Reimagined Communities

What surprised me the most in these two chapters is the nearly-conscious selectivity in choosing what is mainstream, or in what is important to America. In “King Tut, Commodity Nationalism,” McAlister goes into great detail about the ways that Americans tried to make Tut and his relics more like white America. Whites insisted on his decent from Eurasian peoples at the same time that blacks were insisting on his African-ness. Both groups saw features in his face the proved his inclusion in only one group: either white or black. Neither group even entertained the much more plausible thought that Tut was both white and black, as mixing of the races was very common in that area of the world. I believe this was a result of each group wanting to identify Tut’s and Egypt’s wealth, sophistication, history, and mystique with themselves, to the exclusion of the other.
Additionally, the status of the items found in Tut’s tomb was questioned. While the Egyptians rightly argued that the items were artifacts of Egyptian history, owned by the Egyptian people, white Americans and Europeans argued that the items were works of art that should be openly available to the whole world, meaning themselves. I have never heard of any state challenging Greece’s possession of their historical works of art, nor have I heard of any state challenging any other African nation’s possession of their works of art.
What differentiates Tut’s items from items from Greece, or from Mali? Two differences come to mind. First, just as Europe and American did when they were colonial powers, they maintained the mindset that they can lay claim to whatever land, people, or art they want simply because they are technologically superior. Why do they want it? Because they can take it. Also, they high value of the items led to pure greed. Every culture creates its own beautiful art; however, not every culture creates them in solid gold. This differentiates the Egyptian artifacts from wooden or ceramic pieces of art found elsewhere in Africa and around the world.
In “The Good Fight” McAlister shows the lengths to which evangelical Christians went to identify with the Jewish state of Israel. Though Jews had previously been systematically discriminated against, evangelicals came to see identification with the Israelis as a sure method of obtaining their attributes. First, Jews were known as God’s chosen people, while Americans were coming under ideological attack from within and without the nation. Second, Israel maintained a strong, effective fighting force in a time when Americans doubted their own military strength.
Believing that the Jews were God’s chosen people on Earth, the evangelicals saw themselves as God’s “spiritual people” (175). They hoped that their support for the Jews would reflect favorably upon them in the afterlife. Supporting Israel also provided an ideological battle they could win. After all, in their doomsday prophecies, which they believed had been set in motion with the founding of the Jewish state after WWII, God returns to Earth to fight on the side of the Jews. What better odds could you want?!
Occurring during the same time period as the Vietnam Conflict and its ensuing controversy, Israel’s war with the surrounding Arab states, their attack on the Palestinians following the assault on Israeli Olympians, and the Entebbe operation were demonstrative acts of military force and strength of will. Because the nation was so divided over the Vietnam Conflict, among many other issues of the 1960’s and 70’s, the nation needed something with which they could identify and on which they could agree as a nation.
Coming from a nation that survived a civil war over issues of race and ideology, the adaptation of Egyptian artifacts and ethnicity and Jewish nationalism as American ideals was very surprising. Especially surprising was the involvement of a highly conservative Christian group in the support of a radical Jewish state. However, given the centrifugal force of conservative Western culture, if they could not create the art or magnificence of ancient Egypt or the self-determination of Israel, the idea that they would usurp these manifestations of greatness from others is not that surprising after all.

In the middle two chapters of Epic Encounters McAlister illustrates how both a fascination with Ancient Egypt, especially in the form of the King Tut exhibit, and the fate of Israel played integral roles in constructing American nationalism after the radical movements of the 1960s and the wake of the failure of the Vietnam War. In essence, the rearticulation of American nationalism within these two contexts consisted of mapping a brand of American national identity onto other cultures, rather than on a more internal reformulation of what the idea of Americanness. In doing so, the Middle East increasingly played a larger role in American foreign policy interests as the US sought to control the oil in the region like they claimed ownership over Egyptian artifacts and for a variety of reasons Israel became the state to support. While both of these formulations of nationalism were by no means uncontested, they became the dominant ways through which the American nation was defined.

The conversation surrounding the King Tut exhibit placed Ancient Egypt squarely in the historic narrative of Western society. Both by envisioning Ancient Egypt as part of the basis on which modern society is based and also by arguing that the objects from King Tut’s tomb belonged under the authority of Western collectors the King Tut phenomenon became a way through which American ascendancy could be asserted. McAlister writes, “the great nations are defined not as those that produce the greatest art – they are those that collect it.” (P. 133) At the same time, many prominent black thinkers were constructing Egypt in a way that connected it to Africa, rather than to America. McAlister’s analysis traces the way in which race played out in the constructing of the national identity. While a transnational identity of blacks in the United States was constructed with Egypt, ultimately, “blackness became a set of codes and cultural behaviors that could be (at least potentially) owned and operated by white men.” (P. 154)

A similar sort of racial assertion of identity played out in forming US interests in Israel. First, American Jews in the 1960s and ‘70s became thoroughly Americanized, thus achieving status as white in the United States. Moreover, Israel became marked as American. “In Exodus, the story of Israel was one of bravery, hard work, and individualism within a shared community: as the American frontier had been tamed, so the desert bloomed.” (P. 163) McAlister argues three reasons for the burgeoning interest of America in Israel: first, American Jews began to identify with Israelis, evangelical Christians envisioned Israel as the site where the prophesied end of the world would play out, and Israel became the anti-Vietnam, where masculinity and willpower, things the US allegedly lacked in the Vietnam conflict, were being embodied by Israel. This articulation of nationalism also played into the dominant notion of whiteness. Though other cultures were implicit to these new conceptions of national identity, all did so in such a way that retained white identity as fundamentally important to the nation.