Brian T. Edwards - Böcker

The discipline of American studies was established in the early days of World War II and drew on the myth of American exceptionalism. But now that the so-called American Century has come to an end, what would a truly globalized version of American studies look like? Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar offer a new standard for the field's transnational aspiration with "Globalizing American Studies". The essays here offer a comparative, multilingual, or multi-sited approach to ideas and representations of America. The contributors explore unexpected perspectives on the international circulation of American culture: the traffic of American movies within the British Empire, the reception of the film "Gone with the Wind" in the Arab world, the parallels between Japanese and American styles of nativism, and new incarnations of American studies itself in the Middle East, to name a few.Bringing together established scholars already associated with the global turn in American studies with contributors who specialize in African studies, East Asian studies, Latin American studies, media studies, anthropology, and other areas, "Globalizing American Studies" is a timely response to an important disciplinary shift in academia.

When Henry Luce announced in 1941 that we were living in the "American century," he believed that the international popularity of American culture made the world favorable to U.S. interests. Now, in the digital twenty-first century, the American century has been superseded, as American movies, music, and video games are received, understood, and transformed. How do we make sense of this shift? Building on a decade of fieldwork in Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran, Brian T. Edwards maps new routes of cultural exchange that are innovative, accelerated, and full of diversions. Shaped by the digital revolution, these paths are entwined with the growing fragility of American "soft" power. They indicate an era after the American century, in which popular American products and phenomena-such as comic books, teen romances, social-networking sites, and ways of expressing sexuality-are stripped of their associations with the United States and recast in very different forms. Arguing against those who talk about a world in which American culture is merely replicated or appropriated, Edwards focuses on creative moments of uptake, in which Arabs and Iranians make something unexpected.He argues that these products do more than extend the reach of the original. They reflect a world in which culture endlessly circulates and gathers new meanings.