Preface
preface After a half century of near invisibility, since 2001 West and South Asian Americans have become increasingly prominent in comedic and dramatic entertainment , advertising, and journalism in the United States. This notoriety is only one aspect of the public attention people have recently begun giving to those who came to the United States as a result of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act. The descendants of these new immigrants have in turn thought long and hard about how to come across as native-born Americans by their appearance, speech, politics, and more. For entertainers in this group, building a career in show business has been especially tricky. Audiences have been deeply a√ected by the ‘‘War on Terror,’’ the nation’s often-troubled relations with various governments in the Muslim world, and the debate over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. These issues can make it nearly impossible for desi, Iranian, or Arab American performers to get work playing anything but bewildered migrants, religious radicals, or foreign terrorists. To make their way as entertainers and citizens, West and South Asian Americans often use humor to step outside the portrayals of Muslims in news broadcasts and cautionary television dramas. Prominent among these ventures is the ‘‘Axis of Evil’’ Comedy Tour. Featuring comedians of Iranian, Egyptian, and Palestinian descent—but ‘‘still looking for a North Korean,’’ their publicity material teases—comics like Maz Jobrani depict themselves as normal people living in complicated times. One of Jobrani’s most famous jokes revolves around the common scenario of the Iranian American who reveals his ethnic background to a group of acquaintances for the first time. ‘‘You’re Iranian?!’’ they ask with alarm. ‘‘No . . . ,’’ he says with a smile. ‘‘I am Persian, like a carpet. I am soft and colorful, you can lay down on me. Go ahead, take a nap.’’ Here Jobrani reminds us of an older American tradition of interpretation wherein the Muslim world was not a national security concern or subject to invasion by American companies or armies but a familiar provider of contented consumer experiences. In insisting he is Persian, Jobrani brings to the fore again an interpretation of Eastern lands that actually predominated for the first 150 years of American history. In those years, most people interpreted an Eastern persona x ...Preface not through the lenses of American imperialism or national security policy but through capitalism. The consumer’s interpretation of the Muslim world never completely went away, of course; it has lingered with us for the last sixty years. The fortune earned by the Disney film Aladdin, for instance, shows that people continue to seek out depictions of West and South Asia as a site of incredible riches, romance, and happy endings. Yet when the American moment in the Middle East began in 1933 with the Arabian American Oil Company’s Saudi oil concession and expanded during the 1956 Suez Crisis, older consumerist networks of understanding focused on ease and plenty began receding into the background , while Cold War strategic concerns and political news came to define the Muslim world in American public culture. This book is about what came before that moment, a century and a half that could certainly be di≈cult for entertainers but for vastly di√erent reasons. It reconstructs the knowledge of artists, both native and foreign born, amateur and professional, who sought to depict a spectrum of nations stretching from Morocco to India by way of Eastern personae and to understand how and why audiences used these performances to devise ways of displaying their own identities through consumption. My stubborn mission to document this group of creative people has been humored and helped along by many people, and I am really glad to be able finally to thank them publicly. I learned an enormous amount about what to do with this topic, and about how to become a good reviewer myself, from the smart people who read and commented upon various drafts and parts of the manuscript and/or supplied intellectual guidance during the research stages of this project: Karen Ferguson, John Munro, William Cleveland, Mark Carnes, Tim Marr, Ussama Makdisi, Hilton Obenzinger, Donald Malcolm Reid, Leslie Peirce, Beshara Doumani, Paula Fass, Ann Swidler, the members of the University of California, Berkeley, intellectual history reading group, and my mentors at Berkeley, David Hollinger, Mary Ryan, and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby. A special thanks also goes to the faculty and sta√ in the Department of History, University of Guelph, for taking me in in 2004...
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