Defining 'America' from a Distance: Local Strategies of the Global in the Middle East

Altan-Olcay aims to look at three kinds of networks in three different time periods, which spanned the US and the Middle East in order to follow the evolution of particular meanings of terms such as 'cosmopolitan' and 'transnational'. Based on historical analysis and fieldwork in Beirut, Cairo, and Istanbul, he traces the simultaneous formation of the variants of a particular domestic social class and their cosmopolitan cultural capital. These social classes and their knowledge production emerge from the three American institutions of higher education in the aforementioned cities.