The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies

1. Edward Said and American Studies

I first met Edward Said in 1976, when he came to the University of California, Irvine for what turned out to be one of many visits over the next twenty-five years. He was invited to Irvine primarily as a Critical Theorist, first by the School of Criticism and Theory, founded by Murray Krieger, and later by the Critical Theory Institute, a research group organized at Irvine in the early 1980s, for several occasional lectures, mini-seminars, and the1989 Wellek Library Lectures. Several of the faculty members in the Critical Theory Institute, such as Alexander Gelley, Gabriele Schwab, J. Hillis Miller, and Wolfgang Iser were also in Comparative Literature, so Said’s lectures and seminars usually drew a good proportion of Critical Theorists and Comparatists. Of course, Comparative Literature and Critical Theory were closely related at Irvine between 1975 and 2005, which may have been one of the many reasons we felt such close ties with Edward Said’s work.

When Said delivered his Wellek Library Lectures on May 9, 10, and 11, 1989, he was Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, a fact lost on many people who viewed him primarily as a Comparatist and Critical Theorist. [15] Said’s 1964 doctoral dissertation at Harvard was on “The Letters and Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad,” and his subsequent writings include numerous essays and book chapters on major figures in nineteenth and twentieth-century English literature. [16] Shakespeare, Milton, Defoe, Swift, Samuel Johnson, Sterne, Fielding, Blake, Austen, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, George Eliot, Dickens, Gissing, Arnold, Hopkins, Hardy, Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Kipling, Joyce, T. E. Lawrence, and Orwell appear frequently in his books and essays. Even this partial list indicates both Said’s thorough education in the elite literary culture of the modern Anglo-American university, often identified loosely with F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948), and the social criticism of an aesthetic ideology he drew from Swift, Sterne, Dickens, Gissing, Wilde, Shaw, and Conrad.

Yet when considered in terms of his contributions to American Studies and American literary study, Edward Said does not appear to figure centrally in fields secondary to his formal education in English and his increasing focus on non-European cultures, especially those constituting the Arab world, from Orientalism (1978) to the end of his career. Said refers frequently to T. S. Eliot and Henry James, especially in the early work Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), but he treats both authors in keeping with their post-World War II incorporation into the English tradition. [17] Of the relatively few U.S. literary authors Said treats at any length, he quickly focuses on their scholarly reputations as representative Americans in order to link such exceptionalism with “the American quest for world sovereignty” (R, 364). His witty review of Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published The Dangerous Summer (1985)—Hemingway’s return to the bullfighting culture he treated expertly in Death in the Afternoon (1932)—begins by invoking the platitude that “American writing” is distinguished by its “‘how-to-ism,’” only to conclude that “the great problem of American writing” is that “the shock of recognition derived from knowledge and converted into how-to-ism can only occur once […]. The second time around, it is dragged into the market” and commercialized. [18] Said is referring explicitly to the inferiority of The Dangerous Summer to the earlier Death in the Afternoon, but he is also arguing that the distinctiveness of Hemingway’s identity is more an effect of the market than of his ineffable representation of American masculinity.

In his “Introduction” to the 1991 Vintage paperback of Moby-Dick, Said also focuses on American exceptionalism, agreeing with “Leon Howard, Newton Arvin, and Michael Paul Rogin” that “the irreducibly American quality of his life and work” (R, 358) distinguishes Melville’s reputation and confirms the scholarly cliché that Moby-Dick is “the greatest and most eccentric work of literary art produced in the United States” (R, 356). Having paid homage to the Americanists, Said stresses Moby-Dick’s “Euripidean” plot and “connections to Homer, Dante, Bunyan, Cervantes, Goethe, Smollett,” proceeding to an extended comparison of Melville and Conrad (R, 356, 358–359). Putting Melville in the comparative contexts of Europe and America, Said can then problematize the exceptionalist model of American literature by claiming: “I suppose it is true to say that only an American could have written Moby-Dick, if we mean by that only an author as prodigiously endowed as Melville could also have been, as an American, so obsessed with the range of human possibility” (R, 358). Said’s rhetorical qualifications cause the reader to hesitate as well, so that the fiction of Melville’s “Americanness” is effectively replaced by what Said concludes are the inherently transnational qualities of Moby-Dick: “The tremendous energies of this magnificent story of hunting the White Whale spill over national, aesthetic, and historical boundaries with massive force” (R, 358).

