Mazhar Ahmad Al Zo’by
Biographic Data
| ID | 788183 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mazhar Ahmad Al Zo’by |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mazhar Ahmad |
| FAMILY NAME | Al Zo’by |
| SIGNATURE | AL ZO’BY M A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Doha Institute for Graduate Studies |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8725-3240 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
On silencing the subaltern in Tunisian docudrama
In 2023, Four Daughters , a docudrama centered on Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian mother whose two daughters were radicalized and joined the Islamic State, was widely praised in Western media for exposing the suffering of Arab Muslim women and offering them a platform to speak. However, this article argues that the film is far more complex than such celebratory narratives suggest. It may be more accurately understood as a pseudo-participatory productio…
Not just a game”
The intertwined legacy of sports and racism has been a consistent feature in the maintenance of social power, cultural politics, and racial inequality in modern history. Despite providing a critical platform for individual or collective national expressions, sports (as a game and a stage) have also been deployed as strategic tools to articulate a representational vision for western neo-colonial ideology. The aim of this article is to critically e…
Unchilding' Palestine
Normalization and the Erasure of Palestine
This article examines recent transformations in Arab drama narratives and TV productions and showcases how two drama series endorse normalization of cultural and social relations between Arabs and Israelis in subtle ways using the experience of Arab Jews.Sponsored by the Arab state, its elite actors, or directors, and disseminated through state-owned media, these drama series, the article contends, aim to conceal the contradictions between Arab g…
Hollywood’s Racial Order and the Re-throning of White Supremacist Identity
Released during a period of heightened racial tension over the impact of racism in the United States and Europe, the 2021 films Stillwater and Dune Part One reveal the pervasiveness of Arab Muslim misrepresentations in Hollywood and the subtilty of white supremacist ideology as it re-emerges in new cinematic productions. With many symbolic and pronounced references to the delusions of the “great replacement” theory, the foundational blueprint of …
Race and liberal humanism
This article examines the discrepancy in western media portrayals of Brown and Black migrants and Ukrainian refugees by using critical discourse analysis and representation (visual analysis). For many decades, western media coverage of the ongoing irregular migration to Europe, the United States and Australia has been characterized by racial bias against coloured migrants and refugees, regularly framing them either as criminals, swarms of insects…
Hybrid ethnicities, fashionable bodies and unruly transgressors
Until the Arab uprisings occurred, many Arab first ladies and queens feted by US media received exceptionally favourable coverage that celebrated their physical appearance and western sense of fashion. Grounded in the context of neo-liberal politics which considers them objects of cultural identification, this article studies western media’s representations of Suzanne Mubarak, Queen Rania of Jordan and Asma al-Assad who are framed as virtuous hou…
Hollywood’s Bad Muslims
The cinemas of Arab and Muslim societies encompass a substantial number of film genres produced locally or in the diaspora. Arab and Muslim filmmakers experiment with different cinematic narratives, styles, and hybrid forms: auteur, documentary, diasporic, migrant, Third Cinema, and transnational productions. Their richness, diverse thematic foci, creative stylistic characteristics, and ability to reach global audiences recently motivated film sc…
Representation and emancipation
Palestinian cinematic productions have historically attempted to alter biased perceptions of their identity, experience of dispossession, and struggle for liberation, using films to communicate the harsh realities of Israeli occupation. While preserving a pluralistic and hybrid character, and blending different genres from Third and Second films (experimental, neorealist, and transnational), Palestinian cinema – as examined through a close readin…
The Vanishing Native
The thematic foci of the Franco-Algerian war films of decolonization have shifted in the last few decades from evoking triumphalist discourses and redemptive fictional narratives to producing powerful transnational antiwar stories. While being critical of the violent history of colonization, defying earlier French governments’ oppressive forms of censorship, and addressing the history of colonial barbarity in Algeria, many French documentarians a…
Undoing Stereotypical Representations in Arab and Muslim Cinemas
Troubled by a history of misconceptions on Western silver screens, Arab and Muslim filmmakers have kept their cinematic productions thematically close to the reality of their postcolonial cultural and social conditions, while trying to represent their communities in complex ways. In many efforts of artistic excellence, the films they make aim to reverse the frisson of alterity upon which the conception of their disgraced images have been historic…
On naming Arab revolutions and oppositional media narratives
