A scholar whose work sits at the intersection of visual culture, Islamic studies, and the representation of Arabs and Muslims in the West — bringing rigorous and deeply personal understanding of how cultures see, and misread, one another across the East–West axis.
Hatem Akil is a visual culture scholar whose work sits at the intersection of visual theory, Islamic studies, and the representation of Arabs and Muslims in Western media. His monograph The Visual Divide Between Islam and the West (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) examines how images travel — and fail to travel — across cultural contexts, and what the stakes of that failure are for how Arab and Muslim communities are seen and understood.
His formation spans Damascus, UCLA, and the University of Central Florida. He studied theater and film at UCLA and the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Damascus, and English and world literature at the University of Damascus, before completing his PhD in Texts and Technology at UCF. That multi-sited formation is not incidental to his work — it is the condition of possibility for it, and it informs the particular attention he brings to what happens when images and words cross cultural thresholds.
At Interstice, Hatem brings that rigorous and deeply personal understanding to the practice's work at the East–West axis. His scholarship overlaps directly with François-Xavier Gleyzon's — both of them contributors to the Journal for Cultural Research's 2016 special issue on Deleuze, both working in visual culture, and both attentive to how representation, iconography, and perception operate across cultural and theological lines.
"A will-to-visibility — whereby Muslims and Arabs wish just to be seen, and marked as fellow human beings."— Hatem N. Akil, on The Visual Divide, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016
How the same image is perceived in opposing ways by viewers formed in different cultural contexts — and how the failure of cross-cultural visibility becomes entangled with political violence. The central question of his monograph and the work that followed.
From nineteenth-century French postcards to contemporary photojournalism, his work traces a long historical arc of how Western visual culture has constructed the Arab and Muslim body — and the consequences of that construction.
His chapter "The Missing Body: Figurative Representations in Islamic Iconography" in Global Modernity from Coloniality to Pandemic (2023) takes up the question of what is seen, what is refused, and what remains unrepresentable in Islamic visual traditions.
His essay "Deleuze, ISIS, and Delirium" (Journal for Cultural Research, 2016) appeared in the same special issue co-edited by François-Xavier Gleyzon and Christian Beck — placing his work within a shared philosophical register that runs through the Interstice advisory board.
Hatem's work is built on a core observation: that what an image means is never contained within the image itself. Meaning is produced at the point of reception, by viewers whose formation shapes what they see before they know they are seeing it. The same photograph, cartoon, or video can become a gesture of solidarity in one cultural context and an instrument of war in another.
That attention to the gap between what a message intends and what its reception will produce is directly aligned with the core of Interstice's methodology — which attends to the difference between what an institution means to say and what its formation will allow it to be heard as saying. Hatem's scholarly rigour on the visual divide informs how the practice thinks about cross-cultural communication at its most politically charged.
Hatem advises through Interstice — for retained advisory, scholarly collaboration, and work at the intersection of visual culture, Islamic studies, and cross-cultural representation. To begin a conversation, reach the practice directly.
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