Another good example of how Said deconstructs American exceptionalism is his interpretation of R. P. Blackmur. Said views Blackmur’s focus on “consciousness” in Henry James as symptomatic of Blackmur’s own struggle to legitimate his authority “as a teacher, critic, and cultural force at Princeton right after World War Two” (R, 261), especially in an anti-intellectual and anti-aesthetic society that “obligates the artist” to realize imaginatively the whole cultural fabric “no longer carried by social institutions” (R, 260). Said also argues that the Jamesian sensibility or fine conscience that so appealed to Blackmur was part of that civilized heritage the American had to take up in the postwar period as part of a vaguely defined “American responsibility for the world after the dismantling of the old imperial structures” (R, 261). Said can thus identify “the imperialism latent in [Blackmur’s] sense of the American creation of a new consciousness” while brilliantly diagnosing Blackmur’s skepticism as a reaction to this new version of the white man’s (call it the American’s) burden: “All [Blackmur’s] portraits of intellectuals and artists in the world are either morose, severely judgmental, or downright pessimistic: his lifelong fascination with Henry Adams is the strongest case in point” (R, 261–262). [19]

Taken by themselves, Said’s writings on American authors and critics do not constitute a major contribution to American Studies, but weaving through even his earliest references to the U.S. is his central concern with the rise of the American Empire. Said’s definition and criticism of U.S. imperialism developed throughout his career, and there are notable omissions and oddities in the ways he interprets the rise of the U.S. global hegemony. Orientalism is the work most frequently cited as a model for new American Studies committed to the critical study of the U.S. as an imperial power, but Said’s classic work relatively backgrounds the complex nineteenth-century history of U.S. political, economic, and cultural involvements in the South Pacific, Japan, China, Africa, and the Arab world. Said’s most sustained discussion of this history occurs in the final chapter, “Orientalism Now”, where he emphasizes how “during the nineteenth century the United States was concerned with the Orient in ways that prepared for its later, overtly imperial concern” and proceeds to a brief discussion of “the founding of the American Oriental Society in 1842”. [20] Said’s criticism of imperialism in Orientalism focuses on the great European imperial powers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—England, France, Spain, and Portugal—to understand in part the historical legacies and foreign policies taken over by the United States in the twentieth century. Said often characterized Orientalism as part of his own anti-war response to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, including his endorsement of Noam Chomsky’s critique of the “instrumental connection between the Vietnam War and the notion of objective scholarship as it was applied to cover state-sponsored military research” (O, 11). [21] Nevertheless, the general argument of Orientalism stresses U.S. imperialism as a twentieth-century development, despite the substantial, even defining scholarship in American Studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s that studied the “internal colonialism” of slavery, Native American genocide, Manifest Destiny, and sustained conflicts with other colonial powers in North America such as Spain, France, Great Britain and Mexico.

Fifteen years after Orientalism, Said refers in Culture and Imperialism (1993) to an “imperial motif” that rivals “the European one” in nineteenth-century America and how such U.S. imperialism has been “memorably studied by Richard Slotkin, Patricia Limerick, and Michael Paul Rogin”. [22] American Studies scholars could add many names to Said’s 1993 list, including Ronald Takaki, Richard Drinnon, Robert Berkhofer, Reginald Horsman, and Annette Kolodny, but it is fair to conclude that Culture and Imperialism takes more seriously than Orientalism the study of how U.S. racial, gender, ethnic, and regional categories legitimated traditional imperialism. It might also be the case that Said’s relative neglect in Orientalism of nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism, including the substantial scholarship done on the U.S. as an “internal colonizer”, may have provided motivation for new scholarship in American Studies that since 1993 has focused increasingly on the relationship between internal and external modes of territorial expansion, economic exploitation, population control and cultural legitimation. Amy Kaplan acknowledges just this sort of indirect influence in the opening chapter of The Anarchy of Empire in United States Culture (2002): “I am indebted to Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism […] which powerfully shows how the treasures of high culture in Europe bear the traces of their foundation in a remote geography of imperial violence”. [23]

Culture and Imperialism certainly pays much greater attention to U.S. imperialism (and American Studies scholarship on this subject) than Orientalism, but Said’s identification of the U.S. with neo-imperialism in the aftermath of decolonization is consistent in both works. “Freedom from Domination in the Future” is the final chapter of Culture and Imperialism, and it begins with “American Ascendancy: The Public Space at War”, which deals primarily with U.S. global hegemony as it took shape in the post-World War II period (CI, 283–303). To be sure, Said makes references to earlier instances of U.S. imperialism, including the territorial expansion of Manifest Destiny and “offshore experiences […] from the North African coast to the Philippines, China, Hawaii, and […] the Caribbean and Central America” (289), as well as to “anti-imperialists like Mark Twain, William James, and Randolph Bourne” (287). But the explicitly utopian project of political reform Said proposes in his final chapter is set firmly in contrast to “the depressing truth” that cultural anti-imperialism “has not been effective” from the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars to Desert Storm, the military action that haunts the final pages of Culture and Imperialism with Said’s awareness that: “Such views as opposed the United States attack on Iraq did nothing at all to stop, postpone, or lessen its horrendous force” (287).

