Epic Encounters

Epic Encounters PDF Author: Melani McAlister
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520244993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examines how popular culture has shaped the ways Americans define their "interests" in the Middle East. Author McAlister argues that U.S. foreign policy, while grounded in material and military realities, is also developed in a cultural context. American understandings of the region are framed by narratives that draw on religious belief, news media accounts, and popular culture. This book skillfully weaves readings of film, media, and music with a rigorous analysis of U.S. foreign policy, race politics, and religious history.--From publisher description.

Encounters with the Middle East

Encounters with the Middle East PDF Author: Nesreen Khashan
Publisher: Travelers' Tales
ISBN: 9781932361483
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
30 rich, engaging travel stories that capture uplifting scenes from everyday life and deliver sensitive, bittersweet renderings of people and landscapes often shaken by conflict. This book features original takes on commonplace "things to do" for the traveler in the Middle East--from marveling at the brilliance of the bazaars to drifting down the Nile in a felucca. It also provides intimate portrayals of people and traditions too often absent from books on the region.--From publisher description.

Epic Encounters

Epic Encounters PDF Author: Melani McAlister
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520932013
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Get Book Here

Book Description
Epic Encounters examines how popular culture has shaped the ways Americans define their "interests" in the Middle East. In this innovative book—now brought up-to-date to include 9/11 and the Iraq war—Melani McAlister argues that U.S. foreign policy, while grounded in material and military realities, is also developed in a cultural context. American understandings of the region are framed by narratives that draw on religious belief, news media accounts, and popular culture. This remarkable and pathbreaking book skillfully weaves lively and accessible readings of film, media, and music with a rigorous analysis of U.S. foreign policy, race politics, and religious history. The new chapter, titled "9/11 and After: Snapshots on the Road to Empire," considers and brilliantly analyzes five images that have become iconic: (1) New York City firemen raising the American flag out of the rubble of the World Trade Center, (2) the televised image of Osama bin-Laden, (3) Afghani women in burqas, (4) the statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled in Baghdad, and (5) the hooded and wired prisoner in Abu Ghraib. McAlister's singular achievement is to illuminate the contexts of these five images both at the time they were taken and as they relate to current events, an accomplishment all the more remarkable since—to paraphrase her new preface—we are today struggling to look backward at something that is still rushing ahead.

American Studies Encounters the Middle East

American Studies Encounters the Middle East PDF Author: Alex Lubin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781469628868
Category : East and West
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Sexual Encounters in the Middle East

Sexual Encounters in the Middle East PDF Author: Derek Hopwood
Publisher: ISBS
ISBN: 9780863723131
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book, now available in paperback, is a fascinating study of a hitherto neglected topic: the way in which British, French, and Arab men and women related to each other sexually, primarily during the 19th and 20th centuries. In examining sexual perceptions propagated in travel writing, paintings, and novels together with sexual experiences of individuals, the author argues that sexual attitudes have deeply influenced Euro-Arab relationships in the past and still do so today. Sexual attitudes and proclivities affected the ways in which people reacted to each other and, perhaps more controversially, influenced the course of history. Inherited sexual ideas colored everyday relations in the Middle East and the relationships of Arabs in Europe. The book also examines how modern Arab writers have treated Euro-Arab sexual relations in their many novels and short stories.

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present PDF Author: Michael B. Oren
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393341526
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1178

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Will shape our thinking about America and the Middle East for years.”—Christopher Dickey, Newsweek Power, Faith, and Fantasytells the remarkable story of America's 230-year relationship with the Middle East. Drawing on a vast range of government documents, personal correspondence, and the memoirs of merchants, missionaries, and travelers, Michael B. Oren narrates the unknown story of how the United States has interacted with this vibrant and turbulent region.

Iran in the Middle East

Iran in the Middle East PDF Author: Houchang Chehabi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857737651
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Get Book Here

Book Description
Iran's interaction with its neighbours is a topic of wide interest. But while many historical studies of the country concentrate purely on political events and high-profile actors, this book takes the opposite approach: writing history from below, it instead focuses on the role of everyday lives. Modern Iranian historiography has been dominated by ideas of nationalism, modernization, religion, autocracy, revolution and war. Iran in the Middle East adds new dimensions to the study of four crucial areas of Iranian history: the events and impact of the Constitutional Revolution, Iran's transnational connections, the social history of Iran and developments in historiography.

