Strangers in the Spider’s House: Transcultural Intelligence in American-(Middle)-Eastern Encounters

The parable of those who take protectors other than Allah is that of the spider, who builds (to itself) a house; but truly the flimsiest of houses is the spider’s house;—if they but knew.

Surah Al-Ankabut, verse 41

There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground. As the Holy Koran tells us, “Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.”

President Barack Obama, Speech in Cairo, 4 June 2009

To my way of thinking, there is nothing more delightful than to be a stranger. And so I mingle with human beings, because they are not of my kind, and precisely in order to be a stranger among them.

“Song of the Swallow: The Thousand and One Nights” (qtd. in Bowles)

Recent scholarship about American encounters with the areas of North Africa and Western Asia populated by Muslims illuminates new and richer critical perspectives on the weft of intercourse through which what is foreign becomes enmeshed with the familiar to create new transcultural intelligence. In Orientalism (1979), Edward Said called for critics to develop a contrapuntal capacity “to assess oneself and alien cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance” so that the circuits of transnational communication might generate innovative and intimate forms of worldly cultural work (26). This emergent cosmopolitan register invites a species-wide understanding that itself is still all too foreign: the unmanifest destiny that there is one hybrid and diversality whose multiplicities are integrally enmeshed in the planetary commons. James Baldwin averred in Istanbul in his notes on a Canadian play he was directing in Turkish that “it is absolutely and eternally true . . . that what happens to one of us happens to all of us” (qtd. in Zaborowska 141). Yet much of the congenial promise of the postnational is precluded by parochial allegiances, ideological investments, and recalcitrant habits that have hardly been rendered residual and still retain their dominant power. Making the foreign familiar runs the danger of imperially incorporating others in ways that can make the very space of worldly engagement a new wall for the projection of stereotypes that can further alienate peoples and their cultures from themselves and from each other. Foreign affairs, both political and imaginative, have been powerful vehicles for negotiating national identities with a global compass. In their expansive forms they thus possess the potential to dislodge the provincial from the complacency of its own exclusions. New strategies are needed to relate strangers together, probe the fertilizations of their intersections, and generate a more engaged comparative consultation about the realities and relations of cultural contagion. Such a conversation is difficult because it requires growing beyond segregated conventions of knowledge and developing capacities to decipher each other across both distance, difference, and time in ways that not only declare interdependence but learn how to perform and practice it.

This essay examines three new books charting American engagements with what has been called the “East,” each from a distinctive historical period, that share a common interest in exploring how transcultural differences were appropriated and deployed in ways that place American national concerns in more global relief. These efforts open promising questions about these relations that can unsettle the angles of American insularity by suggesting how nationalism can be conditioned by comparative lessons through a more vigorous cosmopolitan conversation with cultural alterities too often left beyond the pale of critical inquiry.

The ways that the Islamic “world” is geographically mapped as non-Western exemplifies how social fictions of space affect the imagination of homelands. The term the “Middle East” was invented in 1902 by the American naval expert Alfred Thayer Mahan to describe the Persian Gulf and...