On 1 November, scholars and intellectuals marked the birth anniversary of . In commemoration of the occasion, Al-Ahram Weekly publishes an abridged version of the Said Memorial Lecture given by John Carlos Rowe at the American University in Cairo 's criticism of US imperialism, especially in the Middle East, is the real basis for the claim several of us have made for him as a scholar-activist of American Studies. A scholar of great intellect and justifiable ego, Said was also the first to insist that we should not venerate our predecessors, but always locate them historically. On the mere evidence of Said's extensive work on US imperialism in the Middle East, ranging from Orientalism (1978) through Covering Islam (1981) and Blaming the Victims (1988) to Out of Place: A Memoir (1999), scholars in American Studies ought to have undertaken the more concerted studies of relations between the United States and the Arabic and Islamic worlds that are just today beginning to have an impact. Said was indeed "out of place" in the United States in this regard, insofar as his regular columns in Arabic journals, including the Al-Ahram Weekly here in Cairo, were virtually unknown in US scholarly circles. Published just last year, Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom's collection of essays, : Emancipation and Representation helps overcome this American provincialism, as do the many valuable studies of Said published in the Arab world before and after his death, including the issue of Alif devoted to his work in 2005. Of course, the phrase "ahead of his time" applies more accurately than "out of place" to Said's actual anticipation of the new scholarly attention in American Studies devoted to the Arab and Islamic worlds. My friendship with was deeply academic and professional, which to some may seem a cold way to describe personal relations, but for me it possessed a purity that transcended friendships based on the trivialities of everyday life, on chance occurrences and serendipitous meetings. and I always connected through "the work," and thus my remembrance of him on this day, his birthday, here in Cairo, on Tahrir Square, in the midst of political events that have changed dramatically not only the Egypt Said loved but also the world -- my remembrance must be true to the greatest lesson he taught me: Criticize your teachers. In the post-nationalist era we inhabit uneasily today, characterized as much by neo-nationalist struggles as it is by a dizzying array of transnational dangers and hopes, the comparatism exemplified in his public persona and his distinguished career should be the work of many different scholars, coming from many, increasingly overlapping disciplines such as American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Comparative Religions, History, Comparative Literature, Philosophy, Political Science, Anthropology, and Foreign Language departments. I turn now to the development of an "American Orientalism" Said may have anticipated but did not live to witness in its current state, particularly manifest in the troubling Islamophobia evident in certain areas of contemporary US society. The debates in 2010 about the construction of an Islamic Center two blocks from "ground zero" in Manhattan, entangled with plans by a small-town preacher in Central Florida to burn Korans on 9/ 11 in protest against Islamic terrorists, are troubling examples of how polarized the US and the Islamic world have become. As a long-time advocate of educational reform, especially with regard to education of Americans about the Arab world and Islam, Said would have understood the current failure of our educational institutions as yet another instance of American Orientalism. My purpose is to suggest that 's contributions to American Studies are more than merely disciplinary and certainly more important than what he might have occasionally said about Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and T S Eliot. Said's legacy for the new American Studies and its cultural politics must be understood as his elaboration of key ideas for our understanding of the US as a global power deeply involved in the politics of the Middle East. When Said died on September 25, 2003, the Second Gulf War had been officially declared over and our military "mission accomplished" in President George W Bush's infamous speech on 1 May 2003, even though the US military occupation of Iraq would last another eight years, only in the past few weeks drawing to a formal close. Said recognized, of course, Bush's military bravura and our unjustified invasion in the search for elusive "weapons of mass destruction" as the causes for the civil war that would break out in Iraq and the breakdown of civil society that would cause hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to die in sectarian violence and millions to flee the country. For Said, it was a familiar story in the history of Western imperialism in the region. Said also predicted accurately how traditional US imperialism would metamorphose into neo- imperialism from the First Gulf War to the George W Bush Administration's postulation of a "Great Middle East," balanced and secured by our disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq in the Second Gulf War. This "new Orient" follows historically the paths of European colonialism in the Middle East, especially in the build-up and aftermath of colonial struggles in North Africa and the Middle East surrounding the construction of the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869, the political balance-of- power European and Ottoman Empire politics negotiated in the region in the World War I era, and the first major foreign exploitation of Middle Eastern oil resources in the 1920s. Said also understood how this imperial legacy shaped the current stalemate between the Israel and Palestine, as well as affected the internal politics and foreign policies of their neighbors in the region -- a political stalemate virtually guaranteed by the territorial fractures that have made distinct national sovereignties in the region so difficult to define, much less maintain. "Imperialism is finally about land," Said writes in Culture and Imperialism, insisting upon an imperial bed-rock we are warned never to forget. But there are limits to the mere extension of the traditional imperialist model to the neo-imperialism of the contemporary US, which certainly dates from the Vietnam War (1965-1975), just the last in the series of colonial wars in Southeast Asia that destabilized that region but also exceptional in the neo-imperialism the US deployed "to win hearts and minds" in Vietnam, with the disastrous results we forget at our peril. Said's insistence upon the irreducible "reality" of land as the object of imperialism's desire may also mark the limitation of his thoroughly modern conception of Orientalism as a key strategy of Western imperialism. In exposing how Orientalism disguised the basic land-grabs of European imperialists, Said imagined a relatively straightforward demystification of Western discursive practices -- scholarship, literature, visual arts, news media, et al. -- that otherwise masked or disguised the real political situation in the Middle East. Taking upon himself the task of cultural translator and demystifier, Said cast himself in the role of anti-imperalist critic of a West whose cultural protocols he understood at the professional level of a trained European Comparatist and Continental theorist. As I noted above, US scholars ought to have recognized what I know scholars in Arabic and Islamic communities knew already: Said's anti- imperialism was also a profound contribution to American Studies. Today, "covering Islam" has assumed some different modes not completely anticipated by Said and that transform our understanding of what must be termed a "neo-Orientalism" manipulated by the US State that draws only in part from traditional Western Orientalism, itself primarily the work of European imperialism. I will consider a few of these new modalities under a single, roughly formulated heading: the internalization of the traditional "Orient" within the US nation. Indeed, one of the crucial features of this US "nationalization" of the Orient involves a curious engagement with European cultural contexts, such that the US attempts to shift the cultural and political relationship from the US and the Middle East to the U.S. and Europe. This European modality complicates the process and works quite effectively to create a "screen discourse" to distract us from the real political, cultural, and religious issues at stake. The core of such "internalization" of the Other is genealogically derived from the European imperialism Said understood so well. In Orientalism, he analyzes brilliantly how nineteenth- century European Orientalism works by projecting Europe's own unconscious anxieties about the foreign, the feminine, the sexual, the racial, and the irrational "other" onto other peoples and cultures occluded by this European fantasy. However much Said objected to deconstruction and post-structuralism in general, he "deconstructed" these "others" to expose the European psychosis, whose principal symptom must be its incurable, unsatisfiable imperialist desire. But Said's criticism of Orientalism reaches its limit when confronted by such cultural productions as John Walker Lindh, "the American Taliban," and Azar Nafisi, the American Iranian, whose Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003) was a national best-seller. John Walker Lindh (1981- ) is the convicted and imprisoned "enemy combatant" (legally not a "terrorist," or else he would be in Guantanamo, probably untried), who was captured in Afghanistan during the early stages of the US invasion in 2001 and sentenced by a US court to 20 years in prison. Azar Nafisi (1950 - ) has gained a wide international following, with special popularity in the United States, as a new "patriot" for both US and dissidents both outside and inside Iran, representing perhaps a nearly inconceivable "transnational" entity, "American Iran." I want to use John Walker Lindh and Azar Nafisi to exemplify the neo-Orientalism Said did not quite comprehend but who nonetheless emerged as widely discussed public figures while Said was still alive. I do not want to overemphasize the exceptional status of what these figures represent in the present