AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 32 (2007) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Rezensionen Heike Schaefer (ed.), America and the Orient (American Studies Monograph Series, Vol. 130). Heidelberg: Winter Universitätsverlag, 2006. Satyam S. Moorty The timely beckoning and challenging title America and the Orient, a potpourri of nineteen scholarly articles selected out of fifty-one contributions to the 51 st annual conference of the German Association for American Studies at the University of Mannheim, June 2004, to discuss the relation between “America and the Orient”, thoughtfully edited by Heike Schaefer, is a welcome addition to the growing body of post-colonial literary perspectives, multi-culturalism, studies on ‘clash of civilizations,’ et cetera. This daunting yet esoterically impressive cross-disciplinary collection of essays opens with Gesa Mackenthun’s theoretical piece “‘Between Worlds’: Edward Said and the Rediscovery of Empire in American Studies,” which acknowledges its debt to Said’s seminal work Orientalism (1978) in paving the way for “critical analysis of relations between Europe and non-European peoples in the modern period,” positioning the critical stance of Todorov, Greenblatt, and Lerner with an “appraisal of the significance that Said’s analysis of orientalism continues to carry for post-colonial reconfiguration of American Studies” (Preface, xi). It closes with Alexander Stephan’s overview and argumentative assessment of the current Middle East situation in “Culture Clash: American, German, and Saudi Arabian Intellectuals Debate the Concept of a ‘just war’”. This last non-theoretical essay explores the “recent international debate on the concept of ‘just war.’” As such the essays are classified under five groups: (1) Edward Said’s Orientalism and the Future of American Studies; (2) The Orient in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature; (3) Intersections between Arabic, South Asian, and American Cultures in Contemporary Literature; (4) The Orient in Twentieth- Century Film, Painting, and Music, and (5) The Clash of Civilization Revisited. The second section of the volume includes essays by Sylvia Mayer, Jörg Thomas Richter, and Markus Heide which critically examine William Munford’s melodrama Almoran and Hamet (1798), Royall Tyler’s novel The Algerine Captive (1797), and “American Orientals/ American Patriots: Jews, Judaism, and the Early Republic in the Rezensionen 334 Writing of Royall Tyler and Mordecai M. Noah,” respectively. In his long essay, Ralph J. Poole examines in detail Bayard Taylor’s Poems of the Orient (1854), which “is but one literary output of his journey to the East” (96) and “reveals Taylor’s approach to cross-cultural engagement as being deeply self-reflexive and critical towards his own culture. The multifaceted implications of his Oriental poems are based on balancing Eastern habits with both German aesthetics and American ethics.” (100) Jeanne Cortiel, in the last essay of the second section, “The Oriental Mother: Race and Egypt in Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)”, demonstrates Douglass’s “American fascination with ancient Egypt. As an African American abolitionist author, Douglass refers to Egypt to create a discursive site that reflects, comments on, and disturbs antebellum race theories.” (Preface, x-xi) All the essays in the second section are of historical interest. It is unlikely that even graduate students of American literature/ American Studies would be familiar with either the authors or their works. As Schaefer in her balanced and well-articulated preface to the collection states, “the engagement of eighteenthand nineteenthcentury American literature with the Orient ranges widely in subject matter and approach […] American authors employ Oriental characters, settings, imagery, themes, and poetics in different ways, drawing on widely varying cultures, geographical regions, and historical times - from ancient Egypt and biblical Palestine to fourteenth-century Persia or contemporaneous Algiers.” (xi) As it is, Schaefer’s summary presents a somewhat limited view of the Orient. There is no reference to the importance of the Orient in American transcendentalists writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott, and the great American bard Walt Whitman! Surely, then, the reader of the volume under review is conditioned by the belief that “Orient” pertains only to Egypt, Algeria, Palestine, and Persia. (G.L. Anderson in his “Preface” to Masterpieces of the Orient states that “this volume contains extracts from the literatures of Arabia, Persia, India, China, and Japan […] The word ‘Orient’ itself is a vague term, of use only for convenience…”) The third group of essays, “Intersections between Arabic, South Asian, and American Cultures in Contemporary Literature,” has one general and informative piece - Lisa Suhair Majaj’s “Arab-American Literature Today.” This is a highly enlightening overview, especially to readers unfamiliar with Arab-American writers. Majaj asserts that “Arab-American writers today confront a plethora of challenges, ranging from the political and artistic.” (148). She addresses concerns related to “ethnic identity formation, migration, forced and desired assimilation, hybridization, and cross-cultural communication.” (Preface, xi) Kareem Abu-Zeid’s essay, on the other hand, demands of the reader familiarity with the work of Syrian poet Adonis and examines the problems translators encounter. Familiarity with the specific works will be immensely helpful in appreciating Brian Brodhead Glaser’s essay “‘Racial’ Melancholy in the Poetry of Vijay Seshadri” - the reviewer has periodically seen individual poems of Seshadri in The New Yorker - that “unravels the repercussions of Seshadri’s ideal of color blindness” (Preface, xii); as well as of Mita Banerjee’s “Portrait of the Postcolonial Artist as a Maker of Dolls: Salman Rushdie’s Fury”. The question Banerjee has “tried to ask in this paper is whether there is not in fact a way to uphold the relevance of race in contemporary social and political life and simultaneously to question its boundaries […] Can one be postcolonial without being postethnic? ” (201) Rezensionen 335 Unable to disentangle several strands of contemporary