After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East

Yes, you can find some clips of Shrek dubbed into Persian on YouTube if you take a look. You can order online some of the Egyptian and Moroccan literary works or perhaps a couple of the films I have discussed and get them shipped directly to your front door. (Too few are translated into English, though, and several are not available online—imagine that!—and the DVDs have the wrong region code.) To be sure, very little of the material I have discussed in this book circulates back to the United States in any substantial quantity or with much impact. Abdellah Taïa’s novels are slowly but surely being translated into English, but the public who will read them in the United States is very limited. Iranian new wave filmmakers such as Kiarostami, the Makhmalbafs, Panahi, and Farhadi may have been the darlings of the film festival set in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, but that counterpublic, too, was small, and many of its members already had knowledge of Iranian society. The Arab uprisings of 2010–2011 riveted American attention for months, and commercial book publishers briefly tried to capitalize on the attention that U.S. media lavished on Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. But Magdy El Shafee’s graphic novel Metro, which was published by a major New York commercial house sixteen months after the Tahrir uprisings, did not get much attention, and two years after its release, as I write this epilogue, the New York edition of Metro languishes, with an Amazon sales rank well higher than 1 million. Hardly a best seller, despite the return of the brutal police state he describes.

That these texts from the Middle East and North Africa reach limited audiences in the United States should not be surprising. I have argued in this book that the ways in which American cultural products and forms are altered as they jump publics make it impossible to translate them back, except laboriously, and that they lose their humor or critical edge in the process. The situation is reminiscent of the case of Mark Twain’s “Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” the wildly popular story of 1865. Decades after its initial publication, Twain encountered a French translation published in Paris. Twain, in turn, translated this French version of his story back into English. His goal, he wrote in 1903, was to demonstrate that the French translator “has not translated it at all; he has simply mixed it all up; it is no more like the Jumping Frog when he gets through with it than I am like a meridian of longitude.”¹ Twain had an enormous amount of fun translating the French translation of his work into English, of course, and his grammar in the second English version is heavily French inflected; it reads like what you would get with early versions of Google translate! Yet there is a serious point embedded in Twain’s fun. The jumping frog jumped publics, and like the frog in the original—surreptitiously loaded with quail shot so that it could not jump—the translation is heavy. If the French appreciated something different in Twain’s tale from what American audiences got from it, then the clunky third version of the story shows something important: a story may be able to move across publics (once, at least), but it is difficult for the uptake in its new public to move again to yet another public.² In other words, as the French took up Twain’s tale and made it their own, it was entextualized in such a way that the uptake itself became embedded in the translation, and that uptake evaded further circulation. Twain turned the French uptake into an object of humor, which highlights the process. Enjoying Twain’s English translation of the French translation requires a sense of how French operates; otherwise, the linguistic jokes fall flat.

If circulation is not an aller-retour trip, there is, however, another alternative. After all, doesn’t circulation work in the other direction, too? There have been flows of people from the Middle East and North Africa westward to the United States for longer than the American century, encompassing the first wave of large-scale migration of Lebanese to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and later flows of Arabs and Iranians to North America. These people came for a range of reasons, including to escape a political situation (Iranians after the 1979 revolution), to find refuge (Palestinians, Iraqis, Syrians), and to seek economic opportunities (greater chances for employment for young Moroccans), and they did not of course leave their love for and attachment to their cultures of origin at Ellis Island or at passport control at Los Angeles International Airport. The technologies of the digital age, especially satellite television and the Internet, have for decades brought cultural products from the Middle East to the United States for those who know where to look for them, and the diasporas of the Middle East and North Africa have maintained cultural ties accordingly. Hamid Naficy’s classic work The Making of Exile Culture drew attention to the diasporic communities in Los Angeles that cohered around watching Iranian television and found that some such communities affiliated across national and ethnic lines and often had only ancestry in the Middle East region in common: “Shared cultures and history allow cross-viewing among not only Iranian subethnics but also other Middle Eastern populations in diaspora.” Naficy tells the story of an elderly Jewish émigré from Palestine who watched Iranian programs even though she didn’t understand the Persian: “The nostalgic music and visuals of exile music videos remind her of her own childhood and homeland.”³ But again, these diasporic communities engage with most of the works from the Middle East–North Africa region that make it to the United States.

