In After the American Century we follow Brian Edwards’s dazzling interpretations of a range of US cultural products and their unlikely transformation in the global cities of Cairo, Tehran, and Casablanca. The aim of Edwards’s carefully argued book is to show how culture now travels in unpredictable ways that challenge our understandings of the relation between the United States and the rest of the world. Working across film, literature, and popular culture, Edwards argues that, rather than endless ludic circulation, globalization produces “end points, perhaps even dead ends” (xv) from which American cultural products do not return; they are no longer translatable back into the cultural register from which they came. Edwards sees such encounters as constituting a phase “after the American century,” whereby US culture, as it circulates globally, is “taken up by individuals in ways that detach the cultural product from its American referent and thereby shatter the...
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