[Earlier this
year, I belatedly but excitedly got into The Americans, the FX drama about
two KGB agents (the great Keri
Russell and Matthew Rhys) living in deep cover as a married couple in
Reagan’s 1980s America. It’s a wonderful and very AmericanStudies show, so this
week I’ll AmericanStudy five issues and themes to which the show connects.
Leading up to my latest Guest Post on another set of pop culture texts and
questions!]
How four kinds
of cultural texts can help us understand the impossibly complicated, vital 20th
and 21st century histories of the US and/in Afghanistan.
1)
80s
Action Films: As I highlighted at length in that post, both James Bond and
John Rambo found themselves in one of their respective 1980s exploits fighting alongside
the Mujahideen (and against the Russians) in Afghanistan. Besides inducing
squirms in American audiences when we realize that Bin Laden and company might
as well as have been the friendly and brave Afghan allies with whom Bond and
Rambo serve, those elements of these films help remind us of both the shifting
realities of war and, most importantly, of our undeniable presence and influence
in even the communities and histories that feel most opposed to our own national
ones.
2)
The
Americans: In many ways the Afghanistan plotline in the show, which
took center stage in season 3, offers precisely the opposite lesson: a reminder
of what both the war and the US/Mujahideen relationship looked like from the
Soviet perspective. When we meet a particular Mujahideen leader whom Elizabeth
and Philip Jennings turn to their own advantage, he’s a violent extremist, one
perfectly willing to turn on his “allies” if he believes they’re not as pure as
he. Yet the show’s depiction of the war isn’t just about this alternative
narrative of the Afghan resistance—we also learn (SPOILERS) that Philip has a
son serving in the Soviet military there, giving the war a very different,
human link to this American character and family.
3)
The
Siege: I said most of what I want to say about Ed Zwick’s uncannily
prescient 1998 film in that post. Here I’ll just reiterate that by making the
film’s terrorist villains an Afghani group who had been trained, funded, and
then abandoned by Annette Bening’s CIA agent (and the agency as a whole)—yet a
group who remain explicitly villainous—Zwick and company succeed at
complicating and enriching the conversation about Islamic terrorism and the
Afghan histories to which it connects far more fully than do most depictions in
American media (or politics).
4)
Afghan American authors: No conversation about
the US and Afghanistan would be anywhere near complete without engagement with
how Afghan American authors and artists represent those histories and issues.
One such author, Khaled Hosseini, has
become of the most popular and prominent 21st century novelists, which
is of course a good thing but also could be a limiting one if he became the
solo representative of a broad and diverse community of figures and voices. So
the more we can also read Tamim
Ansary’s West of Kabul, East of New York,
and Qais
Akbar Omar’s A Fort Of Nine Towers,
and all the writers collected in the anthology One
Story, Thirty Stories, among many others, the more we can make sure
this conversation is as multi-vocal as it needs to be.
Last
AmericansStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
Other AmericanStudies shows you’d highlight?
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