Anti-Americanism
Publication Year: 2004
Ever since George Washington warned against "foreign entanglements" in his 1796 farewell speech, the United States has wrestled with how to act toward other countries. Consequently, the history of anti-Americanism is as long and varied as the history of the United States.
In this multidisciplinary collection, seventeen leading thinkers provide substance and depth to the recent outburst of fast talk on the topic of anti-Americanism by analyzing its history and currency in five key global regions: the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, East Asia, and the United States. The commentary draws from social science as well as the humanities for an in-depth study of anti-American opinion and sentiment in different cultures.
The questions raised by these essays force us to explore the new ways America must interact with the world after 9/11 and the war against Iraq.
Contributors: Greg Grandin, Mary Louise Pratt, Ana Maria Dopico, George Yudice, Timothy Mitchell, Ella Shohat, Mary Nolan, Patrick Deer, Vangelis Calotychos, Harry Harootunian, Hyun Ok Park, Rebecca E. Karl, Moss Roberts, Linda Gordon, and John Kuo Wei Tchen.
Published by: NYU Press
Title Pages
Contents
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pp. v-vi
Introduction
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pp. 1-14
ANY TREATMENT OF THE TOPIC OF THIS BOOK has to begin by acknowledging that caricature is intrinsic to the standpoint known as anti-Americanism. After all, taking Americanism seriously in the first place means accepting vastly exaggerated versions of ideals, traits, and postures that are believed...
PART I: Latin America
1: The Narcissism of Violent Differences
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pp. 17-31
IN SEPTEMBER 2002, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research held a two-day conference on anti-Americanism, bringing together twenty scholars and opinion makers from the United States and abroad to ponder the question “Why do they hate us?” The event grew out of a larger investigation...
2: Back Yard with Views
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pp. 32-46
THE UNITED STATES’S RECENT FORAY INTO IRAQ was not the first time it has sent thousands of troops into a desert land in pursuit of an ally turned enemy. It happened in 1916, and the object of the hunt was the Mexican military virtuoso and popular revolutionary leader Pancho Villa...
3: The 3:10 to Yuma
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pp. 47-68
WRITING THE DAY BEFORE HIS DEATH on April 8, 1895, and finally in the field of the Cuban War of Independence, Cuba’s revolutionary hero and national poet, José Martí, declared to his friends: I am everyday in danger of giving my life for my country and in the duty...
4: U.S. Prepotencia: Latin Americans Respond
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pp. 69-84
LATIN AMERICANS ARE DISPARATE PEOPLES, but there are few things that unite them more than their shared resentment at the persistent record of U.S. high-handedness in the region as a whole. Historically, and especially after Washington stepped up its regional interventions after the Spanish-Cuban-American War...
PART II: The Middle East
5: American Power and Anti-Americanism in the Middle East
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pp. 87-105
THE MOST SURPRISING THING about anti-Americanism in the Middle East is that there is so little of it. On February 15, 2003, opponents of the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq organized anti-war marches in large cities around the world, including one in Cairo. More than one million people marched in London...
6: A Conversation with Rashid Khalidi
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pp. 106-122
Shohat: As a way of beginning our conversation, I’d like to cite Samir Amin’s article published in the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram Weekly [in spring 2003], entitled “The American Ideology.” Amin makes important criticisms of U.S. foreign policy...
PART III: Europe
7: Anti-Americanization in Germany
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pp. 125-143
DEBATES ABOUT THE PROMISE AND PERILS of Americanization have been a constant feature in European economic, cultural, and social life since World War II. For both proponents and opponents of Americanism, Germany—or the Western part thereof—has been regarded as a model of economic, social, and cultural...
8: The French Declaration of Independence
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pp. 144-157
THE UNITED STATES has long been accustomed to representing the inequality between itself and other nations in terms of velocity. Other nations drag their feet, they delay, they haplessly trail behind the kind of unmarked modernity or spirit of inevitability that the United States embodies...
9: The Dogs of War: Myths of British Anti-Americanism
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pp. 158-178
THE RECENT RESURGENCE of widespread anti-American sentiment in Britain provoked by the aggressive neo-imperial foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration, supported by Prime Minister Tony Blair despite a groundswell of popular dismay, is nothing new. Certainly, British protests...
10: The Beekeeper, the Icon Painter, Family, and Friends: “November 17” and the End of Greek History
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pp. 179-194
ON THE EVENING OF JUNE 29, 2002, an icon painter and a beekeeper took a stroll on the quayside at Piraeus, the port of Athens. The bomb in the icon painter’s hands exploded unexpectedly. He fell to the ground, critically wounded. The beekeeper fled into the night. Soon, it became clear that this was no ordinary bomb...
PART IV: East Asia
11: An “Etiquette of Anti-Americanism”: Being Japanese in the American Imperium
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pp. 197-220
Not withstanding recent claims that anti-Americanism is simply a short-lived, spectral apparition, a homemade commodity easily exportable abroad, or even a prod to arousing nostalgia for the consequences of other, now past imperial orders, the phenomenon has always played an active role...
12: Desires for North Korea
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pp. 221-234
FOR ALL THEIR DIFFERENCES, the expressions of anti-Americanism that erupted late in 2002 and 2003 in South Korea and in North Korea, respectively, convey the capitalist desires of Koreans and other Asians in the post–cold war era. They are distinctly post–cold war events, not just because Koreans...
13: China’s Repressed Returns
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pp. 235-250
AT THE BEGINNING OF JUNE 2003, a peculiar situation developed in Beijing. Saddam Hussein’s ambassadorial envoy to the People’s Republic of China, Muwafak al-Ani, refused to relinquish his post. He barricaded himself inside the Iraqi embassy in Beijing and proclaimed that the “Iraqi authorities”...
14: “We Threaten the World”: U.S. Foreign Policy through an Asian Lens
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pp. 251-270
AMID THE DIN OF SELF-CONGRATULATION over the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the occasional voices of quieter caution went unheard. In an article called “Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War,” the University of Chicago professor of political science John J. Mearsheimer wrote...
PART V: The United States
15: Hating Amerika: Anti-Americanism and the American Left
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pp. 273-280
AFTER THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACK, conservative and liberal pundits informed us that the terrorists did what they did because they hated American values. Many on the Left replied that the terrorists were driven more by hatred for what the U.S. government did, for its policies, than for its values...
16: The Domestic Front
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pp. 281-300
THERE ARE FEW NATIONS WHERE DISSENTERS escape being judged unpatriotic, disloyal, or subversive. In the United States, however, they are required to face an additional charge. Those who dissent too vigorously may be judged in contempt of the idea of America and their views...
17: Vigilante Americanism
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pp. 301-314
TO FULLY UNDERSTAND ANTI-AMERICANISM, we have to step back and question what it means to be an “American.” For President George W. Bush, it is a fanciful morality story of all-good versus all-evil. In a White House speech on September 23, 2002, he restated his definition of Americanism...
Bibliographical Notes
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pp. 315-320
About the Contributors
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pp. 321-324
Index
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pp. 325-344
E-ISBN-13: 9780814769096
E-ISBN-10: 0814769098
Print-ISBN-13: 9780814775660
Print-ISBN-10: 0814775667
Page Count: 352
Publication Year: 2004
