Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000) Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press,

Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000) Whiteness of Different Color: European Immigrants and the

Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998) Barbarian Virtues

White man s burden

Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)

Voice of Asia SayonaraTales of the Southern Pacific South Pacific

The King and I

Hawaii

Cold War Orientalism

Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) Ten CommandmentsBen-Hur Quo Vadis

Courage under Fire

No No Boy

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia, Penn.: Temple University Press, 1999); Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Gary Y. Okihiro, Common Ground: Reimagining American History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2003) Amy Kaplan, Left Alone with America: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture, in Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, 3-21.

Abstract Orientalism has become one of the most important analytical concepts in the studies of American culture in recent years. A discursive device based on the binary opposition between the Orient and the Occident, Orientalism has helped our understanding of the hierarchical race relations in the United States and how these relations have been historically constructed and justified. In a multi-cultural, multiracial society, such as the United States, however, the boundary between America and foreign nations or that between Americans and foreigners often becomes ambivalent, and thus the binary opposition which Orientalism is based on is limited in its explanatory power. This study reviews three books published recently in the field of American Studies that overcome this limitation Matthew Frye Jacobson s Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (2000), Christina Klein s Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (2003), and Melani McAlister s Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 (2001). By studying the historical complexities in American perceptions and representations of the foreign, these works transcend the binary opposition and analyze the evolution of transnational narratives within the context of U.S. imperialist expansion. Analyzing Orientalism and Transnational Narratives: Three Works in American Studies Masumi IZUMI