The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies

Front matter

The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies

John Carlos Rowe

The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies

Contents

Preface 9

I Cultural Politics

1. Edward Said and American Studies 31 2. The “Vietnam Effect” in the Persian Gulf Wars S1 3. Covering Iraq in Our Time 78 4. Areas of Concern: Area Studies and the

Preface

This book proposes that we consider the relationship of our many different activities as scholar-teachers in terms of our work for greater social justice and equality. Although this goal is not limited to scholars in the humanities and social sciences, it is more obviously related to our work than to other disciplines. Our scholarship is tested primarily by our students and occasionally by legislators and others framing public policies. We both study and practice “cultural politics”, especially as I define this phrase in this book. My claim contradicts those who argue that knowledge must be “free” of politics. Knowledge is never free of political values, and it is wisest for us to encourage our students to debate the political connotations of whatever field they study. When such political implications are ignored or denied, they continue to operate but in secret, more dangerous ways. Of course, we must “teach the conflicts’, not just advocate for our own political positions, however persuasive we may find them.

I also believe that in many academic disciplines there is a necessary continuity between academic and public debates, as well as between scholarly and social activism. In this book, I offer examples of how I have engaged these debates and pursued activist goals since 1991. I am not an important or influential political activist, and it is one of my central arguments that ordinary scholars do make a difference in the public sphere and can be even more influential once they recognize their abilities to do so. The monumental changes in world history are built upon very small acts, whose coordination may be both the result of profound organization and historical fortune. It is easy to be discouraged today by the marginal positions so many academics appear to occupy amid the broader social, political, and economic forces of globalization. It is more difficult, but far more hopeful and productive, for us to find the points of intersection where our work complements labor by others in the interests of achieving greater equality for all.

All of the chapters in this book are based on essays published in journals, scholarly books, and newspapers in the U.S., Germany, Egypt, and the United Kingdom. Each chapter differs greatly from its first publication, in most cases because the history separating its original publication and its appearance in this book is addressed. I have made specific efforts in several chapters (chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and 9) to retain the historical contexts prompting their original publication and to comment on the intervening history. Sometimes these changes are specifically indicated, as in chapters 2, 3, and 8; in other cases, these changes are integrated into a unified argument, as in chapters 1, 5, and 9. I am trying to represent the historical dimension of scholarship when it enters explicitly the political and public spheres. In one sense, scholarship must be timely; in another sense, scholarship must mark and record the passage of historical time.

I am grateful to many friends who have inspired me with their own activism as scholar-teachers. This book is dedicated to Edward Said, who continues to teach me. When I first came up with the idea for publishing this book in digital format, my good friend, Mark Poster, introduced me to Gary Hall, whose work has also had a profound influence on me. Randy Bass at Georgetown University, Reinhard Isensee at the Humboldt University (Berlin), and Matthias Oppermann at Bielefeld University have led the way in digital scholarship and encouraged me to complete this book. Other friends have set a very high standard for me to follow with regard to activism: Colin Dayan and Hortense Spillers at Vanderbilt University, Ruth Wilson Gilmore at the City University of New York, Henry Giroux at McMaster University, Abdul JanMohamed at the University of California, Berkeley, Curtis Marez and Shelley Streeby at the University of California, San Diego, Donald Pease at Dartmouth College, Wilfried Raussert at Bielefeld University, Marita Sturken and Dana Polan at New York University and Winfried Fluck at the Free University (Berlin). My colleagues in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California are well-known for their abilities to connect scholarship, teaching, and activism. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Richard Berg, Philip Ethington, Macarena Gomez-Barris, Sarah Gualtieri, Jack Halberstam, David Lloyd, Tania Modleski, Tara McPherson, Maria Elena Martinez, Manuel Pastor, Laura Pulido, Leland Saito, George Sanchez, and Janelle Wong have taught me more about “cultural politics” than I can ever repay.