These diasporic communities lead us to wonder: perhaps the circulation of cultural artifacts from the Middle East and North Africa to the United States at large might provide an antidote to older traditions of Oriental-ism. Perhaps greater access to those cultural products might bring Americans into more direct contact with creative people from the region and open up otherwise binary perspectives. In the long and painful years since September 11, 2001, the media obsession with the Middle East and North Africa has of course had an impact on nearly every category of contemporary cultural production in the United States. As noted in a previous chapter, more than two decades ago Edward Said quipped: “American attention works in spurts; great masses of rhetoric and huge resources are lavished somewhere (Vietnam, Libya, Iraq, Panama) followed by virtual silence.” ⁴ Those from the region with a story to tell or a creative work to show have a greater possibility to share or present their work in the U.S. market during such moments—and we are in one now—than at any other time.

So what does make it back to the United States? What works do U.S. publishers and distributors circulate? The sad truth is that when creative works by authors from the Middle East and North Africa have reached larger audiences in the United States during the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, they have tended to confirm prevailing and debilitating stereotypes about the region. As noted in earlier chapters, Ali Behdad and Juliet Williams identify a recent phenomenon they call “neo-Orientalism”: texts about the Middle East published in English by writers with origins in the region whose “self-proclaimed authenticity sanctions and authorizes their discourse.”⁵ In their important essay, Behdad and Williams focus on the high number of memoirs by Iranian women published in English in the first decade of the twenty-first century, such as the best-selling Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) by Azar Nafisi and Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (2004) by Roya Hakakian. Such works are explicitly political in their intent and either explicitly or implicitly justify U.S. intervention in the region through what Behdad and Williams call their “ahistorical historicism.” Namely, these authors purport to teach American readers the history of some aspect of the region that has gone wrong while at the same time making historical errors or misleading statements—say, Nafisi’s inaccurate history of veiling in Iran before the revolution—and suggest that outside assistance is required to set Iran back on its correct course.

For Behdad and Williams, Marjane Satrapi’s wonderful graphic novel Persepolis—written and first published in Paris in 2000—was the exception that proved the rule in large part (in their analysis) because of the ways in which Satrapi refused a New York Times reporter’s attempt to essentialize her as a Muslim invested in “denounc[ing] Islamic fanaticism.” (In her interview with Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Magazine, Satrapi turned Solomon’s questions on themselves. Solomon disagreed with Satrapi when the latter claimed that Iranian veiling and Western unveiling of women are “equally reductive” of women. Satrapi then called out the Western hypocrisy around body image and plastic surgery: “If in Muslim countries they try to cover the woman, in America they try to make them look like a piece of meat.”) ⁶ One might go further and note that within her comics themselves, Satrapi is able efficiently to critique both Iranian contradictions in the obsession with the dangers of American culture and the shallow ways in which the West regards Iran. Her simple, even naive style of drawing allows her, via her autobiographical character Marji, to reveal the paradoxes inherent in both Iran’s and the West’s regard of each other.

Nonetheless, the ways in which Persepolis was read in the United States and adopted in schools tended to focus more on the perfidious nature of Iran than on Satrapi’s critique of the limitations of the West. As Satrapi commented on the U.S. publication of the second volume of Persepolis in 2004 (the original French edition appeared in four volumes, whereas the American edition was divided into two, appearing in 2003 and 2004, respectively), in the first book she had “the benefit of being cute, and not really responsible for the world around me. In the second book, I’m absolutely not cute anymore.”⁷ For schools, the first volume offered a user-friendly approach to teaching the Iranian Revolution, and the younger Marji in Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood offered a more charismatic hero than the older Marji in Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, which begins when a fifteen-year-old Marji emigrates from Iran to Vienna. In 2013, the Chicago Public School system pulled its copies of the graphic novel from school libraries and restricted access for students in grade 11 and lower.⁸ Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, named the book’s “graphic language and images” as the reason; by “graphic,” Byrd-Bennett was not referring to the fact that the book was a graphic novel, of course, but rather to the frames that rendered scenes of torture, apparently too vividly.⁹ The paradox was apparent. As the manager of Chicago’s feminist bookstore Women & Children First commented, it was “‘shocking and ironic’ that a book about freedom and freedom of expression would itself be restricted by [Chicago Public Schools].”¹⁰ Satrapi herself responded: “[T]his whole story in Chicago was absolutely shocking to me. They’re saying it’s inappropriate for kids because of the scenes of torture that were in just a couple of frames—in a book that is 200 pages long! It’s as if children never killed anybody in their video games, or as if they had never seen any films that contain violence. As you know, in America, kids can watch violent movies, and it’s not a problem, but if you say the word ‘fuck,’ that is unacceptable. Children are exposed to violence. But if it’s the violence of guns on TV, that is accepted.”¹¹

