25 Jan Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s
Salim Yaqub (History, UCSB)
January 25, 2017 / 5:00 PM
HSSB 6020
Salim Yaqub discusses Imperfect Strangers, his new book on U.S.-Arab relations in the 1970s. He argues that the seventies were a pivotal decade in U.S.-Arab relations–a time when Americans and Arabs became an inescapable presence in each other’s lives and perceptions, and when each society came to feel profoundly vulnerable to the political, economic, cultural, and even physical encroachments of the other. Throughout the 1970s, these impressions aroused striking antagonism between the United States and the Arab world. Over the same period, however, elements of the U.S. intelligentsia grew more respectful of Arab perspectives, and a newly assertive Arab American community emerged into political life. These patterns left a contradictory legacy of estrangement and accommodation that continued in later decades and remains with us today.
Copies of Imperfect Strangers will be available for sale immediately after the event.
Salim Yaqub is Professor of History at UCSB, and Director of the Center for Cold War Studies and International History. He is the author of Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (University of North Carolina, 2004). His second book, Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s, was published by Cornell University Press in 2016.
Sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for Cold War Studies and International History.