| This study investigates portrayals of North African culture, peoples, and landscapes in twentieth-century U.S. culture. The work interrogates the relationship of these representations to the interpretation of U.S. nationality during moments of international and domestic redefinition. It discusses a variety of forms of cultural production, such as film, fiction, travel literature, journalism, anthropology, and architecture, and offers close readings of work by Edith Wharton, A. J. Liebling, Ernie Pyle, Hollywood filmmakers during WWII, Paul Bowles, Clifford Geertz, and Mohammed Mrabet. Chapters focus on the critique of U.S. isolationism and gender construction following WWI, the representation of WWII's North African campaign, the post-war expansion of U.S. interests into North Africa, and the attention paid to Morocco by U.S. anthropologists in the postcolonial period. An epilogue investigates the representation of Morocco in Disney's Epcot center and Disney's film Aladdin as responses to a new wave of fear of the Arab world in the wake of the creation of OPEC and the Gulf War.;The study expands on and revises the suggestion that when the U.S. attained world power status it inherited an Orientalist tradition in which France and Britain sought to know the "Orient" in order to possess or contain it. Responding to the claim that an idea of "empire" precedes and initiates the idea of "nation," I bring ideas from Orientalist discourse analysis together with theories of U.S. nationality. The study interrogates the ways in which U.S. cultural producers inherited a European tendency to define their national identity against other national and cultural types, and focuses on the ways in which such authors translated their experience of "foreignness" into a recognizable American dialect. I argue that the continual presence of the French in the region---both politically through colonialism and via an Orientalist cultural tradition---catalyzed a process by which individual Americans negotiated the meanings of their own nation and its imperialist tendencies. Responding to recent arguments in postcolonial studies, I explicate textual and disciplinary disjunctures in the texts under consideration and demonstrate how such moments of slippage refigure domestic debates over the meaning of "Americanness."... |