Despite their differences, what authors such as Satrapi, Nafisi, and Hakakian have in common is that they are, as Behdad and Williams put it, “Middle Eastern women and men who use their native subjectivity and newfound agency in the West to render otherwise biased accounts of the region…more authoritative and objective.”¹² Nafisi and Hakakian play on this assigned authority or representativeness, and Satrapi finds it difficult to escape. Either way, the alchemy happens in the U.S. marketplace, whether in the worlds of publishing or in the mediascape populated by talking heads, both of which desire “native informants.” Now, I would be the last critic to argue that people with origins or heritage in the Middle East region should not comment on that region for viewers and readers in the United States, but the point is that biases are of course carried over with the experience of exile or diaspora (quite notably in the case of Iran) and that these biases are often effaced via the logic that the native informant is necessarily unbiased and objective because of his or her heritage. Neo-Orientalism therefore may have continuities with the past, but, as Behdad and Williams argue, it also is a “supplement to enduring modes of Orientalist representation.”¹³ Such memoirs proliferate in what seems to have become an entire genre—the memoir by the previously unknown figure, who serves as native informant to a little-known part of the world. This proliferation of memoirs in turn limits other Iranians’ or Egyptians’ or Moroccans’ ability to publish in different genres in the United States. The market expects new titles to follow in the preestablished niche.

The Iranian memoir is only a part of the terrain in the new fascination with the Middle East. In the wake of the Tahrir uprisings, for example, as I discussed in chapter 2, the work of Alaa Al Aswany stood in for a much more complicated group of writers working in Cairo. For many, Al Aswany’s melodramatic novel The Yacoubian Building confirmed the Orientalist perspective on Egypt that was being revised in Cairo by writers of the next generation. Based on the ways that Al Aswany’s novel was translated and circulated in the United States in 2011 and after, therefore, he can be grouped with those whom Behdad and Williams call the neo-Orientalists. Within neo-Orientalism, as I am describing it, both the author and the U.S. marketplace (publishing world plus media outlets) work together, creating and sustaining the writer’s authority to represent his or her region—to be its representative. The author writes and speaks; the U.S. marketplace publishes and publicizes and effectively filters out competing voices that might challenge the perspective of the chosen representative.

Neo-Orientalism does not replace Orientalism, however; it supplements it. Beyond the popular Iranian memoirists and those representative Arab “native informants” propelled by the U.S. marketplace, can we claim that classic Orientalism endures in the twenty-first century? If so, does Orientalism operate differently in the digital age?

The persistence of Orientalist patterns of representing the Middle East and North Africa is visible in a staggering quantity of representations of the region in contemporary U.S. literature, television serials, comedy, and consumer culture—works that cross the highbrow–lowbrow divide. That which Edward Said predicted twenty years ago, alas, remains true, but with a twist. Since September 2001, the United States has been in a perpetual state of war or troop deployment to sustain the military occupation of two nation-states in the Middle East; we have been in an extended version of that Saidian “spurt” of attention. American Orientalism has been not only renewed but also extended and exaggerated.

It bears recalling that by “Orientalism,” Said meant something a bit more nuanced than the common (mis)usage of the term. His three-part definition noted that Orientalism was, first, an academic field of inquiry that studied, cataloged, and archived a part of the world it referred to as “the Orient.”¹⁴ For the most part, we have given up the term Orient to designate the area of study and adopted other denominations, but Orientalism itself is enduring. The academic and scholarly landscape has been transformed by the military invasion and occupation, with massive new resources and interest by government funding agencies and private donors alike available to develop programs and academic departments. This transformation comes with a level of attention to Middle East studies that can at times be intense. Scholars in the field have had to tread carefully and to face pressures from groups outside the university who can mobilize resources and attention that can be overwhelming or at times intimidating to those who diverge from mainstream or traditionally dominant positions. In this sense, the enduring aspects of American Orientalism make the numerous contests over the field itself in the past decade and a half—from political accusations of radical politics on both congressional and state levels in the wake of September 11, 2001, to the fights over the Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement in the present moment—quite important.