The unfinished Arab revolutions produced unsettling conditions, sectarian wars, counter-revolutionary wars, proxy wars and transitional democracies. US and Arab media responses could not find effective words to describe them and their underlying geopolitical implications. Whether to name them ‘protest’ or ‘unrest’, American mainstream media initially welcomed the events with a cautious curiosity while Arab media favoured a romanticized coverage. …
Isis’s Euro-American Fighters
This article centers on the influx of Western fighters joining ISIS and locates its root causes in systemic and structural forms of alienation, discrimination, and Islamophobia. In Western discourse, understanding this phenomenon is characterized by a sense of denial that limits the interpretive paradigms to one of two approaches: either a racial discourse that confines the debate to antagonistic minoritized citizens with ambiguous loyalties and …
Monsieur Lazhar
The ability of Canadian films to bring the immigrant experience to the centre of public debate is certainly impressive. Monsieur Lazhar (2011 Greenlight Creative. 2011. Monsieur Lazhar Poster Number 2. IMP Awards Canada Movie Poster Gallery. http://www.impawards.com/intl/canada/2011/monsieur_lazhar__ver2.html [Google Scholar]) depicts the life of one such immigrant without the blemishes of Hollywood's essentialist tropes. The film tells the story…
Hybrid ethnicities, fashionable bodies and unruly transgressors
Until the Arab uprisings occurred, many Arab first ladies and queens feted by US media received exceptionally favourable coverage that celebrated their physical appearance and western sense of fashion. Grounded in the context of neo-liberal politics which considers them objects of cultural identification, this article studies western media’s representations of Suzanne Mubarak, Queen Rania of Jordan and Asma al-Assad who are framed as virtuous hou…
Not just a game”
The intertwined legacy of sports and racism has been a consistent feature in the maintenance of social power, cultural politics, and racial inequality in modern history. Despite providing a critical platform for individual or collective national expressions, sports (as a game and a stage) have also been deployed as strategic tools to articulate a representational vision for western neo-colonial ideology. The aim of this article is to critically e…
Normalization and the Erasure of Palestine
This article examines recent transformations in Arab drama narratives and TV productions and showcases how two drama series endorse normalization of cultural and social relations between Arabs and Israelis in subtle ways using the experience of Arab Jews.Sponsored by the Arab state, its elite actors, or directors, and disseminated through state-owned media, these drama series, the article contends, aim to conceal the contradictions between Arab g…
Representation and emancipation
Palestinian cinematic productions have historically attempted to alter biased perceptions of their identity, experience of dispossession, and struggle for liberation, using films to communicate the harsh realities of Israeli occupation. While preserving a pluralistic and hybrid character, and blending different genres from Third and Second films (experimental, neorealist, and transnational), Palestinian cinema – as examined through a close readin…
On naming Arab revolutions and oppositional media narratives
The unfinished Arab revolutions produced unsettling conditions, sectarian wars, counter-revolutionary wars, proxy wars and transitional democracies. US and Arab media responses could not find effective words to describe them and their underlying geopolitical implications. Whether to name them ‘protest’ or ‘unrest’, American mainstream media initially welcomed the events with a cautious curiosity while Arab media favoured a romanticized coverage. …
Unchilding' Palestine
Hollywood’s Bad Muslims
The cinemas of Arab and Muslim societies encompass a substantial number of film genres produced locally or in the diaspora. Arab and Muslim filmmakers experiment with different cinematic narratives, styles, and hybrid forms: auteur, documentary, diasporic, migrant, Third Cinema, and transnational productions. Their richness, diverse thematic foci, creative stylistic characteristics, and ability to reach global audiences recently motivated film sc…
Monsieur Lazhar
The ability of Canadian films to bring the immigrant experience to the centre of public debate is certainly impressive. Monsieur Lazhar (2011 Greenlight Creative. 2011. Monsieur Lazhar Poster Number 2. IMP Awards Canada Movie Poster Gallery. http://www.impawards.com/intl/canada/2011/monsieur_lazhar__ver2.html [Google Scholar]) depicts the life of one such immigrant without the blemishes of Hollywood's essentialist tropes. The film tells the story…
Isis’s Euro-American Fighters
This article centers on the influx of Western fighters joining ISIS and locates its root causes in systemic and structural forms of alienation, discrimination, and Islamophobia. In Western discourse, understanding this phenomenon is characterized by a sense of denial that limits the interpretive paradigms to one of two approaches: either a racial discourse that confines the debate to antagonistic minoritized citizens with ambiguous loyalties and …
On naming Arab revolutions and oppositional media narratives
