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Homeland is a television series that aired between 2011 and 2020 and falls into the genre of an espionage thriller. The majority of the film occurs within the U.S. as well as overseas in Middle Eastern countries such as Lebanon, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. However, the series has never filmed on location for any of the settings such as Beirut, Islamabad, or Kabul, often filming on sets or in Israel. The narrative follows an intelligence officer, Carrie Mathison, in a plot that is involved in investigating individuals or groups that are a threat to the U.S. This involves a missing Seargent who returns to the U.S. but is suspected to be working with a fictional terrorist leader, Abu Nazir, in a plot to attack the U.S.
Homeland has significant implications for the multicultural perspective not only due to the representation within the scope of fictional narrative but also due to the events that occurred throughout filming. For instance, recurring inconsistencies such as a Palestinian character with a Persian name, the depiction of Hamra street in Beirut inaccurately, and frequent mispronunciations of Arabic words and names. In one event, artists were hired to create graffiti for a set that was intended to appear as if in a Syrian refugee camp and had left messages calling out the show as poorly-informed and racist. These messages were visible in the episode and are another factor that exposes the issue with the perception of microcultures in television series such as Homeland.
The microcultural group presented in the television series, especially within U.S. settings, such as in West Virginia, are Muslims. A majority of Muslim characters are presented as terrorists or aiding or involved with terrorist groups. Similarly, the show conflates different terrorist organizations and allies them by ignoring complexities and conflicts that currently exist, such as between Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. In the case that characters are not terrorists, they are faceless and non-autonomous. Even promotional work promotes this narrative by placing the protagonist Mathison amidst a group of women in black burkas while she wears a red scarf. This allusion to a red-riding hood character caught between wolves is extremely narrow and offensive. While the representation of Muslims within Middle Eastern settings is almost always incorrect and stereotypical in Homeland, there is a failure to depict the microculture of Muslim Americans as well. The show depicts a narrative where individuals that come from a Muslim background, despite coming from different religious subgroups of countries, are all in connection with Islamist extremism and particularly with the antagonist of the series, Abu Nazir. Overall, the understanding of Islam and the Middle Eastern politics of the showrunners is very limited and translates to implications in the series which leads to misrepresentation.
The concept of an Arab American microculture in the U.S. clearly presents the effects of stereotyping and reliance on a conspiracy of terrorist-Muslim interactions. The harmful representation in Homeland mimics much of the fear-mongering that was promoted during the attack on September 11th, 2001 (Neuliep, 2018). While the involvement of all Muslim Americans in terrorism is false, the provision of the conspiracy by the media had instigated attacks that had resulted in the death of hundreds of people believed to be Arab Americans. Because the series does little to give voices to the Muslim characters within micro-cultural contexts, the concept of non-verbal communication can be beneficial to the analysis of the work. However, the series fails to depict culture-specific non-verbal codes that may be present among Muslim cultures by establishing regluar Muslim characters as not much more than props. The television series also exhausts the idea of collectivism placing U.S. and Muslim characters at unreasonable points on the scale individualist-collectivist concept.
Reference
Neuliep, J. W. (2018). Intercultural Communication: A contextual Approach (7th ed.). Sage.
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