Preface 11

My thanks to the editors and publishers for permission to reprint significantly revised versions of the essays first published by them: Chapter 1, “Edward Said and American Studies’, first published by American Quarterly 56:1 (March 2004), 33-47; Chapter 2, first published as “The ‘Vietnam-Effect’ in the Persian Gulf War,’ Cultural Critique, special issue, “The Economies of War,” 19 (Fall 1991), 121-39; Chapter 3, first published as “Images from Fallujah Will Stir Debate, But... Won't Alter Policy’, Op-Ed, Newsday (April 2, 2004), A49; Chapter 4, “Areas of Concern: Area Studies and the New American Studies’, first published in Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics (Egypt) 31 (2010), special issue on “The Other Americas”; Chapter 5, “Culture, U.S. Imperialism, and Globalization’, first published in American Literary History 16:4 (Winter 2004), 575-595; Chapter 6, “Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran in Idaho’, first published in American Quarterly 59:2 (June 2007), 253-275; Chapter 7, “The Death of Francis Scott Key and Other Elegies: Music and the New American Studies’, Cornbread and Cuchifritos, eds. Wilfried Raussert and Michelle Habell-Pallan (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011), 27-40; Chapter 8, “Visualizing Barack Obama’, first published in Journal of Visual Culture 8:2 (August 2009), 207-210; Chapter 9, first published as “The Dramatization of Mao II and the War on Terrorism’, South Atlantic Quarterly 103:1 (Fall 2003), pp. 21-43 and “Global Horizons in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007)”, Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld and Falling Man, ed. Stacey Olster (London: Continuum, 2011), 121-134.

Introduction

The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies

Now what? Barack Obama’s election was a great success. A person of great integrity and political skills replaced George W. Bush. In his memoir, Decision Points (2010), George W. Bush defends water-boarding and other forms of torture for “saving lives”, as well as his decision to invade Iraq on the erroneous evidence of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” for “making the world a safer place without Saddam Hussein’.' The 2010 mid-term elections have given Republicans a majority in the House of Representatives, promising a politically divided Congress for the remaining two years of President Obama's first term. President Obama's popularity has dropped to 47%, well below the enormous popularity he enjoyed in his first 100 days in office. Republicans, especially advocates of the Tea Party or Tea Party Express, appear to be resurgent, successfully defending their foreign policy mistakes under George W. Bush and redirecting their responsibility for the current economic recession to President Obama and the Democrats. In the Republicans’ political statements, government bailouts of Wall Street and the costs of “Obamacare” have caused our economic and social problems, not two costly and unnecessary foreign wars or unregulated capitalism. We are at a critical point in U.S. politics, when scholarly knowledge is needed more than ever to clarify history and enable citizens to make intelligent decisions.

Most of the people reading this book contributed to Barack Obama's victory, as well as criticized the policies of the George W. Bush administration. Indeed, one of the few positive lessons from the past decade is that a relatively free intellectual class is one of our best protections against fascism or other dictatorial usurpations. During the Second Gulf War, our invasion and occupation of Iraq, and our ongoing war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, academics were among the most consistently critical of our policies and the best informed regarding the long history of U.S. imperialism as background to our foreign policies, which were justified by the Bush Administration as “exceptions” to an otherwise “anti-imperialist”, democratic U.S. For a variety of reasons, intellectuals with academic appointments turned out to be even more courageous than the usually celebrated “public intellectuals”, many of whom defended U.S. policies in the post-9/11 era. Todd Gitlin’s nationalist sentiments, of course, preceded 9/11 but Don DeLillo’s surprisingly sentimental defense of beleaguered New Yorkers and his general indictment of global terrorism in his Harpers essay “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September” (December 2001), and his novel, Falling Man (2007) surprised many fans of his canny interpretation of the U.S. role in global disorder in Mao II (1991). In the past decade we also witnessed the proliferation of neo-conservative public intellectuals, many supported by private think-tanks as they rotated out of government positions in Republican administrations or relied on their own tenured positions in colleges and universities to defend Bush's foreign policies, Wall Street's unregulated, late modern capitalism, and to fuel populist anxieties about “illegal immigrants” as internal enemies.

The emergence of neo-conservative public intellectuals from the academic ranks dates back to the “culture wars” of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Richard Rorty, Samuel Huntington, and Stephen Ambrose were spinoffs of Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Dinesh D’Souza, and Francis Fukuyama. As print and broadcast journalism tempered its criticism of our foreign policies under George W. Bush thanks in part to mergers and acquisitions in these media and the general “Murdoch Effect”, academic criticism joined with political organizations like Moveon.org to preserve some semblance of anti-war and anti-imperialist activism. As hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were murdered in sectarian violence and millions of Iraqis emigrated to Jordan, Syria, and other countries, changing dramatically the geopolitical shape of postwar Iraq while U.S. occupying forces allowed such violence to continue unabated, a few brave academics tried to challenge the public’s mood of war’s “inevitable violence” by risking their own lives to visit and report on the shattered lives and neighborhoods of Iraq.

