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

Cost:
Free USD
When Henry Luce announced in 1941 that we were living in the “American century,” he believed that the international popularity of American culture made the world favorable to U.S. interests. Now, in the digital twenty-first century, American movies, music, video games, graphic novels, social networking sites, and television shows move across the Middle East and North Africa with a speed and ease that was previously unimaginable—even while the political reputation of the United States has plummeted in the region.   How do we make sense of this shift? Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran, Brian Edwards argues that the ways that young Arabs and Iranians engage with American culture reflects a new set of global conditions—and he argues for a renewed understanding of how culture and geopolitics interrelate.

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 Program in Middle East and North African Studies. He is the author of Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express and a coeditor of Globalizing American Studies. His articles have been published in the Believer, Public Culture, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere.