Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945, Updated Edition (American Crossroads)

Great book; well written, concise and interesting.

Brilliant analysis of American popular culture and now it has upheld and even shaped foreign intervention in the Middle East.

In “Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000”, Melani McAlister argues, “Cultural products such as films or novels contributed to thinking about both values and history in two ways. First, they helped to make the Middle East an acceptable area for the exercise of American power. Second, they played a role in representing the Middle East as a stage for the production of American identities – national, racial, and religious” (pg. 3). McAlister further argues, “After World War II, political and cultural conditions in the United States produced a post-Orientalist model of representing the Middle East for American audiences. These new representational dynamics were not always in the service of U.S. state power; in certain cases they explicitly contested the presumptions of official U.S. policies. But even the official rhetoric of nationalist expansionism worked to establish the United States as different from the old colonial powers, and it did so in part by fracturing the East-West binary on which traditional Orientalism had depended” (pg. 40). McAlister draws upon the theories of Edward Said while interjecting a greater focus on gender and race into traditional studies of foreign policy.Examining film, McAlister argues, “The biblical epics [of the 1950s and 1960s] made representations of the religious history of the Middle East central to a discourse of U.S. ‘benevolent supremacy’ in world affairs” and that “biblical epics should be read not simply as antitotalitarian narratives but as anticolonial ones, situated at the moment when the United States took over from the European colonial nations the role of a preeminent world power” (pg. 46). In terms of race, “in the 1950s and 1960s, the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors took on a new salience in African American cultural politics. In part, the energized significance of the Middle East had to do with decolonization” (pg. 85). In this way, “Between 1955 and 1972, a potent combination of religious affiliation, anticolonial politics, and black nationalist radicalism turned claims upon the Middle East into a rich resource within African American communities. For both Christians and Muslims, religious culture made salient not only ancient histories, but also contemporary political events in the region, particularly the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs for control over territory” (pg. 86).Looking to museum exhibits, McAlister writes, “Examining 'The Treasures of Tutankhamun' as a diverse set of representations, it suggests that newspaper and television news stories, T-shirts and trinkets, books and magazine articles, museum catalogs, and the exhibit itself created ‘Tut’ as a significant cultural phenomenon. The Tut phenomenon was striking for two reasons: first, for the intimate relationships it forged between the high-culture world of museum exhibits and the popular traffic in celebrity icons, and second, for the way it became a site of struggle over both the nature of American world power and the domestic politics of race and gender” (pg. 125-126). Further, “Tut’s presence as a commercial sensation in the twentieth century linked him to commodity culture; like the department store Orientalism at the turn of the century, Tut’s presence enabled the marketing of everyday consumer goods as exotica” (pg. 150).Moving to the late Cold War, McAlister writes, “In the 1980s…the discourse of terrorist threat developed in new and important ways as public reactions to the Iran hostage crisis were staged in the speeches of policymakers, in television news reports, and in the activities of communities around the country. These accounts brought Americans, rather than Israelis, into the primary position as victims of – and eventually fighters against – terrorism” (pg. 199). She continues, “As the discourse of terrorist threat developed, during the Iran crisis and after, it helped to construct a subtle but crucial change in the imagined geography of the Middle East, a change that was marked by a reclassification: ‘Islam’ became highlighted as the dominant signifier of the region, rather than oil wealth, Arabs, or Christian Holy Lands” (pg. 200).McAlister concludes, “In the period after 1945, I have argued, there was a move away from the distinctly modern concern with the construction of a unified (white, masculine) national and racial identity toward a construction of the national subject as disjointed and diverse, gendered both masculine and feminine, and ultimately multiracial” (pg. 270). Finally, “The Middle East was mapped for Americans through the intersecting deployment of cultural interests and political investments. In constructing this history, [McAllister has] aimed to intervene in several ways in the current scholarship in cultural studies, American history, and colonial discourse studies” (pg. 270).

This book changed the way that the Middle East and Islam are analyzed in the field of American studies. Examining the intersections of national security and popular culture--for example, the Black Arts Movement and Hollywood films--Epic Encounters goes beyond Edward Said's classic Orientalism to reveal how U.S. engagements in the Middle East since the Cold War express multiple, sometimes conflicting interests. Its insights remain generative and fresh. It's a classic.

An incredibly good book. McAlister dissects and analyzes the representations of the Middle East in various media -- movies, news, plays, books, etc. -- and their relationships to the projection of US global power and the shaping of US cultural identity since the end of World War II. As she puts it, her goal is to address the absence of culture from discussions of the history of US imperialism, the absence of empire from discussions of US culture, and the absence of the US from discussions of postcolonial imperialism.Among her subjects, all of which she treats deftly and with attentive detail, are: Amiri Baraka's "A Black Mass," the Israeli military raid on Entebbe, the 1977 John Frankenheimer movie "Black Friday," the tour of King Tutankhamen's artifacts through the United States during 1977-1978, Hal Lindsey's "The Late Great Planet Earth," the rise of the Moral Majority, the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1980 and its obsessive coverage in the US media, the prevalence of military revenge movies in the 1980s like "Navy Seals" and "Delta Force," Betty Mahmoody's book "Not without My Daughter," and the Gulf War.I found particularly compelling her discussion of 1950s biblical epics, such as "Ben-Hur" and "The Ten Commandments." The recent controversy over "The Passion of the Christ" is put into definite context when you see how "The Ten Commandments" was received (and what purposes it served) when it was released in 1956.

I chose this book to pair it with Natasha Zaretsky's book "No Way Home" for my final paper and it helped me to make the connection between how American Foriegn Policy is formed by way of the media and the American public interest in the Middle East Region. To learn more about how American policies are shaped regarding the Middle East region, I suggest that you read this book.

McAlister has succeeded in writing a multi-faceted description of the uniquely American view of the Middle East. This book offers unemotional and impartial perspectives on the subject.