Second, Said defined Orientalism as a “style of thought” based on a distinction between Orient and Occident, imagined as an “ontological and epistemological distinction”—in other words, a way of understanding the world as binary.¹⁵ There are still those who maintain these binaries, though the term Orient has been replaced by the phrase “the Muslim world” or “the Arab world” or “the Middle East,” all constructs that collapse internal differences and diversity in place of an imagined totality.¹⁶ In such designations, distinctions between Arab countries or Muslim societies across the world are minimized so that they remain lumped together in a different universe from the United States. A remainder of Orientalism is left over in the twenty-first century: anxieties over the ways in which globalization links these apparently disparate or cut-off parts of the world. But the process of what Said called the third aspect of Orientalism, a “corporate institution for dealing with the Orient,”¹⁷ remains continuous. In Said’s account, Europeans needed Orientalism as a way to understand the lands being occupied by France and Britain and to justify to themselves how they could tolerate such explicit aggression. Here is where the new American Orientalism—and the embrace of it—serves its cultural purpose, where it does cultural “work.”

One would think that globalization and the digital age would put unbearable pressure on Orientalism, especially since the digital age collapses those distances on which Orientalism relies. How can one maintain a binarism when the points of connection and the means by which the worlds connect are ubiquitous and undeniable?

And yet the persistence and renewal of Orientalism in the past five years are notable. The tone of major and popular works such as Craig Thompson’s epic graphic novel Habibi (2011), the Showtime television serial Homeland (2011–), the FX television series Tyrant (2014–), literary novels such as The Yellow Birds (2012) by Kevin Powers and A Hologram for the King (2012) by Dave Eggers—both finalists for the National Book Award—and even the massive popularity of Moroccan style in fashion, beauty, and home-design consumer culture in the past decade (and the way Morocco is described within those marketing mechanisms) go beyond mere persistence of Orientalism to at times the outright embrace of it. To be sure, each of these representations handles its subject differently, with authors or creative teams holding political positions that range from the liberal (Eggers) to the neoconservative (Tyrant producer-creators Howard Gordon and Gideon Raff), but there is definitely a new and quickly deepening archive of twenty-first-century American Orientalism.

All of these representations appear in a context where Said’s critique is well known and studied in the universities that educated many of the authors of these representations. The term Orientalism itself is a part of the cultural landscape. When asked directly whether he distinguished between using Orientalism as a “playground” and reproducing it in his graphic novel Habibi, Craig Thompson responded: “As for the charge of Orientalism, I knew it was going to come up no matter what, so why not embrace it?”¹⁸

Given that the recurrence of Orientalism takes place within the context of continued—even expanded—U.S. political and military presence in the region and that all the examples I have given (except perhaps the fashion) are explicitly political, either in authorial intent or content, we can recognize a continuity in the tradition of American Orientalism that goes back as least as far as the 1942 military landings at Casablanca (and the Warner Bros. film of the same name). In the 1940s and 1950s, as I argue in my book Morocco Bound, American Orientalist texts represented a part of the world generally considered exotic to Americans even as the United States was emerging as a global superpower with increasing interests around the world. In that period, as opposed to our own, U.S. cultural producers recognized that European colonialism preceded American presence. As a result, such artists, filmmakers, and writers were as interested in attending to French and British models of internationalism as they were caught up in portraying Arab exoticism. That interest changed progressively after 1973, when the domestic impact of U.S. presence in the Middle East became increasingly fraught, after which American representations of the Middle East and North Africa, especially in fiction and film, took on a different tenor.

