American Arabesque

American Arabesque succeeds on many levels, not the least of which is its forging of a method of transnational scholarship. Berman places importance on translation, not only in terms of linguistics but also in terms of cultural forms. The result is a nuanced read of densely overlapping cultural forms and ideas...This is an important scholarly intervention that is sure to push forward transnational scholarship. * Journal of American Studies *
Berman's work opens up extended vistas for consideration, and the central accomplishment of the book is immense: by reading Arabic-language texts from North Africa contrapuntally in relation to English-language texts, Berman points toward the possibility of reading nineteenth-century American literature through frames that are far more genuinely planetary and cosmopolitan that has yet been achieved. Berman's study makes an important, indeed vital, contribution to the field of studies of American Orientalism and of Orientalism in Poe's work specifically. * Poe Studies *
[T]his book will prove useful to both historians and literary scholars....always stimulating and rewarding...it should inspire many new avenues of research. -- Anna Suranyi * New England Quarterly *
Berman's American Arabesquemakes an original contribution to the fields of American, Arab American, and Middle East studies through a combination of a novel comparative angle, bold theoretical argument, keenly perceptive and nuanced textual analyses, and an elegant, fluid style. This book will no doubt become required reading for scholars in this field. -- Wail S. Hassan * Symploke *
American Arabesque is daringly ambitious.As a work of scholarship, it ventures an extraordinary range of reference, involving old and new works in English and Arabic. As a challenge to think differently about the United States in a larger world, it ventures to name its perspective & dirty cosmopolitanism. It makes good on both these risks." -- Jonathan Arac,author of Impure Worlds
Berman evokes the figure of the arabesque as a mediation between what is & Arab and its representation in the U.S. context, thereby turning the duality of Us vs. Them into a fluid field of interplay and modulation of representations that perform discrete ideological functions for different agents and under different circumstances. Yet Berman is not content to read American literature with a focus on the arabesque; he employs a theoretical perspective that blends classical Arabic hermeneutics and contemporary literary and cultural theory. This is an original contribution to American and Arab American studies that displays genuine intellectual imagination. -- Wail S. Hassan,author of Immigrant Narratives
This is an original, erudite, and nuanced book that significantly contributes to expanding American studies and to relocating it in a transnational context. -- Amal Amireh,George Mason University