moment. US neo-imperialism today draws upon a very long tradition of American Orientalism that predates the US nation and was employed effectively, along with other xenophobic attitudes, to consolidate and legitimate the new nation, much as the Alien and Sedition Acts did in overtly legal ways in 1798 and the more recent "Patriot Act" has done since 2001. Lindh draws the "new Orient" into the otherwise disparate field of "domestic terrorism," condensing David Koresh, Timothy McVeigh, Ruby Ridge (Idaho) secessionists with American popular fantasies of Middle Eastern and Islamic radicalism. Today, that relation has morphed to include Left politics' anti-imperialist struggle in the anti-Vietnam War movement and thus tacitly the anti-war movements against the immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sarah Palin's resurrection of Barack Obama's association with William Ayres during the 2008 Presidential Campaign is symptomatic of how President Obama's "criticism" of America and the Second Gulf War condenses the Weather Underground Ayres co- founded in the 1960s and the anti-Vietnam War politics it served with a more general anti- American "hatred" that improbably links critical positions as different as critical American Studies as a discipline, anti-Gulf War protests, such as MoveOn.org has sponsored, neo-Nazi and radical Libertarian groups committed to American isolationism and racial purity, and the emergent "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations by the "99 Percenters" currently taking place in dozens of American cities. Lindh had to be ideologically neutralized by infantilizing him and offering him a "lenient" sentence that further testified to his "adolescent" rebellion against Yuppie parents, Bay Area permissiveness, and other "symptoms" of a post- Vietnam generation that could not adequately parent because its members had themselves "never grown up." The familiar neo-conservative explanation of anti-Vietnam War protest, such as Paul Berman has claimed in A Tale of Two Utopics (1996) and its sequel Power and the Idealists (2005), dismisses strong criticism of foreign policy, imperialism, and unjustified warfare as "childish," out of touch with the "real world" and the presumed "Realpolitik" of US military and economic policies around the globe. To be sure, the conflation of the "Orient" (Yemen and Afghanistan in the case of Lindh) with "infantilism" recalls sophisticated Hegelian theories of historical "development" from the "infant" East through the adolescence of Egypt to Greco-Roman young adults and the full maturity of German idealist philosophers, like Hegel himself. Lindh's domestication of Islamic radicalism turns on his adolescent rebellion against Western "modernity and development," a regressive gesture through which "he" displaces and incorporates Arabic, Afghani, Yemeni, and other "Oriental" social institutions and Islam, embodying this "new Orient" in the uncanny figure of the bearded Bay Area youth in the US courtroom, once again confusing anti-Vietnam War hippies with radical Islam. In case you think that the John Walker Lindh "narrative" is a bit of forgotten popular culture in the early stages of the US military invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, I want to suggest that Lindh provides a "national" prototype that regulates the recent rationalizations of such acts as the military assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki (1971- 2011) by means of a US drone missile fired in Yemeni sovereign territory and Nidal Malik Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist accused of the Fort Hood, Texas shootings on 5 November 2009 and connected closely with al-Awlaki. Although both US citizens, neither al-Awlaki nor Malik Hasan have been "nationalized" in precisely the same ways as John Walker Lindh, but instead relegated respectively to "foreign terrorist" and "unstable psychotic." In terms of the cultural narrative I see initiated by the John Walker Lindh, Anwar al-Awlaki constitutes the irreducible "foreignness" of a "terrorism" that can only be addressed by military force, whereas Lindh "appears" American and thus "reformable," instantiating a host of social and cultural problems we need urgently to address. Nidal Malik Hasan poses yet another variation, in which his "Americanness" can only be regulated by way of an absolute judgment of "insanity," rendered especially ironic when we consider his professional training as a psychiatrist and his daily work in treating military personnel suffering from "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder." Another version of this misrecognition is the emigré Iranian writer, Azar Nafisi, whose authority in Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) is presumed to be that of a "native informant," familiar with the political and social history of Iran in the aftermath of the Shah's brutal rule. Nafisi is, of course, just one of numerous emigré writers, who have capitalized on such eye-witness accounts, including the equally celebrated Khaled Hosseini, whose The Kite Runner (2003), is supposed to give us an insider's account of Afghanistan from the pre-Soviet era to the Taliban's rule. Of