ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I HAVE RECEIVED favors great and small while working on this book. Scholarship is an extended conversation, and it happens both inside and outside the pages of a book. To those who made the effort to ask a question when I presented parts of this work publicly, those who read and commented on a portion of it, and those who helped me during almost uncountable trips to the Middle East and North Africa or when I was back at home over the past ten years since I began this project, I send my thanks. Those whom I have forgotten here should know that they are named between the lines and have my gratitude as well.

I thank, in Morocco, Jamal Bahmad, Hakim Belabbes, Khalid Bekkaoui, Taieb Belghazi, Sanaa Elaji, Fadwa Islah, Abdelatif Khayati, Driss Ksikes, Hosna Lebaddy, Mostafa Ouajjani, Hicham Tahir, and Abdellah Taïa as well as students at the Moroccan Cultural Studies Center at Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University in Fes, where I led graduate seminars and presented some of this material. Sadik Rddad and Ouafae Elattaoui have opened their home in Fes for me—and my family—time and again, and over the course of nearly two decades of friendship Sadik has been one of my closest interlocutors and taught me so much about Morocco. I also thank, in Egypt, Muhammad Aladdin, Ahmed Alaidy, Humphrey Davies, Ira Dworkin, Ibrahim El Batout, Nadia El Kholy, Magdy El Shafee, Manar El Shorbagy, Mansoura Ez Eldin, Walid El Hamamsy, Mohammed Hashem, Osama Madany, Weaam Mokhtar, Leri Price, Mounira Soliman, and Bahaa Taher. And I am grateful, in Iran, to Saied Ameli, Ghazileh Behdad, Fatima Kamali Chirani, Azadeh Ghahghaei, and numerous students and faculty at the Institute for North American and European Studies at the University of Tehran, where I taught on two different occasions as I did the research for this book. Ehsan Khoshbakht has been especially generous, sending me articles, answering questions about film, and introducing me to numerous people in the worlds of Iranian cinema. Pejman Danaei provided me the opportunity to view a huge amount of new Iranian cinema when he invited me to serve on the selection committee of the London Iranian Film Festival.

I was helped by Waleed Hazbun, Samir Khalaf, Wahib Maalouf, and Patrick McGreevy in Beirut; by Faouzi Bensaidi, Jocelyne Dakhlia, Pap Ndiaye, Kapil Raj, and Moumen Smihi in Paris; by Everette Dennis, Joe Khalil, and Firat Oruc in Doha; by Kim Fortuny, Meltem Gürle, Sibel Irzik, Gönül Pultar, and Cevza Sevgen in Istanbul; by Lawrence Raw, TanferTunc, and Üfük Özdağ in Ankara; by Catherine Carey and Liam Kennedy in Dublin; and by Gianna Fusco, Fiorenzo Iuliano, Donatella Izzo, and Giorgio Mariani in Naples and Rome.

I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to present portions of this work as it developed at a number of universities in the United States, including Chicago, Cornell, Dartmouth, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, New York, Oklahoma State, Princeton, Rutgers, Stanford, California at Berkeley and Los Angeles, Williams College, Wisconsin, and Yale. In every case, I have learned from my interlocutors and appreciated the opportunity to try out new material in progress. I thank friends and colleagues in the United States who have invited me or engaged with my work during such visits or both, including Hussein Agrama, Moustafa Bayoumi, Ali Behdad, Russ Castronovo, Deborah Cohn, Jennifer Cole, Julian Dibbell, Wai Chee Dimock, Douglas Doetsch, Amina El-Annan, Brad Evans, Jonathan Freedman, Nouri Gana, Leela Gandhi, Zareena Grewal, Allen Hibbard, Gordon Hutner, Brian Larkin, Peter Limbrick, Françoise Lionnet, Saba Mahmood, Timothy Marr, Mark McGurl, Alan Nadel, Jonathan Nashel, Crystal Parikh, Donald Pease, Katarzyna Pieprzak, Elizabeth Povinelli, Sangeeta Ray, Larry Rothfield, Leyla Rouhi, Nancy Ruttenburg, Richard Jean So, Harry Stecopoulos, Dominic Thomas, Michael Warner, and Renée Zuckerbrot.

Several colleagues went above and beyond the call of collegiality. The following read the manuscript at various stages and provided useful advice for its revision: Kate Baldwin, Ali Behdad, Tarek El-Ariss, Susan Manning, Hamid Naficy, Donald Pease, Andrew Wachtel, and two anonymous readers for Columbia University Press. I have benefitted from their advice and am deeply appreciative that they took time out of their busy schedules to help me.

My colleagues at Northwestern have made life at my home institution consistently stimulating, especially in my four primary affiliations: English, comparative literary studies, American studies, and Middle East and North African studies. Among so many great colleagues, I want to thank in particular Mohammad Abdeljaber, Chris Bush, Jorge Coronado, Holly Clayson, Scott Durham, Stuart Dybek, Betsy Erkkila, Harris Feinsod, Reginald Gibbons, Katherine Hoffman, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Rebecca Johnson, Henri Lauzière, Andrew Leong, Susan Manning, Hamid Naficy, Inna Naroditskaya, Carl Petry, Jan Radway, Laurie Shannon, Carl Smith, Wendy Wall, Ivy Wilson, and Jessica Winegar. The English Department staff has been exceptional—Kathy Daniels, Dave Kuzel, Nathan Mead, and Jennifer Britton—as have Tim Garrett, Lexy Gore, and Katie Rashid in the MENA Program. I also thank the Buffett Institute for Global Studies, which has provided support and venues to present some of this work, and especially Bruce Carruthers, Brian Hanson, Rita Koryan, Krzysztof Kozubski, Hendrik Spruyt, and Andrew Wachtel.