The unfinished Arab revolutions produced unsettling conditions, sectarian wars, counter-revolutionary wars, proxy wars and transitional democracies. US and Arab media responses could not find effective words to describe them and their underlying geopolitical implications. Whether to name them ‘protest’ or ‘unrest’, American mainstream media initially welcomed the events with a cautious curiosity while Arab media favoured a romanticized coverage. …
Undoing Stereotypical Representations in Arab and Muslim Cinemas
Troubled by a history of misconceptions on Western silver screens, Arab and Muslim filmmakers have kept their cinematic productions thematically close to the reality of their postcolonial cultural and social conditions, while trying to represent their communities in complex ways. In many efforts of artistic excellence, the films they make aim to reverse the frisson of alterity upon which the conception of their disgraced images have been historic…
Representation and emancipation
Palestinian cinematic productions have historically attempted to alter biased perceptions of their identity, experience of dispossession, and struggle for liberation, using films to communicate the harsh realities of Israeli occupation. While preserving a pluralistic and hybrid character, and blending different genres from Third and Second films (experimental, neorealist, and transnational), Palestinian cinema – as examined through a close readin…
The Vanishing Native
The thematic foci of the Franco-Algerian war films of decolonization have shifted in the last few decades from evoking triumphalist discourses and redemptive fictional narratives to producing powerful transnational antiwar stories. While being critical of the violent history of colonization, defying earlier French governments’ oppressive forms of censorship, and addressing the history of colonial barbarity in Algeria, many French documentarians a…
Hollywood’s Bad Muslims
The cinemas of Arab and Muslim societies encompass a substantial number of film genres produced locally or in the diaspora. Arab and Muslim filmmakers experiment with different cinematic narratives, styles, and hybrid forms: auteur, documentary, diasporic, migrant, Third Cinema, and transnational productions. Their richness, diverse thematic foci, creative stylistic characteristics, and ability to reach global audiences recently motivated film sc…
Hybrid ethnicities, fashionable bodies and unruly transgressors
Until the Arab uprisings occurred, many Arab first ladies and queens feted by US media received exceptionally favourable coverage that celebrated their physical appearance and western sense of fashion. Grounded in the context of neo-liberal politics which considers them objects of cultural identification, this article studies western media’s representations of Suzanne Mubarak, Queen Rania of Jordan and Asma al-Assad who are framed as virtuous hou…
Hollywood’s Racial Order and the Re-throning of White Supremacist Identity
Released during a period of heightened racial tension over the impact of racism in the United States and Europe, the 2021 films Stillwater and Dune Part One reveal the pervasiveness of Arab Muslim misrepresentations in Hollywood and the subtilty of white supremacist ideology as it re-emerges in new cinematic productions. With many symbolic and pronounced references to the delusions of the “great replacement” theory, the foundational blueprint of …
Race and liberal humanism
This article examines the discrepancy in western media portrayals of Brown and Black migrants and Ukrainian refugees by using critical discourse analysis and representation (visual analysis). For many decades, western media coverage of the ongoing irregular migration to Europe, the United States and Australia has been characterized by racial bias against coloured migrants and refugees, regularly framing them either as criminals, swarms of insects…
Normalization and the Erasure of Palestine
This article examines recent transformations in Arab drama narratives and TV productions and showcases how two drama series endorse normalization of cultural and social relations between Arabs and Israelis in subtle ways using the experience of Arab Jews.Sponsored by the Arab state, its elite actors, or directors, and disseminated through state-owned media, these drama series, the article contends, aim to conceal the contradictions between Arab g…
On silencing the subaltern in Tunisian docudrama
In 2023, Four Daughters , a docudrama centered on Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian mother whose two daughters were radicalized and joined the Islamic State, was widely praised in Western media for exposing the suffering of Arab Muslim women and offering them a platform to speak. However, this article argues that the film is far more complex than such celebratory narratives suggest. It may be more accurately understood as a pseudo-participatory productio…
Not just a game”
The intertwined legacy of sports and racism has been a consistent feature in the maintenance of social power, cultural politics, and racial inequality in modern history. Despite providing a critical platform for individual or collective national expressions, sports (as a game and a stage) have also been deployed as strategic tools to articulate a representational vision for western neo-colonial ideology. The aim of this article is to critically e…
Unchilding' Palestine
Sociology (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Art (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · History (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · History (7 works)