Although scholars have long heralded the so-called transnational turn in American studies, scholarly monographs that enact transnational methodologies are only now being published. The success of Ussama Makdisi's Artillery of Heaven (2009) (winner of both the American Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Prize and the Middle East Studies Association's Albert Hourani prize) has suggested the importance of scholarly approaches that are not merely about the projection of the US in the world, but that enact transnational scholarship in which cultural forms are understood to circulate within multiple national cultures. For Makdisi, the transnational resulted in the production of a monograph about the overlapping and translational history of the American Protestant Missionary encounter in the Levant. Makdisi places the English-language and American archive of that encounter on top of the Arab and Syrian, Mt. Lebanon archive of the same events.

Jacob Rama Berman's American Arabesque: Arab, Islam, and the 19th-Century Imaginary takes up the challenge for transnational methodology. What distinguishes American Arabesque is not so much that it is about American literary encounters with the Middle East/North Africa (MENA); it is that it attempts to forge a transnational methodology for understanding US–Arab world encounters in ways that enable one to see the nineteenth-century national imaginary being forged in the process of transnational circulation.

Berman's approach is to consider the American–MENA cultural encounter as something that is shaped through language as it transits between the US–MENA contexts. Fixing on the chronotope of the “Arabesque,” an architectural symbol doubly signified (and doubly translated) within Islamic and European cultures, Berman focusses on the transit of ideas as they are translated within America and within the MENA. Berman employs his method most successfully in the first two chapters. In chapter 1, “The Barbarous Voice of Democracy,” Berman carefully maps the transit of ideas of democracy and freedom within and across the US and the Barbary Coast in the Barbary captivity narrative. Berman goes beyond previous readings of the Barbary captivity narrative by situating them not only within their US context, but also in the context of a multicultural Ottoman society that constituted the narratives' objects. Indeed, Berman carefully demonstrates how acts of intercultural and linguistic translation helped map US understandings of freedom, liberty, Christianity, and their opposites.

In the second chapter, “Pentimento Geographies,” Berman demonstrates the densely overlapping histories that encouraged American travelers in the Arab world to conflate the Bedouin with the Indian, a process Berman calls “the translations of the Bedouin into frontier geographies” (73). Berman demonstrates how Arab intellectuals and American writers employ the Bedouin as a figure of different, yet conjunctural, national imaginaries. In doing so, Berman illuminates one transnational trajectory of the US settler colonial project.

The remaining three chapters consider various representational practices in which American writers and intellectuals take up the figure of the Arab. While these chapters are interesting and illuminating they seem less transnational than the first two primarily because they are less about overlapping histories uniting the US and the Arab world and more about US representational practices. Berman's analysis of Poe's “arabesque” or of the role of the Moor in early African American Islam are important and unique, but they seem to be about US representational strategies rather than about the complex global interactions that are mapped in the first two sections. In the final chapter Berman considers how Arab American writers engage with the longue durée of American Arabesques. Berman's analysis of Ameen Rihani's negotiation of American orientalism is quite engaging.

American Arabesque succeeds on many levels, not the least of which is its forging of a method of transnational scholarship. Berman places importance on translation, not only in terms of linguistics but also in terms of cultural forms. The result is a nuanced read of densely overlapping cultural forms and ideas. Where Berman's methods could have been developed, it seems, is in their engagement with the geopolitical transformations shaping his subject. The American encounter with the MENA was not only cultural, but also political; indeed the cultural and the geopolitical were inextricably linked. Hence it might have been productive to consider how the American presence in the Middle East/North Africa, as early as the Barbary wars but especially beginning in the early nineteenth century, helped establish the context for the American “arabesque.” Although the US was not yet a global power in the nineteenth century the nineteenth-century American presence in the MENA was nevertheless important to Arab history. Furthermore, it would seem that the dissolution of the Ottoman system and the imposition of European mandates and the League of Nations in the early twentieth century would provide important context to discuss Berman's twentieth-century examples, including Claude McKay's and Ameen Rihani's literary legacies. Overall, however, this is an important scholarly intervention that is sure to push forward transnational scholarship.