Islamophobia in "Homeland"? Analysis of the Popular US TV Series

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Communications - Movies and Television, grade: 1,3, Bielefeld University (Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft: Anglistik), course: Analyzing and Interpreting Literary Texts: US American Literatures, language: English, abstract: This essay analyses one episode of the popular US TV series "Homeland", which has been said to be ¿TV¿s most Islamophobic show¿ (cf. Al-Arian 2012) and decide if it contains islamophobic elements. In a first step, using a variety of different sources, islamophobia will be defined. Afterwards, the paper will link theoretical input about the effects of stereotyping to stereotyping of Muslims as terrorists in post 9/11 series such as "24" or "Sleeper Cell". It will then analyse one episode of Homeland and apply the theoretical input to decide whether or not the series contains islamophobic ellements. Finally, the findings of this paper will be concluded.