Even Said’s brief “A Note on Modernism” in Culture and Imperialism follows his periodization of traditional imperialism with primarily the British and French (and to a lesser extent imperial powers of Spain and Portugal who are in “decline” in the nineteenth century) and neo-imperialism with the U.S. (CI, 186–190). His version of cultural modernism does not go very far beyond the Anglo-Irish-Franco version he considers at greater length in Beginnings. Conrad, Forster, Joyce, Woolf, T. E. Lawrence, Malraux, Proust, Picasso, T. S. Eliot, Pound, and Thomas Mann (a nod to German colonialism) are Said’s representatives of the cosmopolitan modernism that ambivalently represented non-European cultures either in conjunction with or as contesting the European will to global power (188–189). In these contexts, T. S. Eliot and Pound figure for Said less as “American” writers than as major figures in such cosmopolitanism, an assumption reinforced by their own carefully cultivated expatriate identities as British and Italian, respectively.

Edward Said is often named as the “founder” of Postcolonial Studies, a claim that has troubled me even as I acknowledge Said’s great importance in advancing Postcolonial Studies as a diverse set of methodologies and overlapping, sometimes contentious, studies of different areas and groups, especially in the non-European and non-U.S. “peripheries” where the majority of the world’s population lives and in many cases barely survives. In recent years and certainly influenced in part by Said’s work, Postcolonial Studies has become a central methodology and topic of debate within the changing field of American Studies. Beginning with Lawrence Buell’s “Are We Post-American Studies?” (1996) and including the essays in C. Richard King’s Postcolonial America (2000) and in my Post-Nationalist American Studies (2000), discussions of how American and Postcolonial Studies can be related have been among the most lively and contentious in the academy. [24] In The New American Studies (2002), I offer my own analyses and solutions to these problems, because I believe that the future of both fields are crucially related and that mistaken efforts to struggle with each other for institutional power and space may have unexpectedly negative consequences for both fields. [25]

Said’s ambivalent relationship to the history of Postcolonial Studies is instructive for those scholars interested in articulating a closer relationship between American Studies and Postcolonial Studies. One of the most important sources for Postcolonial Studies is the work done by South Asian scholars in groups like the Subaltern Studies Group of Historians, which has close affiliations with politically activist groups, including Marxist and feminist organizations. Culture and Imperialism cites the work of some Postcolonial Studies scholars, but Said pays scant attention to feminism and repeats his traditional distrust of Marxist politics. Orientalism is predicated on the European “feminization” of the “Orient”, as well as the projection of European homophobia onto the “exotic East”, but throughout his career Said acknowledges feminism more gesturally than substantially, rarely mentions gay studies and queer theories, and registers frequently his commitments to Marxian theories but his distrust of Marxian practice. As early as 1982, Gayatri Spivak challenged Said to take more seriously both feminism and post- or neo-Marxian theories by contending that Said’s “calls for a criticism that would account for ‘quotidian politics and the struggle for power’” must be supplemented by “feminist hermeneutics”, which already “articulate the relationship between phallocracy and capital, as well as that between phallocracy and the organized Left”. [26] In The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Said could admire Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as “brilliant and […] compelling” while distancing himself from “Marxism” as just another label that inhibits the freedom of “critical consciousness”. [27]

My uneasiness with the identification of Said as the origin of Postcolonial Studies stems in part from Said’s own cultivation of his role as a Gramscian “organic intellectual”, whose critical function Said identified in the early 1980s as operating “in that potential space inside civil society, acting on behalf of those alternative acts and alternative intentions whose advancement is a fundamental human and intellectual obligation” (WTC, 30). In my view, Said grafted Gramsci’s organic intellectual with the modernist “cosmopolitan” in an effort to salvage an independent, often elite, metropolitan “critical consciousness” that became increasingly untenable in the light of poststructuralist critiques of the subject, postcolonial calls for collaborative multidisciplinary scholarship and political coalitions, and cultural studies’ criticisms of the aesthetic ideology and its cult of “genius”. In 1997, Said criticized Postcolonialism for “the realization of militant nationalism and of nation-states in which dictators […] speak the language of self-determination and liberation”. Under these circumstances, Said prefers the alternative “of the intellectual whose vocation is to speak the truth to power, to reject the official discourse of orthodoxy and authority, and to exist through irony and skepticism, […] trying to articulate the silent testimony of lived suffering and stifled experience” (R, 526).

Said always stresses how his own transnational experiences help him shape an identity strategically “out of place”, to borrow from the title of his autobiography, and thus capable of a “worldly” perspective often unavailable to intellectuals rooted in specific national or other social locations. In the concluding paragraph of Out of Place, Said turns such an outlook into an ontological category: “I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents .[…] are ‘off’ and may be out of place, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations […]. A form of freedom, I’d like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is”. [28] Said often found such worldliness in the best literature, comparative scholarship, and in strong predecessors, notably Erich Auerbach, but in ways that sometimes threatened to gloss over the very different historical, cultural, and sociopolitical circumstances involved (WTC, 5–9). [29] Said never explicitly connected this cosmopolitanism with Americanness or even with modernism, but it has very strong roots both in the myth of American selfhood criticized effectively by the American myth critics and in American expatriates’ careful cultivation of their “otherness” abroad.