In the post-2001 period, there has been a crucial twist. Unlike the neo-Orientalism of the Iranian memoirists or of American Orientalists of the twentieth century, the twenty-first-century Orientalists are aware of and sometimes fascinated by the question of circulation. It is the specter that haunts this body of work—sometimes even its provocation. Alternatively a theme inscribed in the work and a shadow cast over it, circulation and the anxiety it provokes run through the works of the new American Orientalists. To note this is both to offer a rubric by which to make sense of a diverse body of contemporary work and to suggest that the disconnect between the Iranian, Egyptian, and Moroccan works I have discussed and those works produced in the United States during the same time period may occur precisely in the realm where they might have crossed. The circulation that fuels cultural production and creativity in the Middle East–North Africa region in the period after the American century—and that is their distinguishing characteristic—is something that the American texts do not quite know how to handle. The anxiety over circulation does not delimit the success of such works; indeed, it makes for entertaining dramas. The works I discuss next have been critically acclaimed and sold well. Perhaps the anxiety over circulation is the reason for their success; they channel a more common concern in the age of globalization.

In Showtime’s blockbuster series Homeland, which broadcast its fourth season from October through December 2014, there is an aggressive, if implicit, justification for maintaining the so-called war on terror and, more specifically, for a hard-line approach to dealing with Iran. In that sense, Homeland, before all else, manages for its American viewers their discomfort about the U.S. military’s presence in the region via a thrilling and ever complex and twisting plot. This might come as little surprise because the series was developed by producers Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa—the team behind the Fox series 24—based on an Israeli miniseries developed by Gideon Raff. As viewers watch the travails of CIA agents chasing down an international network of al-Qaʾida-inspired terrorists, the fictional narrative helps illuminate the masterful opening credits that open each episode. In the first three seasons, the opening credits juxtaposed documentary footage of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama making statements within the long-lasting war against terrorism in the Middle East. We are in it for the long haul, the montage suggests week after week. The credits make a historical point—and a controversial one at that—by connecting the dots between events in the region; in quick succession, we hear four presidents and snippets of actual news broadcasts make reference to U.S. strikes on terrorist facilities in Libya in 1986; the bombing of Pan American flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988; Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990; the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000; the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001; and the assassination of Osama bin Laden. In turn, the credits connect the fictional characters and plot of Homeland with the nonfiction individuals and events. The last of the nonfiction clips is a phrase drawn from President Obama’s speech after the capture of bin Laden, a sentence that might characterize the series’ political message: “We must, and we will, remain vigilant at home and abroad.” Thus, the series’ fictional aspects are intertwined with the long U.S. presence in the Middle East and justify continued sustenance of that presence—a way of dealing with the Middle East, to paraphrase Said.

Beyond such first-level Orientalism, we can note that the central problem of the plot revolves around circulation. When Marine sergeant Nicholas Brody (played by British actor Damian Lewis) is rescued in Iraq after eight years of captivity, the premise of the series, he is hailed as a hero by a naive American public, which includes a media that lionizes him and a political establishment that sees his return as a victory within the unending war on terror. The dramatic tension is twofold. First, his family hardly knows how to receive him. In the long years of his captivity, during which he was assumed dead, his wife, Jessica (played by Italian Brazilian actress Morena Baccarin) has become involved with Brody’s best friend, a fellow marine who has become a sort of surrogate father to their children. Second, CIA analyst Carrie Mathison (played by Claire Danes) is convinced that Brody has been “turned” during his time in the hands of a terrorist organization clearly modeled on al-Qaʾida. The dramatic tension is that few believe her, including her CIA colleagues and supervisors, whereas the audience of the show is given clues that her hunches are correct (figure E.1), all while Brody capitalizes on his celebrity by catapulting quickly to the highest levels of political access.

Transnational circulation is at the heart of the danger imagined in the series: al Jazeera journalists who secretly work for al-Qaʾida, Muslim professors at American universities who are operatives for the terrorist network, and Brody’s own secret conversion to Islam (he sneaks into his suburban garage to pray) are key elements in the first season. As the seasons continue, the fictional version of al-Qaʾida turns out to have alliances and networks that go beyond the believable, at least for those with knowledge of Middle East politics (e.g., the series turns to Iran). Meanwhile, the romantic subplot is so thoroughly intertwined with the geopolitical one—Sergeant Brody and Agent Mathison become romantically and sexually involved—that it does not seem a stretch to call the adulterous affairs (including that of Jessica Brody with Captain Mike Faber, played by Diego Klattenhoff) examples of illicit circulation, too, especially since in the case of Carrie and Brody it will eventually require her to follow him to Iran. The age-old problem of soldiers returning home to find transition difficult, a popular subject for Hollywood during and after previous wars (e.g., the 1946 Academy Award winner The Best Years of Our Lives [William Wyler]), is here in the twenty-first century a problem of not being able to leave the other continent behind. One is never outside the immediate reach of the Middle East in the United States, as this series imagines vividly across a number of story lines.

