Islam as the New Frontier

America at Work in the World

Abstract

Starting from a consideration of the United States as affected by the context of global power relations as well as affecting it, this essay investigates a number of key issues in American self-understanding and suggests their relevance to an understanding of the US attitude to the Islamic world and to Iraq. The conceptual retooling of European Orientalism into a narrative of unbounded expansion; the inherent global reach of the US millennial tradition of (self-)redemption, with the consequent ambiguous entwining of liberation and imperialism; the ambiguous relationship of the US to modernization as democratization – simultaneously expressing a commitment to the secular and a deep investment in the sacred – , and the inevitable political violence marking such a revolutionary project in its very philosophical foundations; the endurance of the frontier narrative as creating a permanent “injun country,” marked by the continuity between a logic of violent encounters outside, and of the ghetto and imprisonment inside the nation: these are some of the cultural issues that the essay examines, linking them to the US role in the current global field of power.