Cultural representation and orientalism in hollywood cinema

In this study, it is aimed to reveal the connection between the Eastern images produced by the travellers that wrote about East in 17th and 19th centuries and the East/Eastern projections of the Hollywood movies with the ?traveller? theme, and to clarify the effect of the discourse created within the Orientalist tradition on the Eastern representations. The study uses (critical) discourse analysis method in order to identify the discoursive practices used for cultural positioning East and Easterns in Hollywood films with the ?traveller? theme and located in Egypt, like Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Mummy (1999) and Mummy Returns (2001) and to unveil the effecting aspects of the images, signs and stereotypes that were used by the Western travellers while defining East on the East/Eastern representations within the movie scripts. Within the movies, which were intensively examined in three aspects, namely dialogue, image and action, it was seen that East and Easterns were represented in accordance with the signs, images and stereotypes that were used in the literature of the travellers and it was concluded that the representation of East in both the films and travel literature with the same common qualities was a consequence of the stable and concrete Eastern fiction of Orientalist discourse.Keywords1.Orientalism2.Hollywood Cinema3.Cultural Representation4.Discourse5.Traveller