Brian Edwards

Trump from Reality TV to Twitter, or the Selfie-Determination of Nations

2018

The age of Trump has ushered in a reorganization of the way American culture circulates through the world. Beginning with the 2015 campaign, the global circulation of Trump’s rhetoric ruptured the crucial divide between popular culture and political discourse, the conditions under which the “American century” functioned. The essay discusses the relationship of the rise of the digital technologies to new social forms that began emerging in the final years of the twentieth-century, accompanied by novel forms of entertainment. The increasing popularity of reality television and social media as entertainment inform what I call the selfie-determination of nations: a digitally mediated, imagined community of the disconnected. This mediated context of social organization is the digital ground upon which Trump campaigned and thus far governs, and connected to the rise of global populisms. Under Trump the US political system itself has become a form of global entertainment.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/706245#.W9G_v6X3dGV.twitter

The World, the Text, and the Americanist

2013

We have entered a period of time when the meanings attached to the US in the world have shifted decisively. In the Middle East and North Africa, there is widespread distrust of American imperial intentions. As the global economic crisis persists, the US economy has entered what some prominent economists have called its “autumn,” a putative decline from its apex during the twentieth century. During the exciting winter and spring of 2011, a wave of global protests for democracy in the Arab world did not look to American models for sustenance or inspiration. Indeed, members of an apparently spontaneous movement in the US, Occupy Wall Street and its many affiliates, avowed that they had looked to the Middle East for their own inspiration.2 Many, if not all, of the sustaining principles that Americans have held dear through the last half of the twentieth century have been questioned—and no longer on the margins of the left, but at the heart of American public discourse.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/496753

Disorienting Captivity: A Response to Gordon Sayre

2010

There are several provocative assertions in Gordon Sayre's essay "Renegades in Barbary" that together make a compelling case for rethinking the ways in which we consider captivity narratives in light of the recent scholarly turn toward the Mediterranean and "the Muslim world." As Sayre rightly notes, this turn, spurred by the geopolitics of the past decade, which has made US political incursions in the Middle East and captivity of both Americans abroad and transnational Muslims at Guantanamo Bay subjects of popular fascination and political crisis, may be seen both in studies of the early American republic and in Americanist work treating subsequent periods. Too often, it would appear, scholars working outside the period have caricatured narratives of American captivity in Muslim hands during the early republic, forgoing a richer understanding of the literary and political engagement with North Africa in the late eighteenth century. That this is done in terms that feed into and are made comprehensible by present concerns is troubling and demands corrective measures.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/382109

Preposterous Encounters: Interrupting American Studies with the (Post)Colonial, or Casablanca in the American Century

2003

Is it rude, in company, to interrupt? Not a social question, of course, but a field question—namely, how not to be properly disciplined? The same question, rephrased: when is critical preposterousness warranted?

This essay responds to critical impasses in the encounter of American Studies and postcolonial studies: competing assertions that the United States is from the start postcolonial versus denials that it has ever or yet undergone decolonization and institutional disincentives and disciplinary impulses against comparative, multilingual, and multi-sited work. Drawing its urgency from the multiple emergencies made visible and exacerbated by 9/11/01, especially the pedagogical and institutional crises that follow that rupture, the essay argues for a "preposterous encounter" of the two critical approaches, one which productively harnesses the energies signified by the word preposterous, a word which etymologically yokes the pre- and the post-. Such an encounter focuses on unraveling the pernicious uses of temporal/spatial/linguistic manipulation named by Henry Luce's phrase "the American century" and performed by his 1941 essay of the same title, a manipulation that is the hallmark of U.S. cultural production representing the foreign since 1941 and the place of U.S. cultural production in globalization.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/191262

Yankee Pashas and Buried Women: Containing Abundance in 1950s Hollywood Orientalism

2001

With the end of the cold war, a new foe quickly took the place of Soviet communism in the imagination of many Americans. Much of the same energy that animated Americans' fear of the "red" menace (the allegedly inexorable and atheistic plot for world domination on the part of the Soviets) shifted during the 1990s to panic in response to the "green" terror (the unpredictable use of terrorism by militant Islamic fundamentalists).2 The fear of usually unseen terrorists vaguely and sbirietimës erroneously described as "Arab" recurs in many of the same forms used to express the paranoia of Soviet invasion. As during the red scare of the late 1940s and 1950s, the phobia of Islamic terrorism is intensified by the impossibility of locating a single source and thereby containing it. Individual citizens imagine collaborators everywhere and redefine "un-Americanness" in terms of ethnic and religious difference, supposed pillars of American tolerance. The impulse to put a nationality, an ethnicity, a religion or a race on the work of scattered individuals, and to hold the millions more who share some of those identities equally responsible for the crimes ofthe few seems an impulse left over from the cold war, which was characterized as a Manichaean struggle between "good" and "evil" in stark national, religious and racial terms.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/400697/pdf