Unreal Realities: Palestinian-Americans, Race and Media Representations

This paper looks closely at Palestinian-American engagement with media and their construction of Arab-American racialization as both absurd and unreal. First, to understand the ways that media and imagery is a locus of racialized violence, I think alongside Palestinian-American criticism of race and media in America. Palestinian-Americans have varied responses to their highly racialized encounters on and offline and identify the root cause of these encounters as due to absurd media representation. Their responses to 'real' racialized encounters with people who 'believe' media range from humor, anxiety, anger, and disbelief. Second, I use Baudrillard's concept of the hyperreal to understand how Palestinian personhood has become racialized as an abstraction. I argue that representation of Palestinians in a post 9/11 world have reached what Baudrillard identifies as the fourth stage of the hyperreal image, in which the representation refers to earlier Orientalist representations rather than referring to a direct reality. Palestinian-Americans assert these hyperreal representations as absurd and describe their reality as unreal. Palestinian-Americans, in turn, labor to challenge the hyperreal through media, narrative, storytelling, and the assertion of themselves as human.