Ten Years after the Danish Muhammad Cartoon News Stories: Terror and Radicalization as Predictable Media Events

In the tenth year after Danish daily Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons, the Muhammad Cartoons, this media event—and the hegemonic understanding behind it—continues to be a discursive reference point for new controversies around national borders and racial boundaries. Then, since late 2010, radicalization as a “pre-terrorist” phase has become the lens through which the category “Muslims” has been represented in much media coverage. In this article, I argue that the dominant hegemonic understanding in Denmark that is based on a certain spatial–racial logic is not a passive production of knowledge. It keeps informing news coverage of media events as terror and thereby risking describing the hegemony more than adequately understanding the events at hand.

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