How Ramy Challenges Arab Stereotypes in American Media : A study of an Arab-American comedy drama

Abstract: The portrayal of Arabs and Muslims in American film and television has been a lopsided affair since the beginnings of Hollywood movie production. Over the course of film and TV production during the twentieth century, and later, Hollywood and TV production companies has used the Arab as a negative trope to negatively stereotype them, or to elevate the perception of American characters in contrast to the presentation of the baser character of the Arab. The English language has been the language of colonial power all over the world. No less so in the Middle East and North African regions. The stereotypes created in colonial times, has continued throughout the English language Hollywood film and American television production.  When Arab American comedian, Ramy Youssef, created an English language television show in the present USA, the previous century’s film and TV representation of Arabs is naturally something he has been exposed to. Ramy the TV-series is distributed to an American audience that chiefly speak the English language and have been raised on film and TV in America biased against the Arab. It necessitates Youssef to communicate criticism of the negative stereotypes in the English language. The aim of this study is to find out how Youssef’s TV show Ramy shows the attitudes of its characters and how it meets the preexisting negative stereotypic representation of Arabs. I used aspects of Jeffersonian transcription, a subdiscipline of Conversation Analysis, a part of Discourse Analysis, to study and analyze the flow and tone of the conversations in Ramy the TV-series as Jeffersonian transcription is a tool that can reveal attitudes in conversation. The results show that Ramy the TV-series uses a style of conversation, similar to everyday and unrehearsed conversations in the English language, and that intonation, cadence, and emphasis are used to reveal the attitudes of the characters. The results also show that Ramy the TV-series individualizes Arabs and problematizes the representation of an ethnic group by a single character.