Brian T. Edwards
When Henry Luce announced in 1941 that we were living in an “American century,” he believed the international popularity of American culture made a world favorable to U.S. interests. For decades, his claim seemed to hold. Now, in the digital twenty-first century, the “American century” has been superseded, as American movies, music, video games, and television shows are received, understood, and transformed in unexpected ways.
How do we make sense of this shift? Built on a decade of fieldwork in Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran, Brian T. Edwards maps new routes of cultural exchange, that are unpredictable, accelerated, and full of diversions. Shaped by the digital revolution, these paths are entwined with the growing fragility of American “soft” power. They indicate an era after the American century, in which popular American products and phenomena, such as comic books, teen romances, social networking sites, and American ways of expressing sexuality, are stripped of their American associations and creatively re-presented in very different terms. A film like Argo or superhero comics is then imbued with new meanings.
Arguing against those in both scholarly and policy circles who talk about a world in which American culture is merely replicated or appropriated, Edwards focuses instead on creative moments of uptake, in which Arabs and Iranians make something unexpected. He argues that these products do more than extend the reach of the original. They reflect a world in which culture endlessly circulates and gathers new meanings.
CROWD OF SORROWS
Nahid Rachlin
2015
Zora, just separated from her American husband, with a six-year old daughter, Anar, has had a highly unsettled life so far. After her marriage falls apart, she moves with Anar to a row-house in Cambridge, MA, that shares a backyard with several young families. She hopes to develop friendships with the other mothers, but soon finds that this is not a big happy family she has moved into.
Anxiety over the children and threats to their wellbeing hang in the air; marital problems surface among the couples. In spite of the transparency of the tenants’ activities, as seen through the sliding glass doors opening on the common backyard, hidden and ambiguous aspects permeate the air. One day Anar disappears; with this shock and its resolution Zora comes to realize that her search for a place in the world might not yet be over.
Nahid Rachlin went to Columbia University Writing Program on a Doubleday-Columbia Fellowship and then to Stanford University MFA program on a Stegner Fellowship. Her publications include a memoir, Persian Girls (Penguin), four novels, Jumping Over Fire (City Lights), Foreigner (W.W. Norton), Married to a Stranger (E.P.Dutton-Penguin), The Heart’s Desire (City Lights), and a collection of short stories, Veils (City Lights). Her individual short stories have appeared in more than fifty magazines and one of her stories was adopted by Symphony Space, “Selected Shorts,” and was aired on NPR’s around the country.
A Short History of the
Iranian Railway System
by Manuvera
Perhaps one of Iran’s greatest achievements after the First World War was the construction of the 850-mile Trans-National railroad. This finally linked southern and northern Iran, a project that had been bitterly opposed by Imperial Russia in the early 20th century. For the first time the northern agricultural lands and the Caspian Sea ports were linked to ports and oilfields in the south. Construction of the Iranian railway had been an overwhelming task as it required the building of 4,100 bridges and 224 bored tunnels (64 miles in total). Iran’s economy after the First World had been in tatters, especially with increasing chaos due to British, Russian and Ottoman military incursions. Even more impressive was the way in which the project had been funded: taxes on sugar and tea helped subsidize the project.
The buildup of the Iranian railway and road systems resulted in a dramatic improvement in the economic sector. Cost and time required for the transportation of goods across the country were now dramatically reduced. As noted by the British Central Office of Information:
By 1933, the Iranian railway and road network system had reduced the cost of transportation to a third of what it had been in 1920. The time needed for transport in 1933 was now reduced to just one-tenth of what it had been in comparison to 1920. The efficiency of the Iranian railway and road networks was one of the primary factors that encouraged the Anglo-invasion of Iran in August 1941. The primary objective of that invasion was to use the Iranian network to supply the Red Army of the Soviet Union. This is because Nazi Germany had been engaged in a massive invasion of the Soviet Union since June 22, 1941 (known as Operation Barbarossa).