How many of us get to hang out at a Romance Writers of America conference interviewing authors who have entertained us for generations spinning out tales of the dark, handsome, and mysterious hero courting/conquering the wide-eyed innocent and demure heroine? Nothing screams heteropatriarchal fantasy louder than the genre of the romance novel, and scholars for decades have also complicated that lens with their subversive readings of female desire, sexuality, and agency. Amira Jarmakani's fascinating book further locates the genre within contemporary geopolitical and imperialist concerns, implicating the US empire and its Other, the Arab world, squarely within a post-September 11, 2001 landscape. The desert romance genre may be just another space where dominant gender and racial ideologies circulate through (re)production of hegemonic male power and female performance; nevertheless it is exceptional in its contingent relation to the war on terror.

Jarmakani dismantles facile assumptions that readers of romance novels are duped into buying into a world that far from resembles any historical or social reality and that writers of this genre cannot be taken seriously in their efforts to describe distant geographic or political realities. On the contrary, Jarmakani shows through careful textual and historical analysis that, with regard to the desert romance, its increased popularity since 9/11 hints that the “whole range of identifications, disavowals, and rejections of the sheikh-hero are broadly reflective of a complex set of cultural associations and identifications with the war on terror” (xi). Exploring the metaphor of “radiation,” which, if in the wrong hands, can be deployed in globally catastrophic ways, Jarmakani reveals the intertwining of fear, desire and submission whereby desire (on the part of the American heroine) is activated by fear of the reformed Arab who rises above and stands apart from the dark masses to ultimately submit to the softer moral feminine agent of empire. “Stimulated by the thrill of danger, the protagonists in these stories learn that to be their own, true selves, they must subject themselves to love” not just at the individual but at the national level (3). This coupling ultimately can lead to world peace! The white female protagonist reins in the reformed sheikh “by shaping his gender politics to align with liberal feminist goals and transforming him into a good, liberal, humanist subject” (18).

Jarmakani's work points to a new direction in feminist studies as she shifts the discourse from how romance novels perpetuate women's oppression by reinforcing patriarchal norms and values to how desire functions in the text on a social and collective level and is bolstered by our (readers’ in the West) investment in a repressive system embodied in a myriad of institutions and ideologies. This book is valuable in understanding how empire operates by enlisting the figure of the white woman to further its colonizing mission of reforming Arab men (and liberating Arab women) “one sheikh at a time” (40). The critical role of the white heroine, personifying the so-called “freedom and choice” of both neoliberal and humanitarian political agendas, brings into sharp relief liberal feminism's complicity with the civilizing mission. One wonders if there are desert romances with women-of-color protagonists? Is such a context unimaginable, and how would desire/fear function in that depiction or disavowal?

Illuminating the shift from territorial colonization toward neocolonial political, economic, and military domination of the Cold War era, Jarmakani points out how proxy wars and militarism have been installed as the new form of humanitarianism. Concurrently, on the domestic front the prison–industrial complex signals the shift to neoliberal corporate control of racialized minorities. In both scenarios, the logic of “securitization” constructs an imminent threat in the racialized Other who has to be “conquered” either by the technology of contemporary imperialism or by the discourse of liberation (26). There is, however, an important parallel comparison here that this reader wishes the author had pursued further: how are the domestic and foreign “Others” differentially objects of desire/conquest? Is there a readership/authorship of the desert romance among foreign markets and the minoritized domestic communities? What sorts of response are elicited in each context?

In the long love–hate relationship the US has had with its allies in the Arab world, their chosen Arab heroes have, of course, often morphed into “despots.” Osama bin Laden morphing from the CIA's “blue-eyed boy” to the most despicable terrorist monster is a case in point. US leaders have been seen literally in arms with political leaders of the likes of Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein who were later considered threats to humanity. Jarmakani posits that analysts of the war on terror have ignored the figure of the “good sheikh” in their efforts to construct the hypervillain monster terrorist (15). This transformation can and does occur in unpredictable ways in the vicissitudes of global politics with regard to Arab leaders. How does the desert romance contend with the flip side of the reformed sheikh when he presumably/inevitably has the “savage” in him as well – to be trotted out and dealt with when expedient? The author is right in saying that the war on terror is its own kind of love story. One might probe further and ask, how are its unintended consequences folded into the imperial fantasy genre?

Jarmakani's fantastic book is a must-read for students and scholars of feminist theory, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies. This reviewer can hardly wait to teach it in her transnational feminism course.