The Cultural Context of American Literature: A Barrier or a Bridge to Understanding?

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 4 (1996) : 37-44. The Cultural Context of American Literature: A Barrier or a Bridge to Understanding? Marwan Obeidat I have been teaching American literature at a number of colleges and universities in the Arab world. My students, seniors and graduate students, have so far been Muslim Arabs, mostly from Jordan, and, more recently, from the United Arab Emirates. Most have been majoring in English (including American literature), the rest in linguistics. Some take American literature (nineteenth and twentiethcentury) classes to fulfill a general departmental requirement; others take them out of curiosity or desire, or both. Most have no previous academic exposure to American culture or literature, and many are not aware of ever having read any American literature. Still, they bring with them a host of images and accompanying emotions, ranging from suspicion to mistrust, along with curiosity; as well as the belief that American literature counts because of the world supremacy of the United States, and that since it is the literature of one of the most powerful nations in the modern world, it is certainly worth exploring. As a nonnative teaching American literature to classes exclusively made up of Arab students, I have become acutely aware of the fact that my nonnative students of American culture and, therefore, literature shape what they read in many contexts, whether cultural, historical, political, religious, social or moral; and that these contexts, in turn, take on special meanings due to the rearing of the students. As a matter of fact, the students' impulse to read in relation to their cultural needs and experiences, on the one hand, and their desire, apart from their cultural concerns, to study American literature asliterature, to see how it works and how it is constructed and what it is in its own right, on the other, two situations unlike each other, create a tension that I have been experiencing for a long while through my academic career as an Arab professor of American literature. To some students, studying American literature is no different from studying their own native literature; that is, it is basically a formalistic activity based on purely academic concerns. However, to the majority of the students, it not only means considering the values or concerns of American literature and the effects of these upon readers, but also implies having to go further and being confronted with the various moral, social, religious, national, political, historical, and even geographical contexts of American literature. Thus the potential for tension is always there. Not unexpectedly, therefore, this tension becomes a troubling experience for my students as well as for myself, constituting an unwanted element of the class. Few (if any) of the students have taken courses in which they encounter, with such intensity, foreign and nonnative cultures so thoroughly new and challenging to them; so much so that their eagerness and curiosity to know about the literature of the United States as "America" become a great discomfort in the face of human knowledge and culture. Historically speaking, the Muslim Arab world has constituted for the West (America included) an exotic entity, an alien and somewhat confrontational world (cf. Obeidat, American Literature andOrientalism). And Western attitudes of considerable antiquity have not yet lost their influence in what is known about this strange "other," in spite of recent developments on the political level. The change of opinion in these ideas from the Middle Ages to the present time has been very small (if not absent). As to the impact of the culture of the West on the Muslim Arab East, this can be traced all the way back to the most climactic confrontation in the Middle Ages--the Crusades (1095-1291). In this context, it is unfortunate to observe from current confrontations and conflicts (the Gulf Crisis, the Civil War in Lebanon, the Intifada in the West Bank in Palestine, the Hezbollah and Hamas warfare) in this part of the world--the Middle East, as some prefer to call it--that wars based on religious or cultural beliefs are capable of generating heated hostility, and that hostility, expectedly, generates further antipathy. Such events as the Arab-Israeli wars have also given the West (including the United States of America) a renewed share of anxiety and concern about this diverse and complex group of nations and peoples. The new situation has encountered the traditional conflicts of ideas between the two worlds, and thus the centuries-old attitudes led to a widespread mutual misunderstanding, and simultaneously to a coetaneous reluctance to change this situation (for a detailed discussion see Said, Orientalism; Covering Islam; "The Phoney Islamic Threat"; Culture and Imperialism). In sum, rather than providing better opportunities for mutual tolerance and trust, contemporary East-West relations have followed certain religious and historical ideas that have engendered further mistrust. It is within this confusing context that American literature is received in the Arab world (see Obeidat, "On Nonnative Grounds"). That there should be some anxiety on the part of the students in studying it is hardly surprising. This feeling of anxiety (and, to some extent, misunderstanding) has been recently strengthened further by the so called "ethnic cleansing" perpetrated by the Bosnian Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, on the students' fellow Muslim brethren, with, they believe, the connivance and a policy of what may be termed the "masterly inactivity" of the West, to which the Arab students associate the Americans. My students' awareness of this conflict of interests has usually come through, however, as a request for detailed background information on American culture and literature; more often as an expression of their inability--more or less--to overcome cultural bias and prejudice; and occasionally as a preference for an in-depth discussion of the literary techniques and values of various American authors from different ages, as well as of what these authors are saying in their works. Admittedly, any class of this nature can, in my view, present very diverse (if not contrary) realities to different students--Arab and non-Arab alike for this matter. But what puzzles me is the constancy of the cultural and moral issues, reflecting the students' perceptions and experiences, that come up in a course on American culture or literature (See, e.g., Asfour; also Dahiyat). I find myself saying often to the students, in this regard, that American literature does not necessarily have to be about nonnative readers, and what they believe and think. In fact, we would be belittling and limiting it if we emphasize too intently what it says about us or what we see and find about ourselves in it. Who we are and what we believe and think matter, of course. This is a fact that I realize, and it can hardly go unn (...truncated)