This article considers how scholars in Studies and Literature might broaden their fields by considering the Arabo-Islamic cultures of the East both as they have been traditionally represented within US literary culture and how these cultures have written back in response to cultural stereotypes, influenced by US foreign and domestic policies, and to affirm their own distinctive qualities as communities. It refers to such representative literary works as Royall Tyler's Algerine Captive (1797), Edgar Allan Poe's Al Aaraaf (1829), Omar Ibn Said's Life (1831), Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), W. E. B. Du Bois's Star of Ethiopia pageant (1915), and Langston Hughes's Negro Speaks of Rivers (1920). ********** There are far too many politicized people on earth today for any nation readily to accept the finality of America's historical mission to lead the world. --Edward Said, and Imperialism We have entered a era in transnational Studies, which I trace to the First Gulf War in 1991. Twenty years ago, President George H. W. Bush's decision to drive the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait and pursue its retreating troops into Southern Iraq made unavoidable the fact that the US was assuming the British imperial legacy in the Middle East. Operation Desert Storm was justified by the international coalition that conducted the military operation, even if it had not been approved by the United Nations. However we might judge differently the actions of the US in that critical moment in 1991, we can reach an easy consensus on the significance of this military action. First, the US could no longer be understood exclusively in terms of events occurring within its geopolitical borders. The subsequent critique of Exceptionalism by intellectuals, especially in and Ethnic Studies, is related directly to this recognition of the US as a state dependent on its global expansion and its emulation of the practices of its imperial predecessors. Second, the New World Order, as the George H. W. Bush Administration phrased it, would be directed centrally by the US state above and beyond the authority of the United Nations or any other multinational organization (e.g., the World Court) or any non-governmental organization. In the field of Studies, 1991 is the critical historical moment in which the urgent study of US imperialism is no longer the eccentric topic of traditional Marxists, Soviet-apparatchiks yearning for a new international, or a metaphor for unjust domestic policies toward minorities and indigenous peoples, as the proponents of the internal colonization thesis had argued. Edward Said's and Imperialism was published a little more than two years after the First Gulf War began, and his fourth and final chapter, Freedom from Domination in the Future, with the utopian promise of that title, begins with American Ascendancy: The Public Space at It would be a mistake to claim that Said's book was the principal cause or scholarly origin for the long list of scholarly books and articles published on US imperialism after 1991, but there can be no question that the book played a significant role in an intellectual movement that had been building through the Culture Wars of the 1980s and was reinforced by the flagrant neoimperialism of the US state in the organization and conduct of the First Gulf War. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease' s The Cultures of US Imperialism (1993), my Literary and US Imperialism: From the Revolution to Worm War II (2000), C. Richard King's Post-Colonial America (2000), Kaplan's The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US (2002), David Kazanjian's The Colonizing Trick: National and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (2003), Andy Doolen's Fugitive Empire: Locating Early Imperialism (2005), John R. Eperjesi's The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in (2005) are just a handful of the titles in which US imperialism figures centrally. …

Arabia Fantasia: US Literary Culture and the Middle East

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