The Borders and Limits of American Studies: A Picture from Beirut

When I decided to go to the American University of Beirut (AUB) in May 2008 to give a talk titled “Beauty without Borders and Other Feminisms,” the subject of my talk seemed both appropriate and ironic. Like many postcolonialists, I had an intense suspicion of the buzzwords of globalization—global flows, borderlessness, circulation, smooth spaces, migrancy, and transnationalism—because they ignored unequal distribution, the starkly imperial makeup of global financial institutions such as the IMF and WTO, and the hegemony of the United States. At AUB I was also to lead a faculty seminar discussion about the attacks on Middle East studies post 9/11. But whereas the subject of my talk was the borderlessness of neoliberalism, I was being hosted by the Center for American Studies and Research (CASAR), which was interested in bridging the borders created by neocolonialism and imperialism. As it turned out, my travel to Beirut under the auspices of CASAR proved to be an education about the possibilities and limits of American studies as currently configured.

CASAR was created only recently, and with a specific geopolitical agenda. Shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Saudi billionaire prince and Lebanese citizen Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Alsand offered Mayor Rudy Giuliani $10 million toward disaster relief efforts. Giuliani accepted the check given to him following a memorial service at Ground Zero but rejected it shortly thereafter when it was revealed that Alwaleed had released a statement suggesting that the United States take the occasion to “reexamine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause.”¹ In 2003, soon after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Alwaleed provided $10 million in funds to initiate programs in American studies at the American University of Beirut and the American University of Cairo. Announcing the donation to establish CASAR at the American University of Beirut, Alwaleed expressed his hope that the center would “bridge the gap that emerged between the United States and the Arab World on the heels of the tragic events of September 11.”² From its very inception, therefore, CASAR was tied to questions of U.S. power, militarism, and occupation in ways that were directly related to its location.³ American studies at CASAR was envisioned as an engagement with, and an attempt to understand, the United States through the prism of the Arab world, a balancing that Edward Said, an ardent proponent of American studies programs in the Middle East, had long advocated.

In recent years, the leaders of the American Studies Association have also stressed the value of understandings of the United States from outside its borders. In her presidential address to the ASA in 2004, Shelley Fisher Fishkin argues that an understanding of the “multiple meanings of America and American culture. . .requires looking beyond the nation’s borders, and understanding how the nation is seen from vantage points beyond its borders.”⁴ In contrast to U.S. foreign policy, which is “marked by nationalism, arrogance, and Manichean oversimplification,” American studies, Fishkin suggests, is a “site of knowledge marked by a very different set of assumptions—a place where borders both within and without the nation are interrogated and studied, rather than reified and reinforced.”⁵ While the State operated its unilateral militarism by reifying borders between Us and Them—Bush’s infamous cowboy threat “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”⁶ comes to mind—American studies rendered borders fluid and subjected to scrutiny the idea of a consensual nationalist identity implied by “Us.”

Fishkin’s vision of transnationalism’s potential to decenter a bellicose nationalism echoes, with a difference, Alwaleed’s utopian cross-cultural mission for American studies programs in the Middle East. Doing American studies from “outside” the United States, through centers that explicitly foreground a transnational focus, might mean engaging in a radically reconfigured field wherein global nodes and networks displace the ubiquity of American power, or create new paradigms through which we raise questions about citizenship and identity. Yet it is absolutely crucial...