Book Review: Melani McAlister's Epic Encounters

Melani McAlister’s book, Epic Encounters analyzes the intersection of culture and foreign policy in order to identify and examine the interactions between the Middle East and the United States in the years following 1945. In order to analyze these interactions, a variety of representations of culture, popular opinion, and political ideology are examined, including: film, TV, plays, poetry, art, fashion, magazines, books, news articles, political speeches, foreign policy, and religion. The book uses these popular cultural mediums and distinct and sometimes contradictory conceptualizations of the Middle East to argue that since World War II, “the politics of identity in the United States was intimately interwoven with the changing cultural logic of US foreign policy. The Middle East… played a role in staging American world power, and the struggles over the meanings of Middle East history and the control over Middle East resources profoundly affected American self-fashionings” (42). Further, despite the importance of the Middle East in American politics, this influence was often unseen and unrecognized at the time.

McAlister’s argument begins with a discussion of how biblical epics were used to place the Middle East in a western history of a fight against slavery through normative practices. This was placed in the context of American influence abroad, specifically its superiority to communism, which was viewed as a form of consensual slavery. Although the primary tensions here were between America and Soviet Russia, views of the Middle East played a significant, but largely unseen, role in these struggles.

The argument then moves to how African Americans in the 1960’s simultaneously identified with the historical Jewish people due to a shared oppression, and identified with modern Islamic cultures. Modern Israel was seen as a “pawn for colonial power,” which the Nation of Islam was staunchly against (85). The Nation of Islam was “insistently transnational” and connected the Civil Rights Movement to a larger, global struggle between colonialist America and Israel, and anti-colonial African Americans and Islam (94). Thus the Middle East influenced internal American politics, despite only being recognized as influential by minority activist groups.

Commodification of both cultural and physical wealth of Middle Eastern origin in the United States led to views of these goods as belonging to humanity in general, and specifically, the United States. The circulation of Ancient Egyptian artifacts through museum exhibitions and thus their appropriation as a “’universal’ resource” allowed Americans to make arguments that oil belonged to the world (139). Although the taking of oil implied that there was someone from whom it was taken away, this half of the equation was downplayed, and thus the arguments about American superiority to the Middle East did not need to be made explicit, and were instead subtly incorporated into the cultural productions of the United States.

Explicit interest in Middle Easter oil claims combined with American feelings of impotence after the Vietnam War to provide the justification for a strong alliance between Israel and the United States. Support of Israel helped to protect American interests in access to oil, and “Israel became a prosthetic for Americans; the ‘long arm’ of Israeli vengeance extended the body of an American nation no longer sure of its own reach” (187). Israel’s handling of military crises, and the association of America with those successes, re-empowered an American public which was unsure of its strength in a post-Vietnam world.

Related to the strong identification with Israel was a strong anti-terrorist feeling in the United States, which quickly morphed into anti-Islamic sentiments. Political authorities and news reporters claimed to understand the difference between fundamentalist terrorists and the religion of Islam, however, when they, “did attempt to explain Iranian actions [in the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979]…, it did so through Islam, rather than the specific history of U.S.-Iranian relations” (210). Popular culture frequently failed to politicize terrorist actions, instead portraying Islam as susceptible to extremism and evil.

From the discussion of terrorism, the argument segued into the military during the Gulf War as symbolic of the integration of all American people, including “not only black and white men but also Latinos, Asian-Americans, Native American Indians, and even women (presumably of all races)” against the racialized “other” of the Middle East (250). In this case the Middle East was used to fulfill the militarized nation’s need for “an ‘outside’ to mark its boundaries,” thus creating space for multiculturalism within the United States (259).

The book concludes powerfully with “an analysis of the contested meanings and compressed history made visible in five well-known images from… 9/11 to Abu Ghraib,” (268). These images are interpreted in ways that show how the set of views of the Middle East presented earlier in the book combined to create a complex meaning suddenly visible Middle Eastern influence on and in the United States.

The book seamlessly combined a multitude of popular culture artifacts and political information, which gave the analysis a great depth. Although the book was explicitly post WWII in time frame, I think that some incorporation of how older images have been evoked in the modern period would have added to the depth of the research, especially considering the invocation of the crusades by President Bush with regards to Iraq.