Mark Levine’s book, Why They Don’t Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil (2005), grew out of just this sort of eyewitness travel outside the

U.S. State Department and military channels to war-torn Iraq.” Levine's work is complemented by the consistent criticism of U.S. imperialism and neo-imperialism by a wide range of American Studies scholars, including Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan, who criticize how the Bush Administration built what might be termed “State Exceptionalism” to justify both our invasion of Iraq and the subsequent human rights’ abuses from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo integral to this foreign policy.’ Much of this new work on U.S. imperialism draws upon the anti-imperialist scholarship of Richard Drinnon, Richard Slotkin, Ronald Takaki, Annette Kolodny, and other American Studies’ scholars of the 1960s and 1970s, who understood how colonial expansion and accompanying racial subalternity are central to U.S. nationalism, no matter who occupies the Executive branch of the government. Much of President Obama's global popularity depends on his appeal to a new American Exceptionalism and on the presumption that nationalism transcends ethnic and racial identities. The repeated refrain of his campaign that only in America could Barack Hussein Obama be elected President impresses me as a gentler version of the older and more dangerous exceptionalisms American Studies has criticized so effectively.

We still have important obligations as scholarly activists to continue our criticism of U.S. imperialism in the ongoing occupation of Iraq, the expansion of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, meliorist policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the U.S. “empire of military bases” that continues to grow.* U.S. neo-imperialism also includes policies of strategic neglect, including the ongoing crises in Haiti, Darfur and Somalia, Zimbabwe, and other African political and human rights’ crises barely visible in the U.S. media and State Department policies.* Although USS. policies appear to be thawing toward Cuba, we continue to wait for regime changes, as we did in Vietnam so long ago, expecting that Fidel Castro’s diminished powers or death, like Ho Chi Minh’s death in Vietnam and Saddam Hussein’s execution in Iraq, will result in sudden political transformations. A new policy toward Cuba is urgently needed, as is more public debate about our role in the Caribbean and broader Latin America. Given the importance of the history of Cuba-U.S. relations in the hemispheric scope of the new American Studies, we must push as scholars and activists for more than merely symbolic acts by the U.S. state toward Cuba, Haiti, and other hemispheric sites of traditional conflict with the US.

President Obama also needs to address the current political crisis in Iran, defending the rights of the Iranian opposition while avoiding the usual platitudes about how Iran should “follow” the model of U.S. democracy and its civil religion. Despite our constitutional separation of church and state, our political history has been profoundly shaped by religious interests, perhaps no more powerfully than in the past few decades. Our complaints about “theocratic” Iran should be tempered by our own reverence for the “Puritan Origins” of U.S. democracy and the persistence of these religious values in the Protestant work-ethic and various forms of capitalist rationalization of economic inequities. We should also be aware of the long history of religious persecution in the U.S., whose original colonists so famously immigrated to the Western Hemisphere in quest of religious freedom and tolerance. Yet colonial and national U.S. history is full of the religious persecution of peoples practicing indigenous religions, Catholicism, Caribbean Voodoo and North American Hoodoo, Mormonism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Sufism, Jainism, Islam, and many other religions.

To be sure, the Obama administration in two years has changed significantly our global reputation. President Obama's speech in Cairo, “A New Beginning”, on June 4, 2009 is a powerful indication of these new, good intentions.° But none of this should dissuade us from the necessary criticism of Obama’s practical policies. U.S. troops remain in Iraq, despite the much-publicized withdrawal of U.S. combat forces in September 2010. The Obama administration has widened the unwinnable war in Afghanistan and Pakistan against the Taliban while maintaining support for the corrupt administration of President Karzai, thus ignoring the lessons of history for the region and of the more general “Vietnam- Effect”. The recent assassination of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Navy Seals operating covertly in Abbottabad, Pakistan affirms our commitment to violent, military solutions and our disregard for the sovereignty of our client-state, Pakistan. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is at one of its most volatile stalemates of the past fifty years. Although scheduled for closure, Guantanamo remains open, its prisoners now destined to be sent to foreign countries like Palau and Bermuda, in yet another instance of US.

“outsourcing”, while those prisoners released have often rejoined al-Qaeda or other terrorist organizations after their long incarcerations by the U.S. Further information about how our government tortured prisoners of war has been suppressed on grounds as specious as those employed by the Bush Administration.