In Homeland, the Orientalism is yet more entrenched when we consider two metatextual aspects of the series: one, its relationship to ongoing geopolitics, and two, its origins as an Israeli miniseries and its afterlife as a new series in the United States: Tyrant.¹⁹ In the first case, the series has an eerie relationship to Obama administration politics, as Joseph Massad has argued. Noting that Barack Obama welcomed star Damien Lewis to the White House in March 2012 and that the president is apparently a big fan of the series, Massad sees the show’s unexpected narrative diversion toward Iran as a means by which to prepare a viewing public for an Israeli bombing campaign. To support this obviously bold claim, Massad reads much into the report of a conversation between Damian Lewis and Barack Obama. He quotes TV Guide’s account of the actor’s visit to the White House, when Lewis “did sort of joke with [Obama] that the creators of the show had asked him [Obama] to give us a heads up on any foreign policy moves so that we could just stay current with Season 2. And he looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘I’ll be sure to do that.’”²⁰ As it turned out, season 3 of the series (2013) suggested that improvement of U.S.–Iran political relations would come not from military strikes but by CIA manipulation inside Iran (specifically the “flipping” and political elevation of a high-level Iranian). Massad’s general point still holds true: that the divergence of Homeland’s plot from geopolitical realities has the potential to have a political impact on American audiences by “teaching” its audience how to think about U.S.–Iranian relations (and in season 4 about U.S.–Pakistani relations) and by inventing political alliances between forces in the Middle East. To be sure, the narrative association of al-Qaʾida with Iran in the series is startling. The figurehead of the fictional terrorist organization in Homeland is Abu Nazir, an Arab according to the script (though played by Navid Negahban, who was born and raised in Iran). Homeland’s chief terrorist is connected implausibly first to Hezbollah and then to Iran, both of which are antipathetic to al-Qaʾida in real-world politics. Thus, part of what Homeland teaches its audiences is to make connections between real-world entities based on fictional plot twists. Because I am arguing that the series manages and justifies continued American military, political, and covert presence in the region, these connections are troubling.

Homeland is already a text in circulation. The American series is based on an Israeli series titled Hatufim (Prisoners of war), which has been a critical and popular success in Israel since its 2010 premiere. The Israeli series imagines the return of three Israeli soldiers who have been held captive by Palestinian forces for seventeen years when their release is brokered. The core theme that carries over from the original Israeli series to the American one is the idea of the difficulties of returning home after captivity, and yet a comparison of the two series demonstrates the ways each is tailored for its own domestic public. Gideon Raff, the producer of Prisoners of War and Homeland, is himself an intriguing transnational figure. A former paratrooper in the Israeli army, he not only created the original Israeli miniseries, then sold and adapted it with Howard Gordon for Showtime, but also went on to create a second series for the U.S. market: Tyrant. The latter series is tailored to a perhaps less-sophisticated audience (moving networks from Showtime to FX). But its success demonstrates both Raff’s and Gordon’s marketing acumen, the ways in which Orientalism is adaptable across publics, and the continuing obsession with—perhaps anxiety over—circulation.

With Howard Gordon as executive producer, Gideon Raff as creator, and Avi Nir as an executive producer,²¹ Tyrant transposes the anxiety about circulation from Homeland onto this new and bolder representation of an irredeemably violent Arab Middle East. The very whiteness of Barry’s nuclear family and the portrayal of his wife’s startling naïveté—she seems unable to fathom why Barry might be hesitant about returning to Abbudin or why, once he arrives to find things as bad as ever, he is eager to leave—suggest a portrayal of American innocence that one might think impossible in U.S. popular culture after 2001. Tyrant further plays on the possibility that the family next door in the United States might in fact be linked to Middle East terror abroad, a fantasy of the most culturally conservative variety. Tyrant proposes that travel to the Middle East can pull one into a world that is at such a remove from American democracy and innocence that the best one can do is stay far away. Here, children are gun-wielding terrorists dealt with by assassination (episode 2), and Barry’s (Arab) American responsibility is to moderate or soften the repression while maintaining order. Circulation in Tyrant is centrifugal. The Middle East is a vortex that sucks America and Americans back in.