Many of Said’s models for such cosmopolitanism were friends and colleagues at Columbia identified with the New York intellectuals. [30] Said’s collection of essays, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, is dedicated “To the memory of F. W. Dupee” and opens with a testament to their friendship, especially Dupee’s “radical and open spirit” and his encouragement of Said’s “interest in the new styles of French theorizing, in experimental fiction and poetry” (R, xiii). Although he acknowledges his “great affection for Trilling as an older colleague and friend”, Said clearly includes Lionel Trilling with those New York intellectuals “among whose worst features were […] a tiresome narcissism and a fatal propensity to self-important, rightward-tending shifts”, as well as an “Anglophilia so endemic to the New York intellectual style” (xiii). [31] In contrast, Said represents Dupee as a left intellectual, committed to the “radical, anti-authoritarian politics of his early Trotskyist years”, even though Dupee’s scholarship and teaching in the years Said knew him certainly followed the high-cultural model of many other New York intellectuals (xiii). As a scholar, Dupee is certainly best remembered for his 1951 contribution to the “American Men of Letters” series, Henry James: His Life and Writings, which played a major part in the post-World War II revival of Henry James as central in the American literary tradition. [32] Nevertheless, it is “Fred Dupee who after 1967, when the great Arab debacle occurred, supported me in my lonely fight on behalf of the Palestinian cause”, and “Dupee and his wife Andy were the only friends from my academic New York life ever actually to pay me a visit in Beirut, at that time (fall 1972) the center of revolutionary politics in the Middle East” (xiii).

Said’s testament to his friendship with the Dupees is unquestionably personal and sincere, but it is also a means for Said to acknowledge his affiliation with the New York intellectuals while distancing himself from their Eurocentric cultural interests and conservative politics. The same conclusion might be drawn more broadly with respect to Said’s frequent praise for New York City as “today […] what Paris was a hundred years ago, the capital of our time”, due largely to “its eccentricity and the peculiar mix of its attributes”, especially as it contributes to his own sense of being “out of place” (R, xi). Remarkably, Said’s admiration of Fred Dupee and his love of New York follow the logic of filiation and affiliation he analyzed so brilliantly in “Secular Criticism”: “If a filial relationship was held together by natural bonds and natural forms of authority—involving obedience, fear, love, respect, and instinctual conflict—the new affiliative relationship changes these bonds into what seem to be transpersonal forms—such as guild consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class, and the hegemony of the dominant culture” (WTC, 20).

I have focused thus far on how Edward Said ambivalently worked within the EuroAmerican worlds of culture, history, and higher education he so effectively criticized in his major writings. Succeeding within those systems was, of course, crucial for his critical consciousness, and his role as a public intellectual cannot be understood without analyzing his affiliations with the EuroAmerican modernists, the New York intellectuals, myths of the “American Adam,” and the “traveling theory” that found such a welcome in the U.S. academy of the 1970s and 1980s. Much of Said’s “critical consciousness” was thus deeply “American”, just as he was himself not only a sometime scholar of American literature and culture but personally, existentially, and legally American. Indeed, his celebrity was also curiously and sometimes troublingly American, insofar as the international community of scholars both loved and reviled him for his ability to operate successfully within the specialized discourses of the university and still respond in several different mass and popular media. Said exemplified the ways the Enlightenment’s cult of genius changed into one of celebrity in the postmodern era, and along the way how this transformation became closely identified with the American commercialism Said satirizes so eloquently in his essay on Hemingway, “How Not to Get Gored” (R, 238).

Scholars admired or condemned Said precisely because he was expected to assume the responsibilities of communicating our knowledge to the general public and of translating intellectual debates into public, even foreign, policies. Edward Said did this work brilliantly, but he also became the academy’s sacrificial figure, far too charismatic in our imaginations for us ever to match his accomplishments and far too dangerous in his political actions for us to emulate. W. J. T. Mitchell points out in “Remembering Edward Said” that “Edward’s public appearances were plagued by death threats that he dismissed (along with his cancer) as an annoying distraction, and (even worse) by questioners who wanted to lure him into anti-Semitic comments, or to characterize his criticisms of Israel as expressions of anti-Semitism”. [33] Said was unquestionably courageous in the ways he responded to public, often dangerous, criticism and in the positive ways he responded to his Leukemia, but we also fitted to him the mask of mythic heroism in part to avoid our own responsibilities as intellectuals to carry our knowledge to a wider audience and to endure the eccentric responses such wisdom so often provokes. There are, of course, many other public intellectuals who have achieved their reputations in part as consequences of their distinguished scholarship, yet few achieved the sort of celebrity that in the case of Edward Said was a distinctively American version of sacrificial success.

