After the American century : the ends of U.S. culture in the Middle East

One of the more delightful aspects of Brian Edwards’ writing, both in his latest book After the American Century and his previous work Morocco Bound is the open ended play of multiple meanings in both his language and his analysis.  In a book that discusses the interaction between globalized American culture and local reimagination and appropriation of that culture, this is perhaps most evident in Edwards’ invocation of the phrase “the ends of circulation.”  The multiple meanings of this phrase certainly include dual senses of “ends” as purpose or intention and “ends” as a stopping point at which circulation ceases. Perhaps this is not surprising in a writer who seems to be as deeply grounded in post-structuralist critical analysis as he is in Middle Eastern language and culture. It is apparent from the beginning that Edwards’ slim volume is a distillation of years of field work in the Middle East and North Africa – beginning and ending in Morocco – filtered through a fabric densely woven from an intimate knowledge of literature, cinema, and critical theory over years of study.   Like Edwards’ previous work, the book is self-consciously academic from the beginning and yet accessible to an intelligent and attentive layman.<br/><br/> One premise of the book is that American culture’s ever accelerated distribution with the advent of digital technology has permeated global culture, but concomitantly with the waning of American political and economic hegemony, American culture abroad has become increasingly deracinated.  As Americans, we think we know what American culture stands for, and we tend to interpret it in generally positive ways for its association with freedom and prosperity, without reflecting on the ways in which America’s standing abroad has soured since September 11, 2001. We fail to see the ways in which other cultures reinterpret it on their own terms, whether by dubbing the donkey in Shrek with subversive songs in Moroccan darija (dialect), subtly transposing meanings in Persian translations of American cinema, or reinventing the graphic novel in Egypt on the eve of the uprising in Tahrir Square in Egypt.  In each of the instances, Americans looking in from the outside naively assume that they can explain events in these cultures from the perspective of the export of American values, when a more thoughtful, insightful, and experienced analysis would suggest that the manipulation of American forms and symbols is turned to local purposes in a manner that is often completely opaque to Americans unfamiliar with the country’s cultural nuances.  Thus we naively congratulate ourselves on America’s export of Facebook to purportedly exotic and chaotic foreign lands as though it conveyed American sensibilities; this is a convenient narrative into which we can shoehorn the politics of other cultures.  In doing so, we fail to see the ways in which these countries have developed their own narratives under the impact of globalization in ways quite apart from our easy assumptions about how the world is constituted. By seizing on the facile and accessible “Facebook narrative,” we overlook the complex literary culture in Egypt that had a far more central role in building opposition to the brutal Mubarak regime so enthusiastically supported by the United States foreign policy establishment.  Ironically, the very centrality of that tradition to Egyptian culture – the fact that American forms have been steeped in Egyptian culture and reinterpreted in ways easily apparent only to Egyptians – tends to wall off an understanding of such cultural end products from reverse assimilation by Americans.<br/><br/> In perhaps the same sense of Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe “This is not a pipe” or the Iranian film maker Jafar Panahi’s film “This is not a film,” which Edwards discusses, After the American Century could have been aptly subtitled “This is not a book about American culture.”  Certainly, the center of gravity of the book is the ways in which the cultures of Egypt, Iran, and Morocco have assimilated artifacts of American culture for their own ends (that word again!). Perhaps most surprisingly in his description of the complexities of contemporary Iranian culture – where he observes that everything is forbidden and everything is permitted – Edwards strips bare the facile assumptions of American Orientalism. This is not to suggest that the Revolutionary government is not harsh or repressive, but it is to suggest that there is more to Iran than political conflict with the United States, and that even that conflict is not one-sided. Quite apart from the political history of American intervention in Iranian affairs, Edwards illustrates this complexity in his analysis of Iran’s ambivalence over the reception in Europe toward the sophisticated Iranian cinematic tradition – simultaneous pride in the acclaim and suspicion of the politicization of films that – in part by necessity – are not intrinsically political. <br/><br/> American understanding of a region in which it has become increasingly and ever more brutally involved will never mature so long as the circulation and consumption of cultural production is largely unidirectional. This cultural sclerosis has multiple consequences: it blinds us to how the world understands us, and it inhibits us from coming to a better understanding of the world.  As we move beyond the “American century” into an increasingly fractured world, our dependence on outdated cultural assumptions and our unwillingness or inability to come to grips with the originality of other cultures can only work to our detriment.  Edwards’ work – thoughtfully considered – is perhaps the beginning of a corrective.<br/>