Literary License and the West's Romance with Afghanistan analyzes the role literature and poetic sensibility played in colonial British and American writings on Afghanistan from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. It also considers the role that literature and literariness, itself, have played in western discourses framing Afghanistan. The British Romantic Orientalists of the 19th century studied the region in-depth and were drawn to what they perceived as an alien space where they could remake themselves in print and in life. These writers and those who followed including scholars, civil servants, and wives or professional women were inspired by the region and sometimes crossed ethnic, national, and imaginative boundaries. This book explores the connections that were forged in print through fantastic and familiar assumptions regarding the region and its people.

Washington Irving and Islam contributes to understanding the relationship between the United States and the Islamic world, valuable not only for studies of Washington Irving, American Literature, or Islam, but also for thinking through the role Islam and the "Orient" have played in American literature and history, a critical field receiving ever-increasing attention. The global context of Irving's work ties these essays together as does an understanding that his writings challenge easy classification of the Muslim other, and, indeed, challenge easy classification of Irving's own responses to that other. Washington Irving bestrides opposing positions as well as distant worlds.

"Globalizing Afghanistan" offers a kaleidoscopic view of Afghanistan and the global networks of power, influence, and representation in which it is immersed. The military and nation-building interventions initiated by the United States in reaction to the events of September 11, 2001, are the background and motivation for this collection, but they are not the immediate subject of the essays. Seeking to understand the events of the past decade in a broad frame, the contributors draw on cultural and postcolonial approaches to provide new insights into this ongoing conflict. They focus on matters such as the implications of Afghanistan's lucrative opium trade, the links between the contemporary Taliban movement and major events in the Islamic world and Central Asia since the early twentieth century, and interactions between transnational feminist organizations and the Afghan women's movement. Several contributors address questions of representation. One looks at portrayals of Afghan women by the U.S. government and Western media and feminists. Another explores the surprisingly prominent role of Iranian filmmaking in the production of a global cinematic discourse about Afghanistan. A Pakistani journalist describes how coverage of Afghanistan by reporters working from Pakistan's Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa (formerly the North West Frontier Province) has changed over the past decade. This rich panoply of perspectives on Afghanistan concludes with a reflection on how academics might produce meaningful alternative viewpoints on the exercise of American power abroad.

"Contributors." Gwen Bergner, Maliha Chishti, Cheshmak Farhoumand-Sims, Nigel C. Gibson, Zubeda Jalalzai, David Jefferess, Altaf Ullah Khan, Kamran Rastegar, Rodney J. Steward, Imre Szeman