American Orientalism By Douglass Little Discussion Of The First Chapter

Essay from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 14, , language: English, abstract: It is inescapable to write about American Orientalism without crossing over Orientalism itself for the reason that if there was no Edward Said, the works of Douglass little will not come into being. Said is of great importance as a literary critic as well as a cultural theorist in the sense that what is known now as post-colonialism is highly indebted to Said’s early works including Orientalism. Many critics agree with the fact that post-colonial theorists such as Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak could not replace Edward Said. Above all, he was the first one who set up the foundations of the colonial discourse along with Frantz Fanon. Thus, he has a major influence in the emergence of other post-colonial thinkers. However, this does not mean that Said’s works are holy texts. That is, they have no shortcomings. To name a few, some critics claim that Said’s works are ahistorical meaning that it is impossible that all these orientalists starting from the poet Dante would have the same colonial discursive assumptions. Second, some of the major criticism directed to Orientalism is neglecting the question of agency and resistance by the colonized itself.

Douglas Little explores the stormy American relationship with the Middle East from World War II through the war in Iraq, focusing particularly on the complex and often inconsistent attitudes and interests that helped put the United States on a collision course with radical Islam early in the new millennium. After documenting the persistence of "orientalist" stereotypes in American popular culture, Little examines oil, Israel, and other aspects of U.S. policy. He concludes that a peculiar blend of arrogance and ignorance has led American officials to overestimate their ability to shape events in the Middle East from 1945 through the present day, and that it has been a driving force behind the Iraq war. For this updated third edition, Little covers events through 2007, including a new chapter on the Bush Doctrine, demonstrating that in many important ways, George W. Bush's Middle Eastern policies mark a sharp break with the past.

Winner of the 2010 Book Award from the New England Historical Association American constitutionalism represents this country’s greatest gift to human freedom, yet its story remains largely untold. For over two hundred years, its ideals, ideas, and institutions influenced different peoples in different lands at different times. American constitutionalism and the revolutionary republican documents on which it is based affected countless countries by helping them develop their own constitutional democracies. Western constitutionalism—of which America was a part along with Britain and France—reached a major turning point in global history in 1989, when the forces of democracy exceeded the forces of autocracy for the first time. Historian George Athan Billias traces the spread of American constitutionalism—from Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean region, to Asia and Africa—beginning chronologically with the American Revolution and the fateful "shot heard round the world" and ending with the conclusion of the Cold War in 1989. The American model contributed significantly by spearheading the drive to greater democracy throughout the Western world, and Billias’s landmark study tells a story that will change the way readers view the important role American constitutionalism played during this era.

This edited collection explores the visibility of modernization in architecture produced in different capitalist regions across the world and provides readers with a historico-theoretical and historico-geographical discussion. Focusing on a particular building type, an influential architect’s work, as well as relevant texts and documents, each chapter addresses the many facets of "delay" which are central to the problematization of capitalism’s progressive dissemination of technological and aesthetic regimes of modernism. This collection underlines the centrality of temporality for a critical understanding of colonialism, modernism, and capitalism. The book is primarily concerned with the historical timeline, the tangential point when a nation enters modernization processes. In exploring modernism in diverse regions such as East Asia, Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Iran, each chapter addresses the historiographic and architectonic unfolding of modernization beyond the western hemisphere. The exploration of these diverse case-studies will be of interest to students of architecture and researchers working on the collision of temporalities and the subject's critical importance for different country’s built-environments.

The imagination of the early twenty-first century is catastrophic, with Hollywood blockbusters, novels, computer games, popular music, art and even political speeches all depicting a world consumed by vampires, zombies, meteors, aliens from outer space, disease, crazed terrorists and mad scientists. These frequently gothic descriptions of the apocalypse not only commodify fear itself; they articulate and even help produce imperialism. Building on, and often retelling, the British ’imperial gothic’ of the late nineteenth century, the American imperial gothic is obsessed with race, gender, degeneration and invasion, with the destruction of society, the collapse of modernity and the disintegration of capitalism. Drawing on a rich array of texts from a long history of the gothic, this book contends that the doom faced by the world in popular culture is related to the current global instability, renegotiation of worldwide power and the American bid for hegemony that goes back to the beginning of the Republic and which have given shape to the first decade of the millennium. From the frontier gothic of Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly to the apocalyptic torture porn of Eli Roth's Hostel, the American imperial gothic dramatises the desires and anxieties of empire. Revealing the ways in which images of destruction and social upheaval both query the violence with which the US has asserted itself locally and globally, and feed the longing for stable imperial structures, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of popular culture, cultural and media studies, literary and visual studies and sociology.

Bringing together historians of US foreign relations and scholars of Iranian studies, American-Iranian Dialogues examines the cultural connections between Americans and Iranians from the constitutional period of the 1890s through to the start of the White Revolution in the 1960s. Taking an innovative cultural approach, chapters are centred around major themes in American-Iranian encounters and cultural exchange throughout this period, including stories of origin, cultural representations, nationalism and discourses on development. Expert contributors draw together different strands of US-Iranian relations to discuss a range of path-breaking topics such as the history of education, heritage exchange, oil development and the often-overlooked interactions between American and Iranian non-state actors. Through exploring the understudied cultural dimensions of US-Iranian relations, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in American history, international history, Iranian studies and Middle Eastern studies.

This book examines the careers of 53 area experts in the US State Department’s Middle East bureau during the Cold War. Known as Arabists or Middle East hands, they were very different in background, education, and policy outlook from their predecessors, the Orientalists. A highly competitive selection process and rigorous training shaped them into a small corps of diplomatic professionals with top-notch linguistic and political reporting skills. Case studies shed light on Washington’s perceptions of Israel and the Arab world, as well as how American leaders came to regard (and often disregard) the advice of their own expert advisors. This study focuses on their transformative role in Middle East diplomacy from the Eisenhower through the Ford administrations.

This book introduces the politics of the modern Middle East, which includes the countries of the Persian Gulf, the eastern Mediterranean countries, and North Africa. It covers the major geographical regions that make up the Middle East, and summarizes the post-World War I history of the Middle East.