My paper proposes to look at an additional category of Orientalist cultural productions that configure themselves as vehemently critical of Islamophobia but reverse their politics midway.
This paper focuses on the nature of these relations and offers an analysis of films as structures composed of heterogeneous media—such as music, screenplay, editing, acting, etc.
In order to test my hypothesis, I focus on two films which explicitly aim to reverse the logics of Islamophobia by presenting tributes to Muslim culture or denunciations of Eurocentric discriminatory practices. They remind their audience that Christianity 8 itself rests on a history of violence, terrorism, and religious fundamentalism. By way of speculation, it is perhaps the peripheral character of these films that allowed for a measure, superficial as it may be, of political ex-centricity and narrative unconventionality.
Some features, however, undermine the manifest rhetoric of the film and reveal its ultimate adherence to a Eurocentric vision. Elliott eponymously argues that the first decade of the twenty-first century brought about a revival of the epic film, dragging out the genre from the niche it had occupied since the s back into mainstream glory. Since the Enlightenment, Hypatia has been regarded as a symbol of freedom of thought, and a secular martyr to religious fanaticism. Agora unconventionally resists the temptation of a romantic subplot as Hypatia, unlike traditional female figures in Hollywood, remains unattached.
This scene and its contents will receive more attention below, for now, suffice to say that these words emerging from a Biblical reading are a potential site of unrest for Western audiences concerned with the oppression of women in Muslim countries. Accordingly, casting choices represent the greatest source of ambiguity as well as a case of multimedia dissensus in Agora as they contradict the politics of the screenplay. This is true, most prominently, for the two Christian archvillains, Ammonius and Pope Cyril.
