American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens

Domestications The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/fl ashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Edi- tor Emeritus; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Founding Editor; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Nouri Gana (Comparative Lit- erature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Lit- erature, UC Santa Cruz), Coordinator; Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz), Founding Editor A complete list of titles begins on p. 242. Domestications American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens Hosam Aboul- Ela northwestern university press | evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2018 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2018. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Aboul-Ela, Hosam M., author. Title: Domestications : American empire, literary culture, and the postcolonial lens / Hosam Aboul-Ela. Other titles: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018. | Series: FlashPoints | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifi ers: LCCN 2018004072 | ISBN 9780810137493 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810137509 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810137516 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. | Literature, Modern—21st century—History and criticism. | Imperialism in literature. | Postcolonialism in literature. | World politics in literature. | Imperialism—History— 20th century. | Imperialism—History—21st century. Classifi cation: LCC PN56.I465 A26 2018 | DDC 809.933581—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004072 To Shankar Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Living with U.S. Imperialism 3 Chapter 1 (Novel). The Specter of Normativity: Paul Bowles and the American “Third World” Novel 19 Chapter 2 (Idea). Other Moroccos: Representation, Historicism, and the North African Lens 47 Chapter 3 (Perspective). Domestication and Eastern Asia: America Imagines the World 81 Chapter 4 (Gender). Normative Feminism: On Saving Women in the Postdevelopment World 113 Chapter 5 (Space). In Spite of the Land: Partitions, Terror Wars, and the New Idealism 151 Conclusion: The End of “Foreign” 191 Notes 197 Works Cited 223 Index 235 Acknowledgments I owe a signifi cant debt to a great many interlocutors, friends, and fel- low travelers who kept my research moving on this project as it spiraled across the globe. My fi rst debt is to those who took the time to read drafts of parts of the manuscript along the way. They include Tarek El-Ariss, Margot Backus, Karen Fang, Ahmad Joudah, j. Kastely, Duy Lap Nguyen, Us- sama Makdisi, Laila Parsons, Samah Selim, S. Shankar, Cedric Tolliver, Julie Tolliver, and Rebeca Velasquez. The opportunity to present these ideas at a series of forums and diverse university settings has been a privilege that I feel has greatly enriched my research. These exchanges would not have been possible without the generous collegiality and hospitality of Nandini Bhattacha- rya, Nouri Gana, Ferial Ghazoul, William Granara, Said Graiouid, Jens Hansen, Michelle Hartman, Neville Hoad, Fadwa Kamal, Eralda Lameborshi, Francesca Orsini, Sangeeta Ray, Joseph Slaughter, Annette Trefzer, Max Weiss, and Jennifer Wenzel. The group of colleagues and friends whose ideas have contributed materially to this project is far too extensive to be listed here, so many times have I found myself at a dead end, only to fi nd myself saved by a thought shared, a reading recommended, or an idea debated. I am thankful to all those who have contributed to this book in such ways, and add that the following members of that expansive group simply cannot be left unnamed: Hosna Abdel-Samie, Latif Adnan, Mohamed ix x ❘ Acknowledgments Badawi, Tani Barlow, Ann Christensen, Abdel Hamid Akkar, Ayman El- desouky, Ahmad Hassan, Salah Hassan, Kimberly Kay Hoang, Chris- topher Hudson, Grace Koh, Kwon Bodurae, John T. Matthews, David Mazella, Paik Nak-chung, Doreen Piano, Abdallah Saaf, Elora She- habuddin, Deborah Smith, Jonathan Smolin, Gayatri Chakravorty Spi- vak, Nirvana Tanoukhi, and Lynn Voskuil. My beloved, intrepid, and exemplary mentor Barbara Harlow did as much as any other single individual to instill in me the academic and intellectual tools necessary to survive the writing of this book. I am deeply saddened that she will not see the fi nished product. The Martha Gana Houstoun Research Fund at the University of Houston provided generous fi nancial support that made this research possible. A section of chapter 3 appeared previously in Global South 11, no. 2. I thank the editors for permission to reproduce the text, as I thank the curators of the University of Delaware Library’s Paul Bowles collection for access to travel notes. Domestications Introduction Living with U.S. Imperialism As with any project of intellectual inquiry, mine can be traced back to more than one starting point. For me, an important beginning was a weekend afternoon in the summer of 1995. I was a year into a three- year residence in Cairo, Egypt, and I had made one of my regular rituals walking to a nearby hotel bookshop on my day off and buying a copy of The Manchester Guardian Weekly for a dose of news from outside the region. Martin Woollacott’s opinion piece, “Europe Losing Faith in Amer- ican Leadership,” which appeared in that week’s issue, examined the aftermath of a successful military mission carried out by marines to save a U.S. pilot, Scott O’Grady, who had been shot down behind enemy lines in Bosnia. During that time, avid consumers of news were reading constantly about the brutal wars that broke up the former Yugoslavia. This column stuck in my memory because it chose the occasion of the O’Grady incident to read U.S. culture from an outsider’s perspective. This was at a time when several years’ worth of public debate inside the United States had been devoted to the question of what the new global role of the United States should be after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. For Woollacott, a strange and pernicious paradox inhered in the scenes of exuberant celebration provoked within the United States by the news of O’Grady’s rescue. “Nothing could better illustrate the neurotic inwardness of America today,” he began, “than the extraordinary over-reaction of the American president, of the 3 4 ❘ Introduction American media, and perhaps of the American people to the rescue of Captain Scott O’Grady.”1 Most of the world had experienced the Bal- kan wars as a tragedy, with their civilian massacres, massive displace- ments, ethnic cleansings, and destabilizing threat to the rest of Europe. Within that context, some more measured response, Woollacott right- fully argued, seemed called for: an acknowledgment of relief alongside an expression of concern for the ongoing dangers to innocents living in the region, for example. Indeed, under the circumstances, the sight of fl ag- waving mobs chanting “USA” struck European onlookers as at best clueless and provincial, and at worst brutish and venal. President Clinton himself, he notes, offered a particularly glib and inappropriate response in his “hankering to blur the boundaries between reality and fi ction [by] already look[ing] forward to what ‘I’m sure one day will be a very great movie’ of the O’Grady rescue.”2 Such responses led the writer to contrast the moment of the Bosnian confl ict with earlier pe- riods in U.S./European relations. On the one hand, “the American idea has been for a long time a vital element in European life,” but on the other, “Europeans, bombarded with the OJ Simpson trial, killings after chat shows, the Waco siege, or the Oklahoma bombing, are beginning to see America not as a powerful society with serious problems but as a deranged and dangerous place.”3 Woollacott was hardly the fi rst European journalist to criticize the global role of the United States. Still, this column appeared at an important historical moment in the working out of the contemporary place of the United States in the world. Also, I have thought of it not only for its contents or its connection to a temporal moment. Rather, I have explicitly cited the occasion, the circumstances, and the location within which I found myself reading it, outside of both the United States and Europe. I had lived all but a few years of my life up to that point inside the United States. In retrospect, that moment seemed to me to represent an initial insight into the idiosyncrasy of viewing the world from inside the homes, institutions, and general media and cultural environment of the United States. If intellectuals living outside the United States prob- ably do not command a detailed knowledge of its inner workings, and thus may at times be led astray in their analysis (and indeed, the causal arguments proffered by Woollacott for the new American weirdness are highly problematic), the saturation in domestic American life that engulfs citizens, educators, and opinion makers in the United States is at least equally skewed.

Load more