The dangers of this cult of academic celebrity are underscored by the continuing debates regarding academic freedom and legislative efforts to limit such freedom, often on the grounds that “politics” do not “belong” in the classroom. The recent legislation in Arizona directed at undocumented workers included a bill banning Chicano/a Studies in the Tucson public schools on the grounds of its “anti-Americanism”. In 2003–2004, there was considerable debate in Congress over H.R. 3077, the resolution popularly known as Congress’s effort to “regulate postcolonial studies”. [34] Passed by the House of Representatives on October 24, 2003, H. R. 3077 languished in a Senate subcommittee before quietly dying in 2004. The bill grew in part out of efforts by Martin Kramer’s Middle East Forum and Daniel Pipe’s Campus Watch to repress what these neo-conservatives consider the politicizing of knowledge by area studies and Postcolonial Studies. The Congressional hearings were viewed by many intellectuals as a new stage in the federal government’s censorship under the guise of “national security”. Named several times as the “founder of Postcolonial Studies” in Stanley Kurtz’s report to the Subcommittee, Edward Said and Orientalism are central examples of what Kurtz terms the “anti-Americanism” now taught in U.S. universities. Kurtz, a “well known partisan from the Hoover Institute and National Review”, recommends U.S. government regulation of “the Title VI funds given over to universities of the study of the rest of the world” (Prashad). The ease with which Kurtz incorrectly identifies Said as the “founder” of Postcolonial Studies and suggests thereby a conspiracy controlled by a single intellectual is what troubles me. New government interference in intellectual life has already resulted from the Bush Administration’s appeals for “anti-terrorist” and new “Homeland Security”, with or without scapegoats like Edward Said, but the ability of uninformed neo-conservatives to mount successful attacks of this sort hinge on their rhetoric of paranoia and conspiracy. How much better might it have been for Postcolonial and Area Studies had Kurtz been unable to single out the “perpetrators”, because so many scholars had shared openly these paradigms of knowledge? In short, what would have happened if we had all said: “Yes, we are all Postcolonial scholars”?

Said’s fame is based less on his arguments in such major academic books as Beginnings, Orientalism, and Culture and Imperialism, few of which have been read by Said’s most vituperative public critics, than on his advocacy of the politics of self-determination and cultural representation by the peoples of the Arab world. Within this world, there are of course Said’s own Egyptian, Palestinian, and Lebanese filiations; he has argued vigorously on behalf of the Palestinians’ rights to their own homeland and accompanying economic, political, and cultural autonomy. In this respect, he has criticized consistently and coherently U.S. foreign policies that have unilaterally supported Israeli imperialism toward the Palestinian people, especially evident in the conduct of the Israeli government and its military in the current crisis. One of the consequences of the internationalizing of American Studies as a discipline is that we must take responsibility for the conduct of the U.S. outside its borders, and Said’s advocacy of Palestinian rights generally includes his criticism of U.S. governmental policies, media representations of Palestinians primarily as “terrorists”, and Orientalist scholarship that have contributed to the current undeclared war between Israel and Palestine. [35]

Said’s extensive scholarship and journalism on the politics and cultures of the Arab world reach back to the beginnings of his career with the publication in 1970 of “The Palestinian Experience” and “A Palestinian Voice”. [36] Assessing Said’s work in Middle Eastern Studies and political journalism over thirty-three years will take the research skills and background knowledge of scholars with qualifications in those fields, but even before such work is done American Studies scholars can learn much from Said’s comparative studies of the U.S., Arab, and Israeli political and cultural contexts. In 1979, he wrote prophetically: “I do not recall a period in recent Arab history when there has been so widespread, so sustained, and so anguished an interest in the United States. Beneath all this interest there is of course the undisputed fact that America and American interests touch Arab lives with an intrusive immediacy”. [37] A common criticism of the broadening of American Studies to include both the work of international scholars and considerations of the U.S. as a global power is that we cannot cover “everything” in our curricula and scholarly projects. Yet the assumption that the study of the U.S. in its connections with other nations, peoples and regions must somehow be done by each individual scholar or exclusively organized by American Studies programs and curricula is refuted by the work of many scholars responding to Said’s provocations for a new understanding of our relations with the Arab world.

In the post-nationalist era we have already entered, characterized as much by neo-nationalist struggles as it is by a dizzying array of transnational dangers and hopes, the comparatism Edward Said exemplified in his public persona and his distinguished career should be the work of many different scholars, coming from many, increasingly overlapping disciplines such as American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Comparative Religions, History, Comparative Literature, Philosophy, Political Science, Anthropology, and Foreign Language departments. Their work ought to be diverse and contentious, but the goal should be certain intellectual coalitions essential for a new liberal education global in scope. Another goal should be the development of public policies that might confirm or challenge the knowledge of government sponsored experts on all sides. In short, we might work toward these difficult but imaginable collaborative ends as a way of replacing the singular celebrity of Edward Said with the more collective and diverse voices of professional intellectuals willing to take greater responsibility for the world in which they live. If we continue to work in the directions already suggested by Said’s work and in the rich scholarship of Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies, and the new American Studies, we will remember Edward W. Said in the best way possible: as the teacher who encouraged us to go beyond his work.

