0. Setting in Motion: The Trans-Location of Anglophone Arab Cultures

Abstract

In season 5, episode 2 of the popular American television seriesHomeland, the former CIA officer Carrie Mathison, now in her new job as a security advisor to a hyper-humanitarian German oligarch, is escorted by Hezbollah militants through a Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon. The buildings and walls of the filmic setting are excessively covered with Arabic graffiti (fig. 1 and fig. 2). Among the messages spray-painted on the film set’s walls are “al-watan ‘unsuri (Homeland is racist),” “mafish watan (There is no Homeland),” and “al-watan batikh (Homeland is a watermelon).” One of the graffiti shows the Arabic transcription of the English words “Black lives matter.” What happened to the film set? Although the respective episode is set in an imagined Arab refugee camp, it was shot on an old factory site on the outskirts of Berlin. In the summer of 2015, the series’ producers hired a collective of Egyptian street artists to add authenticity to the camp’s location design. The artists known as Heba Yehia Amin, Caram Kapp, and Don Karl aka Stone used the unexpected opportunity to vent their political discontent with the controversial series. The drama was not only known for being one of President Barack Obama’s favorite TV shows but has also garnered the reputation of being among the most bigoted series for its undifferentiated and highly biased depiction of Arabs and Muslims. Although it supposedly questions America’s war