American Quarterly

In his landmark 1978 work Orientalism, Jerusalem-born Edward Said denied the salience of his subject in the United States, the country he came to call home in 1951, not long after the mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs during the nakba (catastrophe) of the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. Said wrote that because the United States had no direct empire in Islamic lands, “there was no deeply invested tradition of Orientalism, and consequently in the United States knowledge of the Orient never passed through the refining and reticulating and reconstructing processes, whose beginning was in philological study, that it went through in Europe.”¹ But in the decades since the publication of Orientalism, numerous admirers of Said’s work, including [End Page 491] many American studies scholars, have argued that orientalism matters, even in the United States of America.

In part this is due to recent geopolitical affairs: US involvement in Muslim lands has expanded since World War II both directly and through its support of Iran, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Pakistan. More recently, the first Gulf War of 1991 and the wars following September 11, 2001, brought US armed forces into direct conflict and cooperation with Islamic countries. Especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has in many ways replicated the British “high” imperialism of the nineteenth century that produced the forms of culture and discursive practices that Said deemed to be authentic orientalism. In this era of direct administration of Muslim lands abroad and intensified surveillance, harassment, and even violence against those perceived to be Muslims at home, American studies scholars have responded with a growing body of work treating American perceptions of the Islamic Orient. Whether these scholars use the freighted term orientalism or prefer a less-charged variant such as Islamicism (Timothy Marr) or arabesque (Jacob Rama Berman), they share the sense that America’s current involvement with Middle East and North Africa and deployment of orientalist representations are much deeper, broader, more influential, and more pervasive than Said imagined back in 1978. American studies scholarship consistently shows Rudyard Kipling’s impermeable line between East and West to be fictive; it disrupts orientalist binaries and challenges whatever might remain of the hoary perception of the United States as a benevolent republic without imperial entanglements.

There is also a deeper historical meta-archive composed of US encounters with the Orient or American versions of orientalism that keeps scholars returning to this topic in the last twenty years. First, when US ships lost the protection of European powers after 1783, they immediately became targets of corsairs from the Barbary Coast. North Africans enslaved hundreds of Americans taken captive from these ships, and these captives’ narratives circulated during the early republic, often as part of ransom campaigns. These popular accounts of enslavement written by white Americans (and a solitary African American) gave readers the vertiginous experience of a racial role reversal in slavery and thereby fueled abolitionist campaigns at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Of even greater import was the popularity of Richard Francis Burton’s English translations of One Thousand and One Nights, published beginning in 1885, which led to a fad for orientalism in all modes of expressive culture in the subsequent century plus, from the fiction of Washington Irving to...