THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN CULTURE

Brian T. Edwards, After the American Century: The End of U.S. Culture in the Middle East (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2015) ("In this book, I argue that because of the ways in which culture circulates in the digital age and because of the changed geopolitical status of the United States in the twenty-first century, we have entered a period after the American century--meaning that American culture, long popular globally and assumed to have a positive message or benefit to the U.S. politics, is generally taken up by individuals in ways that detach the cultural product from its American referent and thereby shatter the presumption of their close relationship. Focusing on a series of cases from three contexts in North Africa and the Middle East, I try to make sense of the fragmented meaning that American cultural objects and forms--with recognizably American sources but unfamiliar in their use of application--now take in new and frequently unpredicted locations. In so doing, I am trying to map out what the period after the American century looks like from the perspective of literature, film, and cultural production." Id. at1. "One of the assumptions about globalization in the realm of culture is that there is endless circulation, that the technologies of the digital age that have brought so many cultural products from the United States to the Middle East and North Africa might bring them back home to Americans after their journey abroad--safe and sound, as it were. In our technocentric moment, digital technologies and circulation are imagined as intertwined, with everything propelled seamlessly via the former and nothing outside the reach of the latter. If my discussion of some of the ways in which American cultural forms have been altered, localized, and disoriented in their Egyptian, Iranian, and Moroccan adaptions is accurate, we should wonder if perhaps in their return to the United States they might become repatriated. With a little debriefing, maybe they can teach us something about ourselves we didn't know." Id. at 199.).