1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910822827603321

Autore

Berman Jacob Rama

Titolo

American arabesque [[electronic resource] ] : Arabs, Islam, and the 19th-century imaginary / / Jacob Rama Berman

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, : New York University Press, c2012

ISBN

0-8147-2321-7

0-8147-8951-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (287 p.)

Collana

America and the long 19th century

Disciplina

810.9/3529927

Soggetti

American literature - 19th century - History and criticism

National characteristics, American, in literature

Islam in literature

Arabs - Race identity

National characteristics, American - History - 19th century

Arabs in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: Guest Figures -- The Barbarous Voice of Democracy -- Pentimento Geographies -- Poe's Arabesque -- American Moors and the Barbaresque -- Arab Masquerade : Mahjar Identity Politics and Trans-nationalism -- Afterword: Haunted Houses.

Sommario/riassunto

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 Allan 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.