Such macropolitical issues cannot be separated from the economic crisis the U.S. and many first-world nations are still struggling to overcome. The front cover of Newsweek for June 13, 2009 advertised Fareed Zakarias “The Capitalist Manifesto’, replete with a faux red leather binding and Soviet star. Tediously repeating slogans about “Capitalism with a Conscience”, Zakaria dismisses strong evidence that Karl Marx’s prediction is coming true, advocating instead economic “self-regulation” by Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.’ Predicated on a relentless will to grow without regard for the consequences, capitalism is collapsing from its own internal contradictions. What we are witnessing in the “global credit crisis’, “subprime mortgage meltdown’, or “financial regulatory failure” is in fact the consequence of economic surpluses used to produce further surpluses, rather than being reinvested in the human, social, and global system or prompting redistribution of wealth through improved wages, benefits, and working conditions for the proletariat. The modernization of China has resulted in its transformation into a modified capitalist economy that has produced extraordinary surpluses, often cited as one part of the global economic solution, but also strong evidence of what is wrong. Propping up bureaucratic Chinese Communism is a capitalist economy that has rapidly produced incredible class distinctions in China and now commands immense surplus wealth that will reconfigure economies around the globe under the guise of saving these economies from their own internal problems.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore has argued in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007) that the prison-industrial complex in California is just one example of how “criminality” has been redefined under the pressures from economic surpluses looking for new investment opportunities.* Motivating legislators looking for economic opportunities for their districts, these surpluses have contributed to a prison-industrial-legislative complex far more difficult to decipher than the relatively simple accounting tricks of hedge fund managers and other manipulators of surplus capital. Like Angela Davis and other activists committed to prison reform, Gilmore interprets the “carceral geographies” written on the bodies of inmates in the vast U.S. prison system to constitute neo-slavery, whose abolition faces economic entanglements between criminalization and capitalism as profound as those confronting nineteenth-century abolitionists. At what point does the globalizing of California intersect the Chinese factories, where exploited labor produces so many of the inexpensive imports to the US.?

William D. Cohan’s House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street (2009) clearly analyzes how the investment banking firm of Bear Stearns could go from one of the most powerful investment companies in the world to bankruptcy in a matter of weeks.’ The surpluses with which Bear Stearns “played the market” were never intended to help the poor, rebuild the infrastructure, or contribute to the U.S. “common wealth” In their greatest crisis, the Bear Stearns Board members worried first about their enormous bonuses, topping 25-35 million dollars annually, then as the investment firm buckled as its reputation failed, voiced concern for their “loyal employees”. Finally pleading for U.S. government bailouts, they vaguely invoked patriotic commitments to the U.S. economy. But Bear Stearns’ purpose in the everyday economy of Wall Street had nothing to do with jobs, wealth, or opportunities “trickling down” to the American people, especially those suffering at the bottom of a rapidly expanding class hierarchy; Bear Stearns worked only for its own sake, borrowing more and more money at an increasingly rapid rate for the sake of its balance sheet built on assets that, while substantial in their own right, increasingly appeared trivial when compared with the margin and other credit obligations of the firm. In the end, Bear Stearns was little more than its symbolic capital, which dwarfed its actual cash and material assets, and this symbolic capital could be sustained only by a reputation for ever-increasing growth that was unsustainable. Desperately trying to save the firm’s reputation in the final weeks of its existence, Bear Stearns’ executives seemed blithely unaware of the fact that their collapse was inevitable, whether sooner or later, according to the theory of surplus value.

Yet if late-modern capitalism is indeed collapsing, traditional Marxism is unlikely to reappear as a viable alternative. However vigorously the Left has challenged the bailouts and solutions to capitalism sponsored by Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner and the Obama Administration as superficial efforts to address systemic problems, the Left still has not offered a socio-economic alternative to late-modern capitalism and its complement, the “war on terror”. We may be witnessing the revival of the Keynesian economic policies tested in the most sustained way by Franklin Roosevelt, but Roosevelt’s “New Deal” was not socialism, much less communism. As intellectuals, we need to remind people of the long history of efforts at collectivization, including its failures, and of the inherent relationship between collective labor and the basic social contract. At the same time, we need to revise dramatically the basic Marxian analysis of class divisions, class conflict, and industrial modernization.