In this spirit, I turn now to the development of an “American Orientalism” Said may have anticipated but did not live to witness in its current state, particularly manifest in the troubling Islamophobia evident in certain areas of contemporary U.S. society. The recent debates about the construction of an Islamic Center two blocks from “ground zero” in Manhattan, recently entangled with plans by a small-town preacher in Central Florida to burn Korans on 9/11 in protest against Islamic terrorists, are troubling examples of how polarized the U.S. and the Islamic world have become. My purpose is to suggest that Edward Said’s contributions to American Studies are more than merely disciplinary and certainly more important than what he might have occasionally said about Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot. Said’s legacy for the new American Studies and its cultural politics must be understood as his elaboration of key ideas for our understanding of the U.S. as a global power deeply involved in the politics of the Middle East. By the same token, Said should not be treated as an omniscient prophet; American Orientalism is not merely an extension and elaboration of the European version Said interpreted so well in Orientalism and other scholarly and journalistic works. When Said died on September 25, 2003, the Second Gulf War had been officially declared over and our military “mission accomplished” in President George W. Bush’s infamous speech on May 1, 2003, even though the U.S. military occupation of Iraq would last another seven years. Said certainly recognized Bush’s military bravura and our unjustified invasion in the search for elusive “weapons of mass destruction” as the causes of the civil war that would break out in Iraq and the breakdown of civil society that would cause hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to die in sectarian violence and millions to flee the country. For Said, it was a familiar story in the history of Western imperialism in the region.

Said did predict how traditional U.S. imperialism would metamorphose into neo-imperialism from the First Gulf War to the Bush Administration’s postulation of a “Great Middle East”, balanced and secured by our disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq in the Second Gulf War. This “new Orient” follows historically the paths of European colonialism in the Middle East, especially in the build-up and aftermath of colonial struggles in North Africa and the Middle East surrounding the construction of the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869, the balance-of-power European and Ottoman Empire politics negotiated in the region in the World War I era, and the first major foreign exploitation of Middle Eastern oil resources in the 1920s. Gun-boat diplomacy, spheres of political influence, such as the British Mandate in Palestine, commercial opportunism of first world nations disguised by the rhetoric of modern “development” and “free-trade” capitalism such as Standard Oil and British Petroleum relied upon, have merely been extended by the U.S. over the past two decades in typically “Orientalist” ways.

Said also understood how this imperial legacy shaped the current stalemate between the state of Israel and Palestine, as well as such immediate neighbors as Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria—a political stalemate virtually guaranteed by the territorial fractures that have made distinct national sovereignties in the region impossible to define, much less maintain. “Imperialism is finally about land,” Said writes in Culture and Imperialism, insisting upon an imperial bed-rock we are warned never to forget (CI, xii-xiii). A mere glance at a map of the distribution of Israeli and Arab communities in Israel and Palestine’s divided territories makes clear how impossible any simple division of the region into Israel and Palestine would be, reminding us perhaps why Palestinian politicians in 1948 rejected the apparently common-sense solution of “partitioning” two distinct nations. Whatever successful solution is achieved will involve new conceptions of “national borders”, changing notions of the self-containment and territorial autonomy of the nation-state.

But there are limits to the mere extension of the traditional imperialist model to the neo-imperialism of the contemporary U.S., which certainly dates from the Vietnam War (1965–1975). Said’s insistence upon the irreducible “reality” of land as the object of imperialism’s desire may also mark the limitation of his thoroughly modern conception of Orientalism as a key strategy of Western imperialism. In exposing how Orientalism disguised the basic land-grabs of European imperialists, Said imagined a relatively straightforward demystification of the Western discursive practices—scholarship, literature, visual arts, news media, et al.—that otherwise masked or disguised the real political situation in the Middle East. Feminized, marginalized, minoritized and above all linguistically and culturally excluded from this Western discourse, Arabic culture needed primarily to be reasserted in its venerable authority, both as it had informed and shaped the West and as it continued to represent itself in ways simply distorted and repressed in the willful misreadings of the West. Taking upon himself this task as cultural translator and demystifier, Said cast himself in the role of anti-imperalist critic of a West whose cultural protocols he understood at the professional level of a trained European Comparatist and Continental theorist.

