Escaping Hollywood's Arab acting ghetto: An Examination of the Career Patterns and Strategies of American Actors of Middle-Eastern Origin

Résumé En

The mid-2000s have been an ambiguous period for American actors of Middle-Eastern origins. Contradictory reports have appeared in the press, from the enthusiastic assertion that ''It's a good time to be an actor from the Middle East'' 1 due to the growing number of American films dealing with the Middle East, to the description of the continued plight of actors ''relegated to playing terrorists, the new Arab acting ghetto.'' 2 One issue recurring in the few trade paper articles on the topic was indeed the difficulties encountered by these actors in a Hollywood context, where, in the words of Jack Shaheen, ''There's no escaping the Arab stereotype.'' 3 The aim of this paper is to provide a specific case study on the career of these specific minority actors, thus participating to the larger debate on the place of minority personnel in Hollywood. Concurring with Ella Shohat, and Robert Stam's remark that ''(that) films are only representations does not prevent them from having real effects in the world,'' 4 this paper will not call into question the idea of stereotypes but rather examine the very concrete consequences that these race-based stereotypes, bred both by the Hollywood industrial culture and by Mainstream America's social imagination, have on employment opportunities for actors, and on the strategies available to escape these constraints. The basis of the article is the quantitative and qualitative analysis of a database mapping out the careers of 22 Arab-American and Iranian-American actors. Determining a representative corpus of talent was the main methodological step since it is in fact difficult to define what an ''Arab-American'' is and to get reliable data. The Arab American Institute provides the following definition: ''Arab Americans constitute an ethnicity made up of several waves of immigrants from the Arabic-speaking countries of southwestern Asia and North Africa that have been settling in the United States since the 1880s.'' 5 According to the results to the ''ancestry question'' on the 2010 American Community Survey, people from or with ancestry from the following countries can be considered as Arab-American: Lebanon,