Who today constitutes the “working class”? How is our labor alienated from us, and what are the processes of reification and other forms of mystification? What role does culture play in these “productive” processes of the late-modern or postmodern economy, and how have these economic practices reconfigured the global economy into a hierarchy of different national economies producing value in ways unimaginable to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels? In many respects, our post-Marxian and neo-Marxian ideas remain too close to their modern sources.

How shall we do this work of criticizing the Obama Administration for continuing the imperial legacies of the U.S. state and propping up the rotten capitalist economy? American Studies is traditionally an activist field. We work for social change and greater justice in classrooms, at conferences, on the streets, on the web, and through the many political organizations to which we contribute. These activities are for most of us not discrete. We encourage our students to get involved in the causes they find compelling; we work more than most academics for “open classrooms” that include field work, community involvement, volunteer work, and internships as part of the course assignments. The meaning of cultural politics is not to be sought in a particular method but in the intersection of these activities in progressive politics committed to the demystification of such separate domains as politics, economics, education, and activism.

Traditional Marxism considered cultural practices to be epiphenomenal, part of the super-structural consequences of deeper economic processes. But culture is where value is defined and revised or sustained, especially in post-industrial societies in which cultural production is fundamental to their economies. Prevailing cultural values in U.S. culture make possible salaries for CEOs and celebrities in excess of 100 million dollars per year, as well as our tolerance of gun violence, pervasive poverty, inadequate health care, high unemployment, racism, sexism, and a host of other social failures. In this regard, the Myth-and-Symbol scholars were right to focus on cultural narratives that reified the most fantastic social inequities, even if the national myths they studied often spoke more to U.S. ideals than realities.

Cultural politics also refer to the processes through which the prevailing values of a society are internalized and lived by subjects who identify with the imagined community fashioned and reproduced by such narratives. Whether we mean the processes of interpellation through which subjects are managed by ideological state apparatuses, as Louis Althusser argued, or Slavoj Zizek’s neo-Lacanian notions of internalization in postideological contexts, culture designates the symbolic system through which we constitute ourselves as subjects.” There is no “value” without culture; economic surplus, political power, personal identity, and social affiliation depend upon their deployment through the symbolic network we term “culture”. Political critique is thus impossible without interpretation of this cultural matrix; analysis remains mere commentary on political particulars until it has taken into account how political practices rely on the rhetorical persuasion of culture.

Do such claims grant culture more importance than it deserves? Am I conflating culture with social, political, and economic forces that in fact operate according to their own rules and are merely represented in cultural systems? Such questions will always be debated, but my contention in this book is that at least since the 1960s, political and economic leaders have understood culture to be an essential field of power. Advertising in both political campaigns and the marketplace involves more than just winning votes and selling products, but providing the sort of legitimacy within an imagined community that grants the politician and corporation identity and authority. Of course without votes or sales, neither the politician nor the corporation would survive, but cultural circulation enables the sort of authority that promises re-election or the successful introduction of new products. Because subjects understand themselves primarily through cultural networks, culture can no longer be understood as merely a semiotic fantasy whose illusions can be dispelled but must be interpreted as fundamental to social, political, and personal relations. Cultural politics thus designates the interpretation of the cultural narratives that enable such fictions as the State, the market, the nation, and citizenship to be accepted as real. What matters in cultural politics is the articulation of a system of cultural representation that accomplishes a specific end or purpose, whose “value” may then be judged.

Such interpretations are not exclusively the work of scholars; representatives of the State, the market, the nation, and citizens offer frequent and competitive interpretations of this cultural narrative. We refer vaguely to “popular culture” and “mass media”, sometimes merely to distinguish their works and forms from “high culture” and its specialized media. But such distinctions no longer have much relevance, except as vestigial traces of earlier periods defined by other media, such as print and orality. Contemporary scholars interpret cultural narratives along with other interpreters, all of whom compete for audiences. Don DeLillo’s difficult novels differ from a performance by the Jonas Brothers; both their implied and actual audiences reflect these differences. But both forms of cultural representation exist on the same plane of “cultural politics”: interpretations that situate their audiences in relation to an imagined community, market, and identity. As a medium, the Internet enables a wide range of different discursive, visual and aural practices, including avant-garde works targeting small audiences and others intended to reach the broadest possible market share.