jargon, the reviewer is tempted to quote editor Schaefer’s succinct summary of Banerjee’s article: “She reads Rushdie’s novel Fury (2001), which is set in New York City, as a meta-commentary on postcolonial politics that threatens to reinscribe the racial hierarchies it sets out to undo.” (Preface, xii) According to Banerjee, “Rushdie’s literary failure, then, may uncannily anticipate the end of the postcolonial, a fitting analogy since the very man who inaugurated the movement could hence be said to carry it to its grave.” (190) In the fourth section, “The Orient in Twentieth-Century Film, Painting, and Music,” the six essays focus on the roles of the Orient in twentieth-century American performance, film, painting, and opera. Interestingly, the topics touch upon ‘oriental’ femininity - belly dancing at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, its influence on films such as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Sheik (1921), Kismet (1955), demonstrating the influence of Arab culture on U.S. gender politics, discussed by Astrid Boger and Ella Shohat in their essays “The Princess Rajah Dance and the Popular Fascination with Middle Eastern Culture at the St. Louis World’s Fair,” and “Between America and the Orient: Notes on Popular Culture” respectively. The essays look at the past and are informative. The India-born Jewish artist Siona Benjamin, endowed with multiple cultural traditions, is justifiably situated to explore “development of ethnic and gender identities or the dire political repercussions of racist thought.” (Preface, xiii) Benjamin states at the outset: “In my paintings I raise questions about what and where ‘home’ is, while evoking issues such as identity, immigration, motherhood, and the role of art in social change.” (229) The cover of this volume of essays has a reproduction of Benjamin’s painting Finding Home #39: Zarina’s Encounter with Mr. Eastwood. Recognizing and being acutely conscious of space limitation for the review, I wish to make only a brief mention about the other three essays in the fourth section. They “take a closer look at how intercultural conflicts between Orient and Occident figure in contemporary American culture.” (Preface, xiii). Moreover, all the essays in this section could meaningfully be employed to advantage in teaching contextually such works as John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) and its film version (2003), dealing with the death of a Jewish American hostage at the hands of Palestinian hijackers. Gabriele Linke’s article “Teaching the History of Ethnic Conflict in the U.S.A. through Representations of the Japanese American Internment in World War II” takes up the issue of teaching interethnic contacts and conflicts between groups cast as oriental and occidental …” (Preface, xiii). Though the final section has been touched upon at the beginning of this review, it does open doors for argument and discussion about the ‘clash of civilizations.’ All three essays - Martin Genetsch’s “Samuel Huntington and the Interpretation of Culture,” Konstantina E. Botsiou’s “The Clash of Civilizations Revisited: The Interaction of the United States and Europe with the Orient,” and Alexander Stephan’s “Culture Clash: American, German, and Saudi Arabian Intellectuals Debate the Concept of a ‘Just War’” - are eminently readable, contemporary, and presuppose no knowledge of primary texts; they make fascinating reading. The strength of this collection is that some of the essays are informative, enlightening, and thought-provoking. On the other hand, the essays couched in contempo- Rezensionen 336 rary critical terminology, though substantially researched, may often go beyond the comprehension of educated readers as well. One major weakness of the volume is the fact that only in the Preface is there mention of the use of the expression/ term/ word “Orient”. The term itself is egregious; the word “Orient” is mostly employed to denote the Near and Middle East, Egypt, etc. Is “Orient” to be construed as “non-western? ” One flounders quite a bit in trying to grasp what “Orient” is and develops a certain uneasy response to the collection. The reader vaguely realizes a certain ‘negative’ aspect about the essays, despite solid scholarship of the essayists as clearly indicated in the bibliographies. The flagrant omission of significant Oriental thought both in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature - Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, etc. - makes the volume somewhat lopsided, though the coverage as such is wide and extensive. So, what does “Orient” connote now? Is Middle East the “Orient”? Is Egypt “Orient”? Even Edward Said’s monumental groundbreaking work with its lofty title Orientalism is a misnomer. Said seems to interchangeably use terms such as “Islamic Orientalism,” “Arabic Orientalism,” etc. Is Islam an ‘Oriental’ religion? Questions like these remain unasked as well as unanswered, and this leaves space for future works on the topic. The present collection deserves to be scrupulously studied in small doses. Satyam S. Moorty English Department Southern Utah University Jaroslav Kušnír, Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2005. Teresa Requena What is the difference between literary modernism and postmodernism? Or, how is metafiction an emblematic strategy used in postmodernist literature? All these are questions that have characterized the debate about literary postmodernism in the last decades of the twentieth century and Kušnír’s new book Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction provides us with his own answers through the analysis of selected works by Richard Brautigan, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and Paul Auster. Presented as the continuation of a previous study on postmodernist fiction - Poetika americkei postmodernei prózy: Richard Brautigan and Donald Barthelme - Kušnír here extends his analysis to include more texts and authors than in his previous book. Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction consists of three chapters. The first, “Between Modernism and Postmodernism: Donald Barthelme’s novels Snow White and Paradise,” opens with a theoretical discussion of the relation AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 2