American Arabesque

American Arabesque Arabs, Islam, and the 19Th-Century Imaginary - America and the Long 19th Century

Hardback (11 Jun 2012)

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Publisher's Synopsis

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series
American Arabesque examines representations of Arabs, Islam and the Near East in nineteenth-century American culture, arguing that these representations play a significant role in the development of American national identity over the century, revealing largely unexplored exchanges between these two cultural traditions that will alter how we understand them
today.
Moving from the period of America's engagement in the
Barbary Wars through the Holy Land travel mania in the years of Jacksonian expansion and into the writings of romantics such as Edgar Allen Poe, the book argues that not only were Arabs and Muslims prominently featured in nineteenth-century literature, but that the differences writers established between figures such as Moors, Bedouins, Turks and Orientals provide proof of the transnational scope of domestic racial politics. Drawing on both English and Arabic language sources, Berman contends that the fluidity and instability
of the term Arab as it appears in captivity narratives, travel narratives,
imaginative literature, and ethnic literature simultaneously instantiate and undermine definitions of the American nation and American citizenship.

Book information

ISBN: 9780814789506
Publisher: NYU Press
Imprint: New York University Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 810.93529927
DEWEY edition: 23
Language: English
Number of pages: 269
Weight: 540g
Height: 231mm
Width: 155mm
Spine width: 25mm