| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The question of how to represent the U.S. role in the Middle East brings to the fore the question that Edward Said first raised in 1978 in Orientalism about the nature of American understandings of the Middle East. More than three decades after the publication of his book, Said's criticism of Orientalist scholarship-and his accompanying plea for a secular humanistic interpretation to replace it-remain both topical and enigmatic. It is one thing to criticize American representations of foreign cultures; it is an entirely different matter to study American engagements with them. These are by no means unrelated endeavors, but by the same token, they entail very different conceptions of what constitutes a field of inquiry and how to go about studying it comprehensively. The recent emergence of a more critical scholarship of America and the Middle East, therefore, begs the question of whether it is possible to write a history that takes both the Americans and Arabs equally seriously despite the prevailing political climate, and ultimately what kind of methodology this might entail for the rewriting of U.S.-Arab relations, and more broadly, American involvement in the world.
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