Turkey’s Relations with the Middle East

Turkey’s Relations with the Middle East PDF Author: Hüseyin Işıksal
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331959897X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume examines contemporary political relations between Turkey and the Middle East. In the light of the Arab Uprisings of 2011, the Syria Crisis, the escalation of regional terrorism and the military coup attempt in Turkey, it illustrates the dramatic fluctuations in Turkish foreign policy towards key Middle Eastern countries, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The contributors analyze Turkey’s deepening involvement in Middle Eastern regional affairs, also addressing issues such as terrorism, social and political movements and minority rights struggles. While these problems have traditionally been regarded as domestic matters, this book highlights their increasingly regional dimension and the implications for the foreign affairs of Turkey and countries in the Middle East.

Cultural Encounters in the Arab World

Cultural Encounters in the Arab World PDF Author: Tarik Sabry
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 085771824X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this groundbreaking book, Tarik Sabry is seeking out the terrain for best understanding the experience of being modern in transitional societies. He adopts a dynamic, ethnographically based approach to the meanings of 'modernness' in the Arab context and, within a relational framework, focuses on structures of thought, everydayness and self-referentiality to explore the process of building a bridge that rejoins the 'modern' in Arab thought with the 'modern' in Arab lived experience. In bringing together modernity as a philosophical category with the bridging spaces of Arab everyday life, Sabry is offering fresh methods of comprehending the question of what it means to be modern in the Arab world today.

Epic Encounters

Epic Encounters PDF Author: Melani McAlister
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520228108
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book Here

Book Description
"A wonderfully original and compelling study, essential for understanding the complex relations between the US and the nations and peoples of the Mideast. McAlister argues powerfully that American interests in the Mideast range far beyond the realm of foreign policy to become of paramount importance to the creation of American culture in the post World War II era. . . . A model for those interested in the interconnections of culture and foreign policy in an era of globalization. An engrossing read."--Amy Kaplan, author of The Social Construction of American Realism "Melani McAlister has written a marvelous book that draws together a vast array of materials from the media, archives, scholarly sources, and popular culture, interpreting it through her rich knowledge of cultural studies. Scholars in many fields--American studies, sociology, religious studies, political science, media studies, among others--will want to read this lively and engaging book."--Robert Wuthnow, author of After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s, and Creative Spirituality: The Way of the Artist "A fascinating and completely original analysis of the relation between culture and foreign policy. . . this book casts entirely new light on US military, financial, and emotional investments in the Middle East. Conservative Christian sensibilities, television, Biblical epics, Black Power, and a host of gender-related representations--these and other factors all played a part in the shaping of American foreign policy in ways that have never before been noticed. No historian of twentieth-century American culture or politics should miss this brilliant book!"--Gail Bederman, author of Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the US, 1880-1917 "Diplomatic historians are now turning to Edward Said's Orientalism to explore the cultural dimensions of 20th Century America's representations of the Middle East. They are too late! Melani McAlister develops a "post-orientalist" approach to U.S. culture, foreign policy, and identity. Hers is also the first book ever to recognize that African -Americans matter to such a project. Epic Encounters is a blockbuster of a book."--Robert Vitalis, author of When Capitalists Collide: Business Conflict and the End of Empire in Egypt

The Yom Kippur War

The Yom Kippur War PDF Author: Abraham Rabinovich
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0307429652
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 590

Get Book Here

Book Description
An updated edition that sheds new light on one of the most dramatic reversals of military fortune in modern history. The easing of Israeli military censorship after four decades has enabled Abraham Rabinovich to offer fresh insights into this fiercest of Israel-Arab conflicts. A surprise Arab attack on two fronts on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, with Israel’s reserves un-mobilized, triggered apocalyptic visions in Israel, euphoria in the Arab world, and fraught debates on both sides. Rabinovich, who covered the war for The Jerusalem Post, draws on extensive interviews and primary source material to shape his enthralling narrative. We learn of two Egyptian nationals, working separately for the Mossad, who supplied Israel with key information that helped change the course of the war; of Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s proposal for a nuclear “demonstration” to warn off the Arabs; and of Chief of Staff David Elazar’s conclusion on the fifth day of battle that Israel could not win. Newly available transcripts enable us to follow the decision-making process in real time from the prime minister’s office to commanders studying maps in the field. After almost overrunning the Golan Heights, the Syrian attack is broken in desperate battles. And as Israel regains its psychological balance, General Ariel Sharon leads a nighttime counterattack across the Suez Canal through a narrow hole in the Egyptian line -- the turning point of the war.