After American Studies
A Review of After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East
Brian T. Edwards (Columbia UP, 2016)
American Studies emerged in tandem with the American century, and the methodologies that were developed under its banner were both symptoms of and engagements with the political and economic dominance of the United States in the postwar era. In its formative period, when the "myth and symbol" school dominated the discipline, American Studies was a reflection of and ideological support for the cold war consensus of the anti-Stalinist left. Then in the decades following the sixties, inflected by British cultural studies and the identity politics of the new social movements, scholars of American studies became increasingly critical of American hegemony, but they never doubted the fact of the global dominance, political, economic and, not incidentally, academic, of the United States. Now that American power is receding across the globe it is a good time to ask how these methodologies might adapt to these new circumstances, and what we might name such an academic adaptation. Brian T. Edwards' important new book, After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East, provides us with a possible answer to this arguably urgent question, though it also raises an equally urgent question of its own.
Edwards is a product of Yale's foundational American Studies program and he is currently Crown Professor in Middle East Studies and professor of English and comparative literary studies at Northwestern University; he is also the founding director of Northwestern's Program in Middle East and North African Studies. His academic trajectory, and the complex nomenclature necessary to represent it, provides an indication of the ways in which his scholarly methods both build upon and pivot away from those developed in the program where he was initially trained.
Edwards opens by naming the present: "American autumn" is the shorthand he uses "for the paradoxical situation we find ourselves in: U.S. hegemony is in decline economically and politically even while the products of American culture are ubiquitous" (2). It is the manifold trajectories of these multifarious products that Edwards traces—quite literally, as he is fluent in Arabic and his fieldwork in the Middle East has been extensive—in the pages that follow this opening claim. His book in turn is organized around the three countries in which he was able to live and work—Egypt, Iran, and Morocco—enabling him to establish a comparative framework that, in and of itself, outflanks the orientalism that frequently compromised American studies during the Cold War. Indeed, orientalism, both popular and scholarly, is the foil against which his study positions itself.
The title of his first chapter, "The Ends of Circulation," succinctly indicates the comparative methodology Edwards deploys throughout his study. As he notes, he is "interested in how the cultural product—and sometimes more importantly the form it takes—detaches from the source culture from which it comes" (12). Each of the chapters that follow traces the trajectory of a symptomatic selection of American products in a particular Middle Eastern country, meticulously documenting and discussing the frequently unexpected transformations those products undergo when appropriated by that country's culture (and subcultures). In some ways, Edwards might appear to be practicing a fairly conventional version of cultural studies, which has since its inception been invested in tracking, and celebrating how consumers appropriate and redirect cultural goods in ways that resist the exploitative power of the corporations that produce those goods. But Edwards diverges from these methods in his emphasis on circulation over reception: as his deliberate play on the multiple meanings of "ends" indicates, he is more hesitant, and humble, in establishing scholarly authority over the ultimate significance any given American product may have for its Middle Eastern consumers. While an end may be a purpose, it also may simply be the end, a sort of vanishing point beyond which the American scholar cannot go, no matter how fluent in the native tongue or familiar with the native culture.
Edwards' chapter on Egypt opens with an anecdote about a bobble-headed dog and concludes with a juxtaposition of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996) and Ahmed Alaidy's Being Abbas el Abd (2003), between which is sandwiched an extensive analysis of two groundbreaking graphic novels, Joe Sacco's Palestine (1996) and Magdy El Shafee's Metro (2012), all providing ample illustration of Edwards' omnivorous archive. The orienting interpretive trope of this chapter is also its title, "Jumping Publics," and Edwards' principle agenda is to complicate the West's simplistic understanding of the "Arab Spring," which he identifies as a signal instance of what Ali Behdad and Juliet Williams have recently dubbed "neo-Orientalism." Instead of tracking how American cultural products and political ideologies are adopted by or assimilated into Egyptian society, Edwards instead emphasizes how "innovative works that might at first come into being via the presence of or engagement with American forms could lead eventually to texts in which American meanings are absent" (49). As a result, it is folly to impose these American meanings on an American product once it has jumped from one public to another; as Edwards affirms, "that these works do not circulate back offers a rejoinder to the easy or celebratory account of American culture's circulation in Egypt as intrinsically liberatory" (74). This is an unassailable claim, and it is also a humbling one. As Edwards concludes, the works he discusses in this chapter "are powerful fictions of the digital age because they resist the pull back into a disciplining and disciplinary milieu that would reduce them to a translatable value. That end is where they thrive; that is where they end" (83). In the end, Edwards informs us, the ultimate meaning of the Egyptian appropriations of American products constitutes a sort of interpretative vanishing point into which Americans cannot penetrate.
Edwards' next chapter, provocatively titled "Argo Fuck Yourself," is about Iran, and focuses, for the most part, on cinema since, as he claims at the onset, "in the long-standing U.S. Iranian standoff, cinema plays a key role" (86). As Edwards' title indicates, the principal foil in this chapter is Ben Affleck's Academy Award-winning film Argo (2012), which Edwards reads over and against Asghar Farhardi's Academy Award winning film A Separation (2011). As Edwards concludes, "Farhadi's Iran is one in which differing positions are considered, interrogated, and weighed. Affleck's model of engagement with Iran is one of tricking Iran, slipping one past Iran; that is what circulation means to him" (107). It is also in this chapter that Edwards indicates another significant meaning for the ends of circulation, which refers to "the inability to go back to Iran for many Iranians who have left it" (127). Thus Edwards reminds us that it is not just cultural products but cultural producers who circulate in our contemporary global economy, and while digital technology enables products to circulate in an increasingly frictionless environment, producers are frequently limited by more mundane material and political circumstances.
Edwards' last chapter deals with Morocco, and again engages a dazzling variety of syncretic texts. The most eclectic, and impenetrable, is surely the "Miloudi," in which video pirate-artists appropriate clips from American films and overdub them with Moroccan popular music. Focusing on a particular, and particularly hilarious, example that makes use of Shrek, Edwards analyzes this form in terms of "decalage," which he defines as a "disjuncture, both temporal and geographic, between the soundtrack and the visual [which] is the active space of possibility" (153). From here Edwards pivots to what are, arguably, more conventional and legible forms of appropriation, the Moroccan teen pic and the new "coming out" novel. Edwards' close readings of Laila Marrakchi's films and Abdellah Taia's semi-autobiographical gay fictions are compelling and convincing, but here he neglects to indicate the degree to which the eclecticism of these texts is far more legible in terms of relatively traditional narratives of influence and appropriation.
Edwards concludes by confirming the degree to which his book is positioned against the "new and quickly deepening archive of twenty-first-century American Orientalism," and this is surely an admirable scholarly objective (207). But in fact, he indicates an important liability to his method in an earlier chapter, though he doesn't frame it in these terms: he concludes his chapter on Iran by exhorting his colleagues that "close reading must include the process of following texts and films and cultural products through the curious logics of their circulation, however distant that may take us" (138). But most scholars of American Studies don't have the extensive resources Edwards is able to leverage; indeed, in a time of shrinking support for American Studies specifically and the humanities generally, it is hard to see how anyone but the most privileged scholars can afford to conduct the sort of research Edwards encourages us to undertake. If we are to follow his lead, we will need to engage in some extensive coalition and institution building here in the United States, or we'll never be able to afford to conduct the research required to follow the products our country continues to circulate around the globe. In the end, Edwards' pun on "ends" comes back to haunt him, as the end of American Studies may prevent us from pursuing the ends of American culture at the end of the American Century.
Loren Glass is Professor in the department of English and the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa. His most recent book is Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde (Post*45 at Stanford University Press, 2016).