Salim Yaqub, History, “Imperfect strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s”

Salim Yaqub will be giving a talk on his new book, Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s, which was published by Cornell University Press in September 2016. In this book Yaqub argues that the 1970s 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 seventies, 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.

Yaqub is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Director of UCSB’s 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) and of several articles and book chapters on the history of U.S. foreign relations, the international politics of the Middle East, and Arab American political activism.