At Northwestern, my students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels have taught me much. I owe thanks to a number of excellent research assistants: Aretha Chakraborti, Farah Chami, Maziyar Faridi, Wahib Maalouf, and Marjan Mohammadi.

The Northwestern administration has been generous with research support, leave time, and flexible teaching arrangements. At Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, former dean Sarah Mangelsdorf and associate deans John Franks, Simon Greenwold, and Marie Jones were greatly supportive. Daniel Linzer was my dean when the project began and my provost when it was completed, and he has my great appreciation. Henry Bienen, former president of Northwestern, had a significant role in this project, first by nominating me to be a Carnegie Scholar and then by standing by my work throughout. I would also like to express my sincere thanks to Northwestern’s Office of Foundation Relations, especially Sarah Fodor and Susan Fisher Miller, and to Storer Rowley and Pat Vaughan Tremmel in Media Relations.

I benefitted from the exceptionally generous support of two foundations without which this book would never have come to be. The Carnegie Corporation of New York, which named me a Class of 2005 Carnegie Scholar, launched this project and allowed me to imagine a comparative study on a scale that seemed nearly impossible when I first proposed it. My special thanks to Patricia Rosenfield and Hillary Wiesner, program directors of Carnegie Scholars and the Islam Initiative, respectively. Two years later, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation named me a New Directions Fellow, which allowed me the unimaginable pleasure to take a year’s leave to train in a new discipline, which I did in 2008/2009 in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, an academic experience that significantly changed the conception of my research. The Mellon Foundation then awarded me a second major grant: a New Directions Post Fellowship Award in 2012/2013 to complete the writing of this book manuscript. I thank Joseph Meisel, Nora Lambert, Philip Lewis, Martha Sullivan, and Harriet Zuckerman at the Mellon Foundation. I also thank colleagues at Chicago for opening their graduate classrooms to me as a student, especially Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Judith Farquhar, John Kelly, and Joe Masco in anthropology as well as Amina Mohamed and the late Farouk Mustafa in the Center for Middle East Studies.

I thank the Fulbright program for awarding me two Senior Specialists grants to teach and interact with faculty at Cairo University in Giza and at Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” in Italy, both of which helped me make progress on this book. My thanks to the Binational Fulbright Commission in Cairo, especially Maggie Nassif and Nevine Gad El Mawla. Various institutions have invited me to be visiting faculty, where I worked out some of these ideas with an international body of students and colleagues: the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College, Dublin; the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris; and the Institute of North American and European Studies at the University of Tehran.

Earlier versions of some parts of the manuscript have appeared in print elsewhere. A portion of chapter 1 was published as “The World, the Text, and the Americanist,” American Literary History 25, no. 1 (2013): 231–246. A few paragraphs of chapter 2 are included in “Tahrir: Ends of Circulation,” Public Culture 23, no. 3 (2011): 493–504. Another section of that chapter appeared as “Jumping Publics: Magdy el Shafee’s Cairo Comics,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 47, no. 1 (2014): 67–89. A portion of chapter 3 was printed as “Watching Shrek in Tehran,” The Believer 8, no. 3 (2010): 5–11. And one section of chapter 4 appeared as “Marock in Morocco: Reading Moroccan Films in the Age of Circulation,” Journal of North African Studies 12, no. 3 (2007): 287–307. I am grateful to these journals for publishing my work and for allowing me to incorporate it here. Most of all, I thank the editors with whom I worked on those pieces for their engagement, intelligence, and advice: Plaegian Alexander, Nancy Armstrong, Brigid Hughes, Gordon Hutner, Heidi Julavits, Eric Klinenberg, Andrew Leland, Nancy Ruttenburg, and Stephen Twilley.

For permission to reprint his comics in chapter 2, I thank Magdy El Shafee. Thanks to Fantagraphics for permission to use the drawing by Joe Sacco. My appreciation also goes to Abdellah Tourabi, editor of TelQuel, for permission to reprint the covers of TelQuel in chapter 4.

At Columbia University Press, Philip Leventhal has been a remarkably enthusiastic advocate for the book, offered great advice on its structure, and been especially patient in waiting for the manuscript. Whitney Johnson answered numerous questions with professionalism and efficiency and was a pleasure to work with. Irene Pavitt guided the manuscript through production brilliantly. Annie Barva’s excellent work as a copy editor improved the manuscript from close-up, and Bob Schwarz completed the book’s index.

Finally, my family has endured both the most and the least pleasant aspects of this book, and I hope in the end the balance tips in the positive direction. My children—Oliver, Pia, Theo, and Charlotte—have literally grown up with this book. What that means in practice is that they have endured my absence from them too frequently. The few occasions when they could accompany me to Morocco, Cairo, Istanbul, and Paris have been some of the most pleasurable times of the past years, and their presence—and their questions—have frequently opened up my understanding of aspects of the region I thought I understood. Kate Baldwin is my partner in life and has not only thrived in her own career as a scholar, teacher, and writer while raising four children but also done so with my extended absences abroad to work on this book. She also made time to read a late draft of this manuscript and to offer advice and encouragement. To say I am in her debt is an understatement.