Representation Of Islamophobia

Islamophobia’s occurrence in any particular country has little do with the presence of Muslim; it is possible to be Islamophobic when there are virtually no Muslim around. This because the lack of Muslims is filled by the surplus of Islamophobic representations. This surplus of representations is now increasingly reliant on the internet. There are many studies reporting on Islamophobia on the internet, classifying the negative representations, the targeted acts of aggressive online behaviour (trolling) against Muslims. These studies are basically taxonomies, and they share this feature with general literature on Islamophobia, which is concerned with reporting instances of Islamophobia empirically with little time spent on its theorisation.

Islamophobia cannot simply be over-determined by the problem of immigrants and their integration into host societies. The tendency, especially pronounced in Western plutocracies, to see immigrants and Muslims as effectively equivalent should not prevent us from seeing the other logics in which Muslims often become metaphors for invaders and traitors. These four theatres define configurations of space providing distinct topographies where series of overlapping tropes are mobilised in the performance of Islamophobia. These theatres are transnational; they are unified not by spatial contiguity but performative resemblances. In other words, Islamophobia is not a national but global phenomenon. It may be experienced locally, some of its infrastructures may be enabled nationally, but it is articulated globally. It operates through these four theatres, providing the ‘structural selectivity' by which types of tropes are harnessed in specific narratives. Like other forms of racism, there is a ‘family resemblance’ in the categories by which Islamophobia is enunciated and

Spatial imaginaries in the West find it very difficult to evade the lure of Orientalism. The various representations of cyberspace demonstrate the way in which the spatial in different forms was articulated by tropes culled from the history of Orientalist imaginings. Descriptions of the meaning of cyberspace have reflected broader cultural disposition among Western plutocracies about the relationship between technology and humanity. Such articulations have significance for the Western enterprise, since, technological reasoning has been one main marker by which the West differentiated itself from the Rest. An approach which technology which saw in a positive light has been tempered by the realization that technology may undermine the human. The Western cultures also identified themselves as being societies in which the human could be the most humane. Thus, the tension between technology and humanity had a resonance in Western societies. This tension between technological and the human are reflected in main interpretations of the meaning of cyberspace. A complex set of interpretations can be summarized for our purposes as a dialectic between the potential of cyberspace to deliver totalitarianism or liberation. This dialectic can be seen in the shifts in perception about the