Today, “covering Islam” has assumed some different modes not completely anticipated by Said that transform our understanding of what must be termed a “neo-Orientalism” manipulated by the U.S. State that draws only in part from traditional Western Orientalism, itself primarily the work of European imperialism. I will consider a few of these new modalities under a single, roughly formulated heading: the internalization of the traditional “Orient” within the U.S. nation. I prefer this description to “Americanization”, itself an older form of cultural importation within the history of U.S. imperialism, because I think this process has some new features that differ from “Americanization” in the simplest sense, notably a complex and contradictory use of the “nation” by hegemonic powers that are themselves self-consciously transnational and global. Said certainly understood nineteenth-century European Orientalism to be a projection of Europe’s own unconscious anxieties about the foreign, the feminine, the sexual, the racial and the irrational “other”. Said objected to deconstruction and post-structuralism in general, but he himself “deconstructed” these “others” to expose the European psychosis, whose principal symptom must be its incurable, unsatisfiable imperialist desire.

But Said’s criticism of Orientalism reaches its limit when confronted by such cultural productions as John Walker Lindh, “the American Taliban”, and Azar Nafisi, the American Iranian; the former a convicted and imprisoned “enemy combatant” (legally, not a “terrorist,” or else he would be in Guantanamo, probably untried, at this very moment), and the other a new “patriot” for both U.S. and Iran, perhaps even that inconceivable “transnational” entity, “American Iran”. I consider both Lindh and Nafisi in their own terms in chapters five and six, respectively, but I want to use them here to exemplify the neo-Orientalism Said did not quite comprehend. Lindh draws the “new Orient” into the otherwise disparate field of “domestic terrorism”, condensing David Koresh, Timothy McVeigh, Ruby Ridge (Idaho) secessionists with Middle Eastern, Islamic radicalism. Today, that relation has morphed to include Left politics’ anti-imperialist struggle in the anti-Vietnam War movement and thus tacitly the anti-war movements against the immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sarah Palin’s resurrection of Barack Obama’s association with William Ayres during the 2008 Presidential Campaign is symptomatic of how Obama’s “criticism” of America and the Second Gulf War condenses the Weather Underground Ayres co-founded in the 1960s and the anti-Vietnam War politics it served with a more general anti-American “hatred” that improbably links critical positions as different as critical American Studies as a discipline, anti-Gulf War protests, such as MoveOn.org has sponsored, and neo-Nazi and radical Libertarian groups committed to American isolationism and racial purity. It would do no good to protest that such radical movements in the U.S., only some of which have been labeled “domestic terrorism”, usually depend upon their profound patriotism, insisting that whatever criticism they advocate is necessary for a functional democracy.

Lindh posed a far greater threat to U.S. state authority because he refused that democratic and national universe of discourse. As a consequence, he had to be ideologically neutralized by infantilizing him and offering him a “lenient” sentence that further testified to his “adolescent” rebellion against Yuppie parents, Bay Area permissiveness, and other “symptoms” of a post-Vietnam generation that could not adequately parent because its members had themselves “never grown up”. The familiar neo-conservative explanation of anti-Vietnam War protest, such as Paul Berman has claimed in A Tale of Two Utopics (1996) and its sequel Power and the Idealists (2005), dismisses strong criticism of foreign policy, imperialism, and unjustified warfare as “childish”, out of touch with the “real world” and the presumed “Realpolitik” of U.S. military and economic policies around the globe. To be sure, the conflation of the “Orient” (Yemen and Afghanistan in the case of Lindh) with “infantilism” recalls sophisticated Hegelian theories of historical “development” from the “infant” East through the adolescence of Egypt to Greco-Roman young adults and the full maturity of German idealist philosophers, like Hegel himself. Lindh’s domestication of Islamic radicalism turns on his adolescent rebellion against Western “modernity and development”, a regressive gesture through which “he” displaces and incorporates Arabic, Afghani, Yemeni, and other “Oriental” social institutions and Islam, embodying this “new Orient” in the uncanny figure of the bearded Bay Area youth in the U.S. courtroom, once again confusing anti-Vietnam War hippies with radical Islam.

Another version of this misrecognition is the emigré Middle Eastern writer, Azar Nafisi, whose authority in Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) is presumed to be that of a “native informant”, familiar with the political and social history of Iran in the aftermath of the Shah’s brutal rule. Nafisi is, of course, just one of numerous emigré writers who have capitalized on such eye-witness accounts, including the equally celebrated Khaled Hosseini, whose The Kite Runner (2003) is supposed to give us an insider’s account of Afghanistan from the pre-Soviet era to the Taliban’s rule. Of course, eye-witnesses are always to be judged skeptically, especially when we are considering politically conflicted societies irreducible to a single, representative perspective. Often enough the actual authority of the non-Western native is Western, threatening native credentials. Nafisi’s authority is actually that of the Ph.D. in English literature she earned from the University of Oklahoma, not her ability to do the sort of social ethnography of modern Iran we identify with the new cultural geographers and anthropologists.

