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  • After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East by Brian Edwards
  • Peter Limbrick (bio)
After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East
Brian Edwards
New York: Columbia University Press, 2015268pages. ISBN 9780231174008 (paperback 2017, ISBN 9780231174015)

In After the American Century we follow Brian Edwards’s dazzling interpretations of a range of US cultural products and their unlikely transformation in the global cities of Cairo, Tehran, and Casablanca. The aim of Edwards’s carefully argued book is to show how culture now travels in unpredictable ways that challenge our understandings of the relation between the United States and the rest of the world. Working across film, literature, and popular culture, Edwards argues that, rather than endless ludic circulation, globalization produces “end points, perhaps even dead ends” (xv) from which American cultural products do not return; they are no longer translatable back into the cultural register from which they came. Edwards sees such encounters as constituting a phase “after the American century,” whereby US culture, as it circulates globally, is “taken up by individuals in ways that detach the cultural product from its American referent and thereby shatter the presumption of their close relationship” (1). Edwards offers a finely tuned perspective on exactly what happens to US cultural products as they “jump publics” into new situations where they become just one element in the complexity of local production. As a given US product “detaches from the source culture from which it comes . . . its national origin is left behind as a trace, and as fragment it is propelled into the world” (12–13). Global consumption then becomes more important than US production: “As these newer cultural forms and products make their way across the circulatory matrix, they may carry some Americanness with them, but they also shed the United States as their point of origin or their ultimate meaning” (8).

The book is organized into four chapters that form important case studies for this analysis. The first, effectively an introduction, situates his argument about the period after the American century and the idea of the “ends of circulation,” a term that is polyvalent through the text. The second chapter analyzes the mechanism whereby texts “jump [End Page 442] publics” through the example of Egyptian fictions and comics that use US cultural forms but in new, distinctively local rhetorics. The third chapter, “Argo Fuck Yourself,” follows what happens to Hollywood films when they are taken up in Iran—the Iranian reception of Ben Affleck’s film Argo (2012), the uses that Shrek (2001) is put to, and the story of an archive of 35mm Hollywood film prints amassed by a Tehran cinephile who saved them from destruction after they reached their own “ends of circulation” (many studios used to abandon prints rather than pay the expense of shipping them back to the United States). The fourth chapter centers on Morocco. Shrek makes another appearance, this time in the guise of the “Miloudi” mashups, short videos using clips from Shrek with chaabi or popular Moroccan music, but so do controversial works like Laïla Marrakchi’s film Marock (2006) and the writing of Abdellah Taïa, described by his American publisher as “the first openly gay autobiographical writer published in Morocco” (182).

The Moroccan chapter, especially the work on Marock, hums with the energy of its source material. Edwards shows how Marrakchi’s film functioned within multiple media worlds: designed for the big screen yet consumed beyond it; pilloried in some channels and praised in others; discussed in both local and diasporic contexts. Its director “located and created a public whose nerve was ready to be struck. Marock was thus a harbinger of the new pressures on the Moroccan nation of the digital age” (158). He also shows how its focus on gender and sexuality, particularly that of young Moroccan women, is part of the film’s taboo-breaking status and how images of its teenage female star worked to either help or stymie the film’s reception. Similarly, Edwards ties the debates around Taïa’s work (his outing in a Moroccan magazine, and his frank depictions of sex...

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