global americana

Juan Cole's Global Americana Institute, which aims to bridge the gap of misunderstanding between the U.S. and much of the Arab world "by getting central works of American thought and history into Arabic," is finally up and running as a 501(c)3 charity, and he's looking for funding. As Cole points out, the availability of good information about the history & politics of the U.S. is terribly limited--we have no British Council equivalent, no libraries since USIA was shut down, no BBC World Service (just Radio Sawa and al-Hurra, which are pretty clearly regarded as propaganda channels), and academic American studies programs are accessible only in English-medium universities. And the translation of books is limited largely to literature and pop politics (in Damascus once, I saw an Arabic edition of The Clash of Civilizations, with the same cover as the US paperback, and thought oh great, this is just EXACTLY what we need to be sharing...sigh.) So the project aims first to translate the likes of Jefferson, Lincoln, King, DuBois etc. into Arabic in order to make American political thought and history more accessible, and in future to provide a broader, non-government-sponsored platform for the transmission of diverse knowledge about the U.S. to the Arab world. I think it's a very good idea, and I know most of the people who read this blog are penniless academic types like me, but if you have funds or skills to offer, go here.

At Cole's site, a commenter named Nabil made some interesting observations about the difference between the offerings at the Cairo and Beirut vs. the Istanbul international book fairs in the 90's:

Intriguing is the case of Turkey, where everything is translated as soon as it makes it anywhere in the world. Michel Foucalt, Bernard Lewis, Haruki Murukami, Samuel Huntington, and several others share shelf space with new works of Turkish literature. Does this mean that all Turks are more in touch with the world than all Arabs? Not really -- it just means that the Turkish masses have far greater access to foreign publications than Arab masses, while at the same time Turkish elites tend to read such works in the original language far less than their Arab counterparts.

I think this is partly due to the liveliness of the publishing industry in Turkey (i.e., the presence of a lot of small publishing houses devoted to making such works available) and perhaps also to the fact that intellectual life in Turkey does take place largely in a Turkish medium, even though the flagship universities are still technically English-speaking. It's probably also the result of closer political ties between the US & Turkey (NATO etc) in the past. In any case, while there's certainly a lot of political anti-American sentiment in Turkey since the Iraq War, there doesn't seem to be quite the same sense of incomprehension/alienation as in the Arab world.