course, eye-witnesses should always be judged skeptically, especially when we are considering politically conflicted societies irreducible to a single, representative perspective. Often enough the actual authority of the non-Western native is Western, threatening native credentials. Nafisi's authority is actually that of the PhD in English literature she earned from the University of Oklahoma, not her ability to do the sort of social ethnography of modern Iran we identify with the new cultural geographers and anthropologists. Although both Nafisi and Hosseini represent traditional "assimilationist ideals," neither works to "forget" his or her native culture as assimilated minorities are presumed to do. Instead, these new subalterns actively construct fantastic Iranian and Afghani "cultures" inside the US, both in their English-language books and in their special valorization of Iranian or Afghani refugee communities in the U.S. as models for those who will eventually "return" to their homelands. A third version of this internalization of the Orient is the adaptation of mythic national narratives and archetypes to new foreign ventures in the Middle East, such as the various interpretations of Jessica Lynch in the context of Puritan captivity narratives and the condensation of domestic frontier conflicts with the Second Gulf War. This modality is far more conventional in terms of nationalist ideology than the figurae of John Walker Lindh and Azar Nafisi, because the protagonists in these cultural narratives are rendered "representative" Americans, whereas the Middle Eastern actors are generally demonized as "enemy combatants" or at best subaltern "mediators." In the cases of Lindh and Nafisi, each character is "transformed" by the narrative -- Lindh metamorphosed into an "American Taliban," problematically captured in the field of battle in Afghanistan and traceable back to his studies in Yemen; Nafisi changed by her émigré experiences in the US from anti-war student protester to the "good" citizen defending the nation against the Evil Empire in Tehran. Later developments in the Jessica Lynch mythology, including Lynch's own repudiation of events as they were recounted in the melodrama of her heroic rescue by the U.S. military, appear to subvert this national mythopoeia. In fact, cultural myth-making today is all about "circulation" or what ratings' experts would term "air- time," and by that measure Jessica Lynch's personal denial of her heroic rescue and her criticism of the media representations of her have only added to her celebrity, making her name synonymous with the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The speed with which Jessica Lynch was in fact adapted and adopted to domestic concerns is symptomatic of my general conception of the "U.S. nationalization of international crises" as means of containing and controlling those crises. The US fascination with the fate of Patrick Daniel "Pat" Tillman (1976-2004), killed in Afghanistan by "friendly fire," also suggests that ideological complications, even contradictions, contribute to the new mythopoeia. Once again, both Lynch and Tillman are extensions of very familiar US national narratives of "captivity" and "friendly fire" that can be traced back to pre- national forms, such as the Puritan "captivity narrative", in which characters caught between the changing alliances during the French and Indian Wars often suffer injury and death from "mistaken" political identities. Both Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman remain figures of interest as long as they continue to represent the contradictions of the Second Gulf War and our ongoing war in Afghanistan, and they do so by bringing these wars "home" in all their unresolved political complications. The popular television series, 24, in which the investigator Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) faced critical terrorist threats on US territory with only twenty-four hours to foil these attempts follows the logic of more conventional US imperial narratives. Although Bauer faced a wide range of domestic and international "terrorists," the stories invariably turned on the personal psychologies of the American characters, thus reinforcing the "clash of civilizations" so invidiously represented in the late Samuel Huntington's book of that title. Much has been written about the series, 24, but it tells us relatively little new about US cultural imperialism. The series 24 concluded this year, the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and it seemed that it had run its course as cultural therapy, but the new Showtime series, Homeland, which debuted on 2 October 2011, is an intriguing spinoff that offers new evidence for my thesis of a neo-imperialism that works through the importation of international problems as part of a broader US globalization. Homeland plays upon the redemptive plot of the captivity narrative, but with a radical difference. US Marine Sergeant Nicholas ("Nick") Brody returns home after eight years of enemy captivity in Afghanistan. Brody is received by all as a suffering hero, whose captivity by al-Qaeda has left him with countless physical and psychological wounds. Only