"Wild Westernization" and Liminal Racialization at the Limits of the Middle East and North America

The biopolitical governmentality of nation-state projects ranges from managing ethnic and racial difference to instituting processes of modernization, of ten seen as concomitant with Westernization. The transgressions of everyday life and cultural production that expose the limits of such projects are the concerns of two recent texts that consider the Middle East in relation to the United States from the perspectives of the Iranian diaspora and Turkish public culture and folklore. From the limits of whiteness to the limits of Westernization, Neda Maghbouleh and Perin E. Gürel's books demonstrate how figures and concepts are constructed and mobilized across time and space and how attention to the local reveals the disconnects and transgressions of governmental, imperial, and nationalist discourses and regimes. Maghbouleh's multisited analysis exposes the liminality of Iranianness in a North American ethnic and racial schema in which it is included within the legal and cultural parameters of whiteness or, alternatively, constitutes the boundaries of exclusion from it. Gürel's analysis of "wild westernization" in Turkey, The Limits of Westernization, traces the internal and external struggles of power within culture and international relations through the figuration of the West in Turkish historiography, literature, folklore, and sociology.

While the books do different things, they converge in their examinations of how local understandings of what or who is modern, white, liberal, good, and so forth exist within particular relations of power, tracing the historical antecedents and transgressions of early Orientalisms and racial orders and their continuities in and ruptures from a contemporary landscape of civilizational discourses and gendered racialization of religiosities and regions around the world. In doing so, they produce significant archives of how liberal discourse, and what Mahmood Mamdani (2004) refers to as "culture talk," racialization, and cultural analysis, intersect in our contemporary moment; these archives are simultaneously humorous, serious, and consequential.

In The Limits of Whiteness Maghbouleh gets at the contingent aspects of how the "racial hinge" or "loophole" of Iranianness is experienced and mobilized in Iranian American everyday life through qualitative research conducted in family homes, suburban neighborhoods, and a summer camp started by young Iranian Americans for their younger counterparts. The expansive scope of the research gives a broad sense of the multiple spaces and discourses through which Iranianness is shaped, from its early twentieth-century mobilization in courts by non-Iranians to its mythic proportions and contradictions for an intergenerational group of Iranians. A vital contribution to whiteness studies and ethnic studies, Maghbouleh's book offers an important example of how ethnic, religious, and national differences (as they are embodied and lived) become racialized in ways that suggest how Iranians fail to become white despite their legal status as white. Through the everyday experiences of young Iranian Americans, Maghbouleh demonstrates how whiteness is constructed, managed, and policed at the levels of population management, citizenship, and national security, as well as in suburban and exurban classrooms and homes. The chapters are organized by site and methodological approach, beginning with historical examples of how Iranians were figured in early citizenship cases in which proximity to or distance from Iranians underlay the arguments of other peoples' claims to whiteness. The text then travels to different sites where Iranianness is discursively figured and experienced: in Iranian American homes; at American schools; in travels to the homeland, Iran (largely focusing on Iranians in transit at American and Iranian borders); and at a summer camp for Iranian American youth. Maghbouleh's multisited research enables her to observe how it is in majority-white spaces that Iranian Americans feel racialization most acutely. Contrary to assimilation narratives positing that "legal, socioeconomic, and geographic proximity to white Americans" would "make Iranian Americans white," Maghbouleh's research demonstrates that these are precisely the spaces in which...