Critical Analysis of Racist Post-9/11 Web Animations

Abstract

This study employs a critical historical approach to situate a corpus of 106 post-9/11 anti-Arab Web cartoons as populist wartime narrative that remediates U.S. racist animation and racist wartime cartoons produced during World War II. Analysis of the production, distribution, and exhibition circumstances, as well as general narrative strategies deployed in the animations, demonstrates that these amateur texts resurrect and reproduce racist narrative strategies employed historically in professionally produced government-sanctioned animation. These cartoons illustrate how animators can use the Web as a folk venue for racist wartime animations that are currently unrepresentable by dominant mass media.