Despite the popularity of such series as Homeland and Tyrant and the way they double down on Orientalism, television, even putatively serious television, might seem an easy target for discussions of how contemporary American artists are haunted by questions of circulation. After all, transnational circulation is at the heart of twenty-first-century TV with its massive audiences, rebroadcasts, and reruns. So let us take a quick and final detour through recent fiction to see if it is haunted by these questions as well.

Fiction, both graphic fiction and old-fashioned prose narrative, is supposed to be an endangered category in the digital age. And yet a number of critically and popularly acclaimed works have taken up the same obsessions that run through Homeland and Tyrant alike, though in more subtle ways. In novels such as Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for the King (2012), set in Saudi Arabia, and U.S. Army veteran Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds (2012), set in Iraq, as well as in Craig Thompson’s epic graphic novel Habibi (2011), set in an invented Middle Eastern nation, the region is understood as a central setting for the American novel in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Eggers explores the odd juxtapositions of aging American business models and the new wealth and ambitions to be found on the Arabian Peninsula with a sense of precision that comes with an awareness of the historical or geopolitical proximity of Saudi Arabia and the United States. Powers recrafts the U.S. war novel as the poetic Yellow Birds alternates between Iraq in 2004 and Richmond, Virginia, in 2005 (and elsewhere in the United States later in the decade) in the soldier-writer’s perpetual attempt to bridge two worlds that are kept ever apart for those who were not in Iraq but that haunt each other through the decade and beyond. And Thompson sets out to create an epic that might itself open up U.S. culture to question the debilitating Islamophobia that is so prevalent, while embracing that which is beautiful in Arab and Islamic culture, religion, and art.

The premise of Habibi, however, is problematic in its implicit assumption of the binary that haunts Orientalism and maintains the distance that Thompson would seem to want to bridge through his work. He apparently doesn’t recognize this problem: his timeless desert is a world apart. The fictional city/kingdom of Wanatolia is a place where a lecherous and murderous sultan seems to come directly from the medieval worlds of the Arabian Nights even while the city outside the palace has advertisements for Pepsi and American consumer culture (thereby suggesting that the tale is set in the present). As Thompson’s critics pointed out, despite the author’s effort to open up American attitudes, his embrace of a sumptuous Orient laced through by dramatically retrograde gender and racial politics renders Habibi a familiar example of old-fashioned Orientalism, albeit in a new medium. Robyn Creswell wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “Thompson the illustrator is in the same situation as Zam: both are prisoners of their own fantasies, apparently unable to think of Dodola without disrobing her.” ²² Demonstrating his admitted embrace of visual Orientalism, Thompson went so far as to redraw scenes from classic European Orientalist paintings. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s famous bathhouse scenes, for example, appear in Habibi, redrawn in Thompson’s own hand. But here they are neither parody nor pastiche and instead mingle the artist’s pleasure in gazing at Muslim women’s bodies and his apparent pride in finding an occasion for the new form (the graphic novel) to encompass the older one (painting).

How does circulation operate in Habibi? First, on the level of plot: the two characters at the heart of this 670-page epic are lost and always attempting to find each other. Their fates are intertwined, and just as the Qurʾan and the Bible diverge from the same source, in Thompson’s vision Dodola and Zam’s reunion will be both inevitable and forever impossible. Zam’s desire for Dodola—along with his earlier pain in having to witness her prostitute herself to save them both—is so great that he allows himself to be castrated: a eunuch. Thompson traffics in the classic Western obsession with “Oriental” sexual deviance and in so doing finds a figure—the eunuch—by which to represent the inability to connect the disparate worlds he is trying to bridge in graphic narrative.