Carrie Mathison, who has faulted herself for not predicting the terrorist attacks on 9/11, suspects that Brody is not who he appears to be, but in fact may well be an operative of al-Qaeda. The details of this new series are just being worked out in the first few episodes, but the broader outlines are clear. The "foreign" antagonist now looks just like an "American," whatever that generalized appearance might really be, and the transposition of "terrorist" qualities to domestic "dissidents" will be rendered easier as cultural work like this television series reinforces such popular slogans in the US as what every traveler reads on US airport signs: "If you see something, say something." Recalling the famous Cold-War era film, recently remade, The Manchurian Candidate, Homeland plays upon the broad paranoia within the general population of the US The broader cultural narrative is the Vietnam- Effect in both Gulf Wars and Afghanistan, whereby our ventures in one "Orient" (Southeast Asia) appears to condition our later policies in two other, very different "Orients" (Iraq and Afghanistan), confusing the three regions by mere nominal association. Of course, these social psychological practices of projection and substitution are crucial to nineteenth-century European Orientalism, which began with its own fantasies of the exotic "East" and substituted such fictions for regions neither "eastern" nor "Oriental." The difference of the new Orientalism is the self-conscious importation of these fantasies. In the nineteenth-century imaginary, distance was a crucial factor, which preserved the exoticism of distant lands and peoples, especially important when people from those lands had emigrated to the metropolitan centers of the empire. But today US neo-imperialism depends upon rendering familiar the distant and exotic. We must add to this formula the equally powerful myth of the United States as a "settler society," whose social values have been shaped by immigrants. Of course, the conventional claim to the US as "exceptional" in this regard ignores the fact that virtually all societies are shaped by immigrants, as long as one goes back far enough. The difference is how the uniqueness of "US settler society" has been used not only to ignore indigenous rights and history but also to treat other sovereign nations and peoples in this era of globalization. That old British fantasy of "the English world" in which everyone within the British Empire would speak English and behave according to the British standard of civil society has metamorphosed into the U.S. imaginary of an "end of history" when everyone will come to America to realize his or her destiny. And, of course, by implication "America" will be everywhere. In this dystopic view, Americans are encouraged to look inward to our domestic problems to work through foreign policy issues in anticipation of those "foreign" problems coming to them, as Americans are warned they will. It is this fantasy of "American universality," too often the model for new cosmopolitanism, including Said's own, that tells us US neo-imperialism is not so much about land, natural resources, even global economic or military power, but primarily about a national identity we still cannot define. The new Orientalisms are multiple, overlapping, and strategically confusing, enabling their authors to substitute foreign policy discussions for any genuine historical discussion of the Vietnamese, Iraqi, Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese, and Afghani peoples. The irony of these cultural processes of internalization, domestication, and displacement is that they take place through a US national model that has never been more fragile and fictional, irrelevant as it is to the global State power wielded by the Reagan-Bush administrations through transnational coalitions, US allies in the Greater Middle East, oil interests in the Black Sea neighborhoods of Afghanistan, and global capitalism's dependency on Chinese modernization and development. President Barack Obama's administration has attempted to create an image of more cooperative international relations and a less militant foreign policy, even as the US continues to wage wars in the name of US "national security," in keeping with the policies of Presidents George H W and George W Bush that the US police the "New World Order." The Obama administration's new foreign policy and international image still depend upon a vigorous American exceptionalism, and Barack Obama is ironically the most eloquent defender of such exceptionalism we have had in recent years. The US is not just the "leader" of the "free world," but the democratic exemplar of religious, racial and ethnic, gender and sexual, economic, and political diversity and tolerance. The "Orient" is everywhere else, especially at home in America. What would have made of such neo-imperial complications worked through a cultural narrative that is closer than ever to the geopolitical interests of the United States? Of course, he would have tried to understand the intersection of culture and politics while cultivating his critical perspective "out of place," unstably occupying US, European, and Arabic positions.
