‘The criminal in the Middle Eastern sense is more cowardice (sic) than the general criminal. They’ll hide in the dark and attack in numbers. They’d rather use a gun than stand in a fist-fight’.
– Ken McKay (Detective Chief Superintendent).
Screening the Arab other is a story about the violence of representation in contemporary Australian film and television narratives. The new urban gangster on the set is the Arab male – Lebanese to be more precise – brooding and bungling his way into celluloid stardom and narrative stasis. The Arab male body has achieved race capital status in a slew of feature films including The Combination (2009) and Cedar Boys (2009), and in the television drama series East West 101 (2008/2009) and ‘documentary’ Gangs of Oz (2009).
The successful reception of this most recent of cultural products depends entirely on how effective the links between male racialisation and Orientalism have been forged outside the culture of the screen. In tracking the emergence of this racialised character over the past decade in newspaper stories and on tabloid television, it seems this cinematic construction is precisely what the market wants. But just how ‘authentic’ is the Lebanese gangster?
More to come….
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