Traditional imperialism produces subalterns by shaping them in the mould of the cultural and social values of the metropolitan center of Empire. Nafisi and Hosseini carry this tradition further by adopting those values in active ways to construct a “representative” Iranian-American and Afghani-American, each of whom represents the utopian ideal of citizenship for Iran or Afghanistan after democratization. Of course, the political precondition for such democratization is military invasion and occupation, so that such utopian fantasies are always already predicated on U.S. imperial expansion. Nafisi and Hosseini represent traditional “assimilationist ideals”, but neither author ever “forgets” his or her native culture as assimilated minorities are expected to do. Instead, these new subalterns actively construct fantastic Iranian and Afghani “cultures” inside the U.S., both in their English-language books (and among their primarily Anglo-American audiences) and in their special valorization of Iranian or Afghani refugee communities in the U.S. as models for those who will eventually “return” to their homelands.

A third version of this internalization of the Orient is the adaptation of mythic national narratives and archetypes to new foreign ventures in the Middle East, such as the various interpretations of Jessica Lynch in the context of Puritan captivity narratives and the condensation of domestic frontier conflicts with the Second Gulf War. To be sure, later developments, including Lynch’s own repudiation of events and the melodrama of her heroic rescue by the U.S. military, have done much to challenge this national mythopoeia, but the speed with which Jessica Lynch was in fact adapted and adopted to domestic concerns is symptomatic of my general conception of the “U.S. nationalization of international crises” as means of containing and controlling those crises. The U.S. fascination with the fate of Patrick Daniel “Pat” Tillman (1976–2004), killed in Afghanistan by “friendly fire”, may suggest that ideological complications, even contradictions, contribute to the new mythopoeia. [38] Both Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman remain figures of interest as long as they continue to represent the contradictions of the Second Gulf War and our ongoing war in Afghanistan, and they do so by bringing these wars “home” in all their unresolved political complications.

The broader cultural narrative is the Vietnam-Effect in both Gulf Wars and Afghanistan, whereby our ventures in one “Orient” (Southeast Asia) appears to condition our later policies in two other, very different “Orients” (Iraq and Afghanistan), confusing the three regions by mere nominal association. The “Vietnam-Effect” says it is all about us, not them, whether Iraqis, Afghanis, Vietnamese, Laotians, or Cambodians, so that we can readily transfer key terms, the operative metaphors of imperial poetics, from one domain to another without experiencing cognitive dissonance: quagmire (Vietnam and First Gulf War), dominoes (Southeast Asia and Afghanistan/ Pakistan), yellow ribbons (POW/ MIA and the VVA and Gulf vets), PTSD, Agent Orange and Gulf War Syndrome. Of course, these social psychological practices of projection and substitution are crucial to nineteenth-century European Orientalism, which began with its own fantasies of the exotic “East” and substituted such fictions for regions neither “eastern” nor “Oriental”.

The difference of the new Orientalism is the self-conscious importation of these fantasies. In the nineteenth-century imaginary, distance was a crucial factor, which preserved the exoticism of distant lands and peoples, especially important when people from those lands had immigrated to the metropolitan centers of the empire. But today U.S. neo-imperialism depends upon rendering familiar the distant and exotic, especially their imaginary qualities, incorporating them into that powerful U.S. myth of assimilation. That old British fantasy of “the English world” in which everyone within the British Empire would speak English and behave according to the British standard of civil society has metamorphosed into the U.S. imaginary of an “end of history” when everyone will come to America to realize his or her destiny. And, of course, by implication “America” will be everywhere. In this dystopic view, we look inward to our domestic problems to work through foreign policy issues in anticipation of those “foreign” problems coming to us, as we know they will. It is this fantasy of “American universality”, too often the model for new cosmopolitanism, including Said’s own, that tells us U.S. neo-imperialism is not so much about land, natural resources, even global economic or military power, but primarily about a national identity we still cannot define.

The new Orientalisms are multiple, overlapping, and strategically confusing, enabling their authors to substitute foreign policy discussions for any genuine historical discussion of the Vietnamese, Iraqi, Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese, Pakistani and Afghani peoples. The irony of these cultural processes of internalization, domestication and displacement is that they take place through a U.S. national model that has never been more fragile and fictional, irrelevant as it is to the global State power wielded by the Reagan-Bush administrations through transnational coalitions with the royal Saudi family, U.S. allies in the Greater Middle East, oil interests in the Black Sea neighborhoods of Afghanistan, and global capitalism’s dependency on Chinese modernization and development. Barack Obama’s administration has attempted to create an image of more cooperative international relations and a less militant foreign policy, even as the U.S. continues to wage two wars in the name of U.S. “national security”. The Obama administration’s new foreign policy and international image still depend upon a vigorous American exceptionalism. The U.S. is not just the “leader” of the “free world”, but the democratic exemplar of religious, racial and ethnic, gender and sexual, economic, and political diversity and tolerance. The “Orient” is everywhere else, especially here at home.