The leisure, abundance, and contentment that many imagined were typical of Eastern life were the same characteristics used to define "the American dream.""--BOOK JACKET.
This study engages with the emerging field of energy humanities to provide close readings of several early American oriental-observer tales. The popular genre of orientalism offered Americans a means to critique new ideas of identity, history, and nationality accompanying protoindustrialization and a growing consumerism. The tales thus express a complex self-reflection during a time when America’s exploitation of its energy resources and its engagement in a Franco-British world-system was transforming the daily life of its citizens. The genre of the oriental observer, this study argues, offers intriguing glimpses of a nation becoming strange in the eyes of its own inhabitants.
The Theatre of Sa'dallah Wannous is the first book in English to provide a clear sense of the significance and complexity of Wannous' life and work. It is unique in bringing cross-disciplinary scholarship on Wannous together and aligning it with cultural practice and memory by including contributions from leading academics as well as renowned cultural figures from the Arab world. This volume should be of interest to literary and theatre studies scholars, cultural historians, theatre practitioners and anyone who cares about contemporary theatre, Syria and the Arab world. Collectively, the contributions demonstrate the role of cultural production - especially dramatic literature - in providing a portrait of and shaping a culture in the throes of profound transformation.
The first decade of the 21st century witnessed an explosion in scholarly and public interest in women and Islamic cultures, globally. From misguided media representations, to politically motivated state manipulations, to agenda-driven Islamist movements, to feminist and international NGO projects – the subject and image of Muslim women has become iconic and riveting. This volume unpacks the representations, motivations, agendas, and projects by focusing on the advances in scholarly research on women and Islamic cultures in the first decade of the 21st century. The editors of the pioneering Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures bring together leading scholars, discipline by discipline, to critically analyze state of the art research on women and Islamic cultures from 2003-2013. Editors for this volume include Suad Joseph, Marilyn Booth, Bahar Davary, Hoda Elsadda, Sarah Gualtieri, Virginia Hooker, Amira Jarmakani, Therese Saliba, and Elora Shehabuddin. Contributors include Suad Joseph, Azza Basarudin, Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, Amira Jarmakani, Sajeda Amin, Kamran Rastegar, Robina Mohammad, Annika Rabo, Ahmed Ragab, Vannessa Hearman, Bahar Davary, Michelle Hartman, Hoda Elsadda, Nerina Rustomji, Amaney Jamal, Vickie Langohr, Hania Sholkamy, Zayn Kassam, Rachel Rinaldo, Samar Habib.
Tracing the transnational influences of what has been known as a uniquely American genre, “the Western,” Susan Kollin’s Captivating Westerns analyzes key moments in the history of multicultural encounters between the Middle East and the American West. In particular the book examines how experiences of contact and conflict have played a role in defining the western United States as a crucial American landscape. Kollin interprets the popular Western as a powerful national narrative and presents the cowboy hero as a captivating figure who upholds traditional American notions of freedom and promise, not just in the region but across the globe. Captivating Westerns revisits popular uses of the Western plot and cowboy hero in understanding American global power in the post-9/11 period. Although various attempts to build a case for the war on terror have referenced this quintessential American region, genre, and hero, they have largely overlooked the ways in which these celebrated spaces, icons, and forms, rather than being uniquely American, are instead the result of numerous encounters with and influences from the Middle East. By tracing this history of contact, encounter, and borrowing, this study expands the scope of transnational studies of the cowboy and the Western and in so doing discloses the powerful and productive influence the Middle East has had on the American West.
Our foremost theorist of myth, fairytale, and folktale explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly and genies grant prophetic wishes. Stranger Magic examines the profound impact of the Arabian Nights on the West, the progressive exoticization of magic, and the growing acceptance of myth and magic in contemporary experience.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a particular story about the United States’ role in the long history of world civilization was constructed in public spaces, through public art and popular histories. This narrative posited that civilization and its benefits – science, law, writing, art and architecture – began in Egypt and Mesopotamia before passing ever further westward, towards a triumphant culmination on the American continent. Early Civilization and the American Modern explores how this teleological story answered anxieties about the United States’ unique role in the long march of progress. Eva Miller focuses on important figures who collaborated on the creation of a visual, progressive narrative in key institutions, world’s fairs and popular media: Orientalist and public intellectual James Henry Breasted, astronomer George Ellery Hale, architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and decorative artists Lee Lawrie and Hildreth Meière. At a time when new information about the ancient Middle East was emerging through archaeological excavation, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia appeared simultaneously old and new. This same period was crucial to the development of public space and civic life across the United States, as a shared sense of historical consciousness was actively pursued by politicians, philanthropists, intellectuals, architects and artists.
