Post-Orientalism

Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East. By Melani McAlister. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001. 352 pages. $50.00 (cloth). $19.95 (paper).

Melani McAlister worked for several years on her ingenious analysis of U.S. engagement with the Middle East, Epic Encounters, before the book finally made its appearance in bookstores on, oh, about September 11. It is hard to gauge how a world so suddenly altered by Osama bin Laden's "storm of planes" will receive this book. The attack on the World Trade Center and the nation's ensuing "New War" have perhaps expanded the natural audience for such a study beyond anyone's wildest calculation. But on the other hand, these events have likely placed a set of requirements on the book which neither McAlister nor anyone else could have predicted as of September 10. One imagines readers thumbing the pages of the index—first thing, probably—in search of prescient references to Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or the Taliban. (One imagines reviewers situating Epic Encounters within the context of September 11, first thing, in their opening gambits.)

But finally the book's chief virtue is that it is decidedly not topical. If not for the WTC attacks, perhaps readers would not have seen this as a book about the Middle East at all, but as a study of U.S. political culture, broadly conceived, since the 1950s. The Middle East may be the focal point, that is, but it is not exactly the point. In this respect McAlister joins scholars like Amy Kaplan, Van Gosse, Paul Gilroy, Mary Renda, and others in showing that the politics and the sensibilities of the "domestic" in U.S. affairs cannot be understood in isolation from this country's perpetual engagements abroad; this is a line of argument whose implications far transcend the passions and anxieties of the post-September 11 moment. ¹

At the heart of McAlister's analysis is a brilliant dissection of American "interest" in the Middle East, and of the dual, mutually entangled meanings of that word: the U.S. has developed many tenacious "interests" in the region since the mid-twentieth century (most having to do with oil and the geo-strategic imperatives of the Cold War), but so have Americans been continually, even feverishly, "interested" in the Middle East (the region has been a site of almost obsessive attention in media and the arts, once you stop to consider it). These two varieties of "interest" cannot be disentangled, in McAlister's view, nor should they be: the international policy realm of the Suez crisis, the Six Day War, the Iranian Revolution, or the Gulf War on the one hand, and the cultural realm of The Ten Commandments, Exodus, the King Tut exhibit, or Black Sunday on the other, constitute and animate one another. "Culture matters," McAlister demonstrates, because it is here that meaning is made and therefore that "interests" become meaningful—it is here that crucial political vocabularies take shape, that symbols indispensable to the reproduction of American nationalism take wing. The book's most far-reaching ambition is not merely to illumine U.S.-Middle Eastern relations, then, but by focusing on that region to map "the intersection between cultural texts, foreign policy, and constructs of identity" (276)—to explicate the role of "the foreign" in constituting and policing "the domestic," and vice versa.

Epic Encounters owes its deepest intellectual debt to Edward Said's Orientalism, but with Said McAlister also has her deepest quarrel. ² If this is among the most compelling deployments of Said's "Orientalism" in analyzing American cultural and political practices, so is it among the most thoughtful challenges to, and refinements of, the usual contours of that paradigm. Indeed, one of the tasks which McAlister articulates for herself at the outset is that of "putting Orientalism in its place" (12). For McAlister this means two things, chiefly. First, it means crafting an interpretation that duly considers both the historical...