After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East

Brian Edwards

Published by Columbia University Press 2015

After the American Century

The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East

Brian Edwards

https://doi.org/10.7312/edwa17400

Overview
Contents

About this book

Building on a decade of fieldwork in Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran, Brian T. Edwards maps new routes of cultural exchange. Shaped by the digital revolution, these paths are entwined with the growing fragility of American "soft" power. They indicate an era after the American century, in which popular American products and phenomena—such as comic books, teen romances, social-networking sites, and ways of expressing sexuality—are stripped of their associations with the United States and recast in very different forms.

From Egyptian cyberpunk to dubbed versions of Shrek in Iran, this book examines the emergence of new forms of culture in circulation and their geopolitical implications.

Author / Editor information

Brian T. Edwards is Crown Professor in Middle East Studies and professor of English and comparative literary studies at Northwestern University, where he is also the founding director of the Middle East and North African Studies Program. He is the author of Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (2005) and a coeditor of Globalizing American Studies (2010). His articles have been published in the Believer, Public Culture, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere.

Reviews

Edwards is to be commended for his ethnographic methods, his command of local languages, and the originality of his archive.

Edwards challenges traditional narratives of US cultural imperialism.... Highly recommended.

Ambitious, wide-ranging, and highly valuable.

Now that American power is receding across the globe it is a good time to ask how... methodologies might adapt to these new circumstances, and what we might name such an academic adaptation. Brian T. Edwards' important new book... provides us with a possible answer to this arguably urgent question.

Edwards' background and considerable expertise shine... making the book a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the region.

John Waterbury:
Edwards plunges into the cultural lives of Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran to illustrate the demise of one aspect of "the American century": the outsize influence that U.S. popular culture exercised in the Middle East.

Donald E. Pease, Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities and founding director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College:
In After the American Century, Edwards has devised subtle, ethnographically informed reading methodologies to explain how anomalous logics of transnational circulation have radically undermined plans for a 'new American century.' The book will fast become indispensable to an understanding of the genealogy of transnational American studies.

Saba Mahmood, author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject:
This book is a rich account of what happens when cultural objects, literary texts, and films circulate between the Middle East and the United States: how they are interpreted and reinvented, in the process engendering new publics and counterpublics. A nuanced analysis of cultural politics that extends our understanding of the forms and limits of Western domination of the Middle East.

Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University:
After the American Century is a book of exquisite audacity. Bold in its detailed precision and daring in its imaginative topography of topics, Brian T. Edwards's writing cuts through much noise and nuisance to lay bare what lies ahead. Its arguments do not just dismantle the imperial fantasy of an 'American century,' but point to the uncharted worlds far beyond its captured imagination.

Marc Lynch, author of The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East:
After the American Century offers a fascinating tour of the appropriation and deployment of American popular culture in a globalized, restless Middle East. From cinema and novels to hip-hop and comic books, this wonderfully written and richly observed book presents novel and exciting readings of familiar cultural forms in new political environments.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
1. After the American Century Ends of Circulation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Jumping Publics Egyptian Fictions of the Digital Age Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	34
3. “Argo Fuck Yourself” Iranian Cinema and the Curious Logics of Circulation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	84
4. Coming Out In Casablanca Shrek , Sex, and the Teen Pic in Contemporary Morocco Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	139
Epilogue Embracing Orientalism in the Homeland Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	221
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	255

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 288
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 21
- Other: 21 b&w illustrations

eBook

Published: December 1, 2015
ISBN: 9780231540551