Introduces key terms, research traditions, debates, and histories for American Studies and Cultural Studies in an updated edition Since its initial publication, scholars and students alike have turned to Keywords for American Cultural Studies as an invaluable resource for understanding key terms and debates in the fields of American studies and cultural studies. As scholarship has continued to evolve, this revised and expanded third edition offers indispensable meditations on new and developing concepts used in American studies, cultural studies, and beyond. Designed as a uniquely print-digital hybrid publication, this Keywords volume collects 114 essays, each focused on a single term such as “America,” “culture,” “diversity,” or “religion.” More than forty of the essays have been significantly revised for this new edition, and there are nineteen completely new keywords, including crucial additions such as “biopolitics,” “data,” “debt,” and “intersectionality.” Throughout the volume, interdisciplinary scholars explore these terms and others as nodal points in many of today’s most dynamic and vexed discussions of political and social life, both inside and outside of the academy. The Keywords website features forty-eight essays not in the print volume; it also provides pedagogical tools for instructors using print and online keywords in their courses. The publication brings together essays by interdisciplinary scholars working in literary studies and political economy, cultural anthropology and ethnic studies, African American history and performance studies, gender studies and political theory. Some entries are explicitly argumentative; others are more descriptive. All are clear, challenging, and critically engaged. As a whole, Keywords for American Cultural Studies provides an accessible A-to-Z survey of prevailing academic buzzwords and a flexible tool for carving out new areas of inquiry.
Named Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE Winnter of the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association Winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Prize Winner of the 2014 Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions Jacob S. Dorman offers new insights into the rise of Black Israelite religions in America, faiths ranging from Judaism to Islam to Rastafarianism all of which believe that the ancient Hebrew Israelites were Black and that contemporary African Americans are their descendants. Dorman traces the influence of Israelite practices and philosophies in the Holiness Christianity movement of the 1890s and the emergence of the Pentecostal movement in 1906. An examination of Black interactions with white Jews under slavery shows that the original impetus for Christian Israelite movements was not a desire to practice Judaism but rather a studied attempt to recreate the early Christian church, following the strictures of the Hebrew Scriptures. A second wave of Black Israelite synagogues arose during the Great Migration of African Americans and West Indians to cities in the North. One of the most fascinating of the Black Israelite pioneers was Arnold Josiah Ford, a Barbadian musician who moved to Harlem, joined Marcus Garvey's Black Nationalist movement, started his own synagogue, and led African Americans to resettle in Ethiopia in 1930. The effort failed, but the Black Israelite theology had captured the imagination of settlers who returned to Jamaica and transmitted it to Leonard Howell, one of the founders of Rastafarianism and himself a member of Harlem's religious subculture. After Ford's resettlement effort, the Black Israelite movement was carried forward in the U.S. by several Harlem rabbis, including Wentworth Arthur Matthew, another West Indian, who creatively combined elements of Judaism, Pentecostalism, Freemasonry, the British Anglo-Israelite movement, Afro-Caribbean faiths, and occult kabbalah. Drawing on interviews, newspapers, and a wealth of hitherto untapped archival sources, Dorman provides a vivid portrait of Black Israelites, showing them to be a transnational movement that fought racism and its erasure of people of color from European-derived religions. Chosen People argues for a new way of understanding cultural formation, not in terms of genealogical metaphors of "survivals," or syncretism, but rather as a "polycultural" cutting and pasting from a transnational array of ideas, books, rituals, and social networks.
Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis to argue for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean: from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth century Jamaica, to early twentieth century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the 1990 Jamaat al-Muslimeen attempted government coup in Trinidad and its calypso music, to judicial cases of contemporary interaction between Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the "fullaman," a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.