Melani McAlister's Epic Encounters

Melani McAlister’s Epic Encounters explores the post-World War II United States’ relationship with and deployment of the Orient/Other, especially in relation to portrayals and understandings of the Middle East. She begins by outlining how the United States government understood its power and role after the conclusion of World War II—and how the orientalist/colonialist mindset and narrative circumscribed the United State’s understanding of its power. By examining official policy documents, the speeches and writings of both governmental and non-governmental leaders, as well as popular culture trends and artifacts, McAlister makes the compelling argument that “political and cultural conditions in the United States produced a post-Orientalist model of representing the Middle East for American audiences” (40).

Beginning with a discussion of the United States’ “benevolent supremacy,” McAlister goes into some depth concerning that stance, and its relationship to the proliferation of “biblical epic films like The Ten Commandments” (40).

These biblical epics deploy tropes of enslavement and exodus there from, and position the audience (primarily U.S. citizens) as sympathetic to the former slaves, and to supportive of many of the films’ end of “freely chosen subordination” in the form of marriage. That subordination, after a fashion, mirrors the attitude U.S. government foreign policy assumed and desired from the Middle East: yielding to a superior intellectual, military and moral force that differentiated itself from old imperial models by involving “freely chosen subordination” instead of the straight-forward choiceless militaristic domination.

That view of the Middle East was the mainstream European-American vision; for some African-Americans, the Middle East became a location for the formation of political and religious identities. Affiliations with Islam became more readily apparent, and in some ways superseding the “Christian-influenced civil rights movement’s evocation of the ancient Hebrews and the modern-day Israelis” (41). That is, some portion of the civil rights movement embraced active deviation from mainstream European-America’s expectations for how to frame the understanding of who persecuted whom and what it meant to identify with Hebrews, Israelis or Muslims.

McAlister expands on how these varying roles of the Middle East play into the overall official discourse on the region and how it was and is understood on the global stage, demonstrating the “benevolent supremacy” managerial model in practice, as well as the U.S. government’s active management of the way the Middle East is understood in the United States. That management is highly visible in the discussion of the Iran hostage crisis, as well as the many oil shocks of the last few decades.

One of the many threads that run throughout Epic Encounters is the captivity narrative, in all its varied forms. From the captivity slaves escape in the biblical epics to the captivity portrayed in Not Without My Daughter, the trope reoccurs in numerous contexts, all of which reinforce the position from which “benevolent supremacy” and “freely chosen subordination are not only acceptable, but also expected. Notably, it is also a trope that some African-American leaders rejected when they reframed their take on the civil rights movement away from the expected identification with the Hebrews and Israelis to the less expected and perhaps more empowering identification with Muslims in the Middle East.