Enemies and Intimacies: Rethinking US-Middle East Cultural History

Abstract

This review essay discusses three books that document the complex presence of Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim cultural figures in the history of the US. Susan Nance's How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790–1935, Jacob Rama Berman's American Arabesque: Arabs, Islam and the 19th-Century Imaginary, and Jeffrey Einboden's Nineteenth-Century US Literature in Middle East Languages are important contributions to a growing body of scholarship that illustrates the different ways that American writers, artists, performers, and impresarios engaged with Middle Eastern cultures and Muslim practices to produce a specifically American relation to the Arab and Islamic East. Each book shows also how Middle Easterners have long participated in defining a complex transcultural relationship from the early years of the republic to the twenty-first century.