The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies is thus an effort to comprehend these different interpretations in relation to the field of American Studies. In the exceptionalist understanding of “America” as a unique nation, this task would be difficult enough, but today we understand “American Studies” to encompass the different societies of the Western Hemisphere, their many different languages, the global intersections we identify loosely with the “Pacific Rim” and “Atlantic World”, and the history of Western imperialisms and neo-imperialisms that continue to shape global realities.'' The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies does not claim to deal with all of these issues and areas, because the discipline is no longer encyclopedic in its methods or scope. Instead, these many fields are understood in terms of their relevant intersections and historically significant contacts.

The chapters in this book are examples of the interpretations I have defined as “cultural politics”, and they do a variety of activist work I try to identify in each chapter. The book is divided into two parts. Part I: Cultural Politics deals with issues and topics of immediate activist relevance. In this part, I ask how our work as scholars qualifies as “cultural politics”, competing with the other, everyday acts of interpretation that construct the narratives of state, market, nation and citizen. Edward Said’s dual role as a public intellectual and a distinguished scholar at a major university is used to introduce this part to encourage us to think anew about a distinction between these two social and political functions. Every scholar is a “public intellectual” in the digital era, but just what does this new role mean for those of us trained in the specific protocols of traditional scholarship?

In chapters two and three, I offer two personal examples of efforts to use scholarship to act in the public sphere in response to political crises: the First and Second Persian Gulf Wars, respectively. Although done in the spirit of Said’s activism, my own efforts require a reinterpretation of Said’s founding concept of “Orientalism” to understand better the transformation of Western Orientalism into the foreign policies of the U.S. as it justified the Vietnam War and then the First and Second Gulf Wars in relation to this “Vietnam-Effect”. All three chapters suggest their mutual concern with the intellectual problem of interpreting U.S. nationalism in relation to Western imperialism and transnationalism. Chapter four turns from the activist questions of how we can best protest U.S. neo-imperialism to the more specific academic politics of the “area-studies” model for studying Latin America, Asia, and other regions. Recalling how the academic practices of area studies were developed by scholars, private foundations, and the U.S. state during World War II, I argue that some of the same issues facing us today in our protests of U.S. participation in foreign wars also haunt our academic disciplines. Nation and region-specific forms of knowledge may contribute, however unwittingly, to our imperial imaginary. “Cultural politics” thus includes critical accounts of the public sphere and academic protocols. It is not simply a question of choosing whether to demonstrate in the streets against war or write about the assumptions behind nation-specific knowledge, but of doing both in conjunction with each other.

Part II: Cultural Practices deals with more familiar cultural media: film and television (chapter 5), memoir and literary criticism (chapter 6), music (chapter 7), visual culture (chapter 8) and the novel (chapter 9). All of these media are in themselves instances of “cultural politics’, so my interpretations do not depart from the focus on this topic in Part I. In Part II, I am also concerned with the conflict between nation-specific knowledge and global concerns, often arguing that the focus on the U.S. nation in a global era has had two troublesome consequences. In the aftermath of 9/11, U.S. nationalism has assumed a reactionary political quality that is curiously linked with an effort to internalize foreign problems. What I term in several chapters “hyper-nationalism” depends on the effort to import imaginatively foreign conflicts and render them in more manageable domestic terms: terrorism, religious intolerance, racism, sexism and class conflict. Many U.S. cultural works attempt to comprehend and imaginatively solve international problems by restaging them in U.S. national contexts. Tacitly such hyper-nationalism reinforces U.S. cultural and political imperialism by arguing that such domestic negotiations are models for the eventual and ideal democratization of other nations.

Alternatively, the popularity of an émigré writer’s works in the U.S. is often motivated by our desire to recognize in such works a desire for U.S. citizenship and thus a validation of our social and political values. It is no coincidence that the émigré memoirs and novels of greatest interest to us come from the very regions where our national values are the most contested. The colonial subaltern who once reproduced the values of the imperial power in the colonized country has reappeared in U.S. neo-imperialism as a model citizen in the domestic U.S., testifying to the justice of contested foreign policies and rehabilitating old U.S. myths. Equally interesting is how older U.S. cultural narratives are interpreted by immigrant writers who have lived and worked both outside and inside the U.S. The vestigial colonialism in the European and U.S. literature Nafisi reads as a child in her upper-middle-class family in Tehran becomes a cultural source of freedom and rebellion in her adult opposition to the theocracy of the Republic of Iran. The flea-markets of Oakland are greeted by