by Brian T. Edwards

About Brian T. Edwards

Brian T. Edwards is Associate Professor of English, Comparative Literary Studies, and American Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also Director of the Program in Middle East and North African Studies. He is the author of Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express and coeditor, with Dilip Gaonkar, of Globalizing American Studies. He is completing a book called After the American Century: Ends of Circulation in Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran.

Islam

book Keywords for American Cultural Studies

The arrival of Islam as a religion in the United States is far from new, yet neither the religion nor its adherents received much attention in American studies or cultural studies until Islam became a media and popular fixation, especially after September 11, 2001. In this sense, scholarly interest in Islam has responded to the obsessions of the U.S. public sphere, where the religion is poorly understood and often defined in imprecise or fallacious ways, resulting in inaccurate references to and representations of both Islam and the “Muslim” or “Arab” worlds. Locating “Islam” as a keyword for American studies and cultural studies thus requires an exploration of related terms such as “Muslim” and “Arab.” While not all Arabs are Muslim, and only about one-quarter of all Muslims are Arab, U.S. public discourse has often collapsed the religion and the ethnicity through the logics of Orientalism, wherein the inscription of a unified Other located in the “Orient” buttresses the equally fictitious sense that there is a unified West or “Occident” (Said 1978; Prashad 2007).