Muslims in the US has a history of its own, well predating the so-called “war on terror”, and ultimately going back to the unresolved racial status of Arabs amid US assimilation practices predicated upon the performance of a “racial dramaturgy”. The author suggests that the post 9-11 backlash has been based on previously consolidated Orientalist biases in the US aiming at marginalizing Arabs and Muslims from the national body politic.