Thompson tried to connect to Arabs during the period he was working on Habibi—to find a way to draw the worlds he was trying (he claimed) to open up to American eyes—by traveling through contemporary Morocco. There he found numerous visual motifs he would employ in Habibi. But based on his own testimony about his trip to Morocco, he failed to bridge the cultural gap that might have been predicted by his embrace of Orientalism. Thompson published his journals and sketchbooks from the period when he was working on Habibi in the small-format book Carnet de voyage (2004). There he depicts himself as an artist trying to connect with Moroccans while traveling solo in North Africa and admittedly getting caught in the tourist circuits. Travelers’ sickness, loneliness, the impossibility of escaping the tourism mill confronted Thompson in Morocco, according to his own graphic account, and I think this account helps to explain the way the Orientalism of Habibi ultimately reinscribes the very distance he wanted to break down. Thompson himself suggests that Carnet de voyage should be read in connection with Habibi: in his opening disclaimer, he states that Carnet de voyage was “not ‘the Next Book,’”²³ and so I read it as an artist’s study for the graphic novel that would follow.

Circulation is everywhere, and yet it does not allow American characters in the new Orientalism to bridge the gap. In Dave Eggers’s novel A Hologram for the King, there is a sense of the passing of a torch from the United States to China and the end of an American century. Eggers puts his protagonist in an empty tent at the King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia, ever ready to make a sales presentation to the Saudi king using the latest in American digital novelties, though the meeting is ever deferred. The opportunity to renew the glories of the American century—here represented by the Chicago-based bicycle company Schwinn, whose corporate dissolution haunts the protagonist—by using the newest innovations in U.S. technology will not present itself. Eggers has in the past several years written two novels and a work of narrative nonfiction—Zeitoun (2009), A Hologram for the King (2012), and The Circle (2013)—that together help explain the way circulation and the fate of the United States in the Middle East are associated for him. Eggers has not called these works a trilogy, but a series of associated tragedies and paradigm shifts is explored in them. First, in Zeitoun Eggers exposes the failure of American institutions—especially the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—during the cataclysmic tragedy of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In A Hologram for the King, he represents the loss of American economic hegemony and corporate breakdown in the global shift toward the Persian Gulf states, which recognize a different set of economic ties and cultural affiliations. And, finally, in The Circle, taking on an area where the United States is still dominant, Silicon Valley, he forecasts the threat to private life and individuality as we know it by imagining the logical extension of the digital revolution. For my purposes, these three books serve as a trilogy documenting the various “ends” of the American century. In Zeitoun, Syrian-born character Abdulrahman Zeitoun finds in his confinement, as FEMA agents spit at him and randomly and painfully call him “Taliban” and “al-Qaʾida,” that the United States will jail him rather than celebrate his embrace of ur-American values of hard work and community. A Hologram for the King recalls the greatness of an era in American manufacturing and civic pride that is now lost and associates its demise with the personal and professional failures of the novel’s middle-aged protagonist and his inability to thrive in Saudi Arabia. The Circle imagines that a piece of software that links one’s “true,” real-world identity with one’s digital identity will eventually end privacy and individual subjectivity itself, and it thereby sees that the end of the digital revolution as driven by U.S. culture will be a form of totalitarianism.

But anxieties over circulation can provoke nightmares for Americans, too. As I wrote this epilogue, a brief but intense fear of the arrival of the Ebola virus flared up in the United States, fueled by media coverage and running across both broadcast and social media platforms with a speed far greater than the actual incubation period of the virus itself. (The virus seems to have died out as a news story and was replaced on the front pages by the midterm elections in November 2014 and then later in the month by the devastating events in Ferguson, Missouri, following a police shooting of an unarmed black teenager.) For so long during the past century, Americans felt at a geographical remove from the rest of the world, which perhaps kept the United States from experiencing that sense of empire and Orientalism that Said describes for British and French subjects living in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But now, in the period after the American century, anxieties run deep about the ways digital connectivity and the interconnectedness of the transnational grid make “domestic America”—that still sacred space in Homeland, Tyrant, The Yellow Birds, and so on—an ever-fractured fantasy. Thinking through these anxieties is a way of grappling with a logic that no longer makes sense for the contemporary period. In this regard, examples of American cultural production—such as Habibi—are still caught in the earlier paradigm. Eggers’s trilogy knows how to represent that paradigm but cannot break free from it. Meanwhile, new creative work in Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran has already moved beyond American century logics of how culture moves through the world and has found ways to shift the center of gravity away from New York and Hollywood in ways that frequently defy American expectations—when these works are noticed at all. It is about time we paid attention to such innovations and caught up with the logics of a new century well under way.