In the field of American studies, attention is shifting to the long historyof U.S. engagement with the Middle East, especially in the aftermath of warin Iraq and in the context of recent Arab uprisings in protest against economicinequality, social discrimination, and political repression. Here, AlexLubin and Marwan M. Kraidy curate a new collection of essays that focuseson the cultural politics of America's entanglement with the Middle Eastand North Africa, making a crucial intervention in the growing subfield oftransnational American studies. Featuring a diverse list of contributors fromthe United States, the Arab world, and beyond, America Studies Encountersthe Middle East analyzes Arab-American relations by looking at the War onTerror, pop culture, and the influence of the American hegemony in a timeof revolution.

Ere Roosevelt Came is a short novel by early pan-Africanist Dusé Mohamed Ali. Originally serialised in Ali's Nigerian magazine The Comet in 1934, it grapples with the rise of global fascism and white supremacy, and the growing geopolitical influence of the USA in the interwar period. This is a fantastical, intricately woven and speculative story about how Black American airmen, organising in secret, fight an international assemblage of white supremacists and Russian foreign agents bent on instigating a new world war. The narrative reveals how Black liberation struggles, Bolshevism, and the rise of so-called 'coloured' Japanese empires were bound together in the Pan-African literary imaginary. Written by a Sudanese-Egyptian, serialised in West Africa, and set in the USA, Ere Roosevelt Came is a Pan-African novel par excellence, and a fascinating historical document that conveys the complexities of Black internationalism in the interwar years. The novel is presented with two original, contextualising essays and appendices featuring selected other writings to provide further insight into Ali's vision of a Pan-African future.

A concise primer to the political, cultural, and social consequences of the perpetual US global war on terror. An entire generation of young adults has never known an America without the War on Terror. This book contends with the pervasive effects of post-9/11 policy and myth-making in every corner of American life. Never-Ending War on Terror is organized around five keywords that have come to define the cultural and political moment: homeland, security, privacy, torture, and drone. Alex Lubin synthesizes nearly two decades of United States war-making against terrorism by asking how the War on Terror has changed American politics and society, and how the War on Terror draws on historical myths about American national and imperial identity. From the PATRIOT Act to the hit show Homeland, from Edward Snowden to Guantanamo Bay, and from 9/11 memorials to Trumpism, this succinct book connects America's political economy and international relations to our contemporary culture at every turn.

A concise primer to the political, cultural, and social consequences of the perpetual US global war on terror. An entire generation of young adults has never known an America without the War on Terror. This book contends with the pervasive effects of post-9/11 policy and myth-making in every corner of American life. Never-Ending War on Terror is organized around five keywords that have come to define the cultural and political moment: homeland, security, privacy, torture, and drone. Alex Lubin synthesizes nearly two decades of United States war-making against terrorism by asking how the War on Terror has changed American politics and society, and how the War on Terror draws on historical myths about American national and imperial identity. From the PATRIOT Act to the hit show Homeland, from Edward Snowden to Guantanamo Bay, and from 9/11 memorials to Trumpism, this succinct book connects America's political economy and international relations to our contemporary culture at every turn.

In the field of American studies, attention is shifting to the long historyof U.S. engagement with the Middle East, especially in the aftermath of warin Iraq and in the context of recent Arab uprisings in protest against economicinequality, social discrimination, and political repression. Here, AlexLubin and Marwan M. Kraidy curate a new collection of essays that focuseson the cultural politics of America's entanglement with the Middle Eastand North Africa, making a crucial intervention in the growing subfield oftransnational American studies. Featuring a diverse list of contributors fromthe United States, the Arab world, and beyond, America Studies Encountersthe Middle East analyzes Arab-American relations by looking at the War onTerror, pop culture, and the influence of the American hegemony in a timeof revolution.

In this absorbing transnational history, Alex Lubin reveals the vital connections between African American political thought and the people and nations of the Middle East. Spanning the 1850s through the present, and set against a backdrop of major political and cultural shifts around the world, the book demonstrates how international geopolitics, including the ascendance of liberal internationalism, established the conditions within which blacks imagined their freedom and, conversely, the ways in which various Middle Eastern groups have understood and used the African American freedom struggle to shape their own political movements. Lubin extends the framework of the black freedom struggle beyond the familiar geographies of the Atlantic world and sheds new light on the linked political, social, and intellectual imaginings of African Americans, Palestinians, Arabs, and Israeli Jews. This history of intellectual exchange, Lubin argues, has forged political connections that extend beyond national and racial boundaries.

CONTRIBUTORS
John Charles, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Bill V. Mullen, Rachel Peterson, Paula Rabinowitz, Rachel Rubin, James Smethurst, Melina Vizcaino-Aleman

The essayists in "Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left" examine Ann Petry's relationship to left-wing political circles in the years following World War II. Anthologies dedicated to African American writing, even those that consider the African American literary left, often exclude Petry (1908-1997). These essayists demonstrate how Petry's literary art, as well as her engagement in various community struggles, landed her squarely in a variety of progressive communities.

Through analyses of Petry's three novels, her short fiction, and her nonfiction, scholars identify her literary forms and aesthetics, including pulp fiction, Marxist analysis, literary naturalism, and the realism Petry used to explore early Cold War racial, sexual, and class politics. Although Petry is not readily placed in leftist circles, the essays collected here show her engagement in a number of events centered in post-WWII Harlem, such as the Bronx Slave Market protest concerning treatment of African American female domestic workers and her role as contributor to Harlem's radical periodical, the "People's Voice." Essays show that Petry's writing provides an important link between the Popular Front of the 1930s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s.

Alex Lubin, assistant professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico, is the author of "Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954," published by University Press of Mississippi.

"Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954" studies the meaning of interracial romance, love, and sex in the ten years after World War II. How was interracial romance treated in popular culture by civil rights leaders, African American soldiers, and white segregationists?

Previous studies focus on the period beginning in 1967 when the Supreme Court overturned the last state antimiscegenation law (Loving v. Virginia). Lubin's study, however, suggests that we cannot fully understand contemporary debates about "hybridity," or mixed-race identity, without first comprehending how WWII changed the terrain.

The book focuses on the years immediately after the war, when ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality were being reformulated and solidified in both the academy and the public. Lubin shows that interracial romance, particularly between blacks and whites, was a testing ground for both the general American public and the American government. The government wanted interracial relationships to be treated primarily as private affairs to keep attention off contradictions between its outward aura of cultural freedom and the realities of Jim Crow politics and antimiscegenation laws. Activists, however, wanted interracial intimacy treated as a public act, one that could be used symbolically to promote equal rights and expanded opportunities. These contradictory impulses helped shape our current perceptions about interracial romances and their broader significance in American culture.

"Romance and Rights" ends in 1954, the year of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, before the civil rights movement became well organized. By closely examining postwar popular culture, African American literature, NAACP manuscripts, miscegenation laws, and segregationist protest letters, among other resources, the author analyzes postwar attitudes towards interracial romance, showing how complex and often contradictory those attitudes could be.