Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 58-11, Section: A, page: 4320.

Director: Alan Trachtenberg.

Although Muslims did not settle in the United States in large numbers until the twentieth-century, early Americans were extensively engaged in imagining the status and significance of the Islamic world. This study elucidates the protean orientalism through which early Americans articulated the Islamic orient as a means of authorizing or criticizing domestic cultural positions within the discourses of millennialism, nationalism, reform, and literary expression. The rhetoric of islamicism counteracted the threat of Islam as a cultural contender even as it functioned as a mirage for allowing a deeper understanding of the Islamic ethos. This process of transposition domesticated the difference of Islam as a significant resource of religious and racial cultural definition for forming more hybrid and global national identities. This study demonstrates how islamicism provided an interpretive horizon against which diverse Americans frequently oriented the direction of their national project, the morality of their cultural institutions, and the shape of their romantic imaginations.

A centuries-long exegetical tradition contained the meaning of Islam within Protestant eschatology in ways that deeply affected missionary approaches to Muslim societies. Americans in the early national period expanded this conception of Islam as an antichristian dispensation by drawing upon the Enlightenment equation of Islamic government with systematic despotism. During the Barbary wars, literary imagination helped enable Americans to depose despotism by exercising the republican virtue most clearly represented by moral women and naval tars. Ante-bellum Americans imported islamicism into the rhetorics of anti-slavery and temperance both to mark unacceptable domestic behaviors and to provide comparative cultural critique. The Mormons were regularly figured by nineteenth-century critics as reenacting Muslim practices of deception, despotism and polygamy inside national boundaries. The final three chapters analyze Herman Melville's versatile engagement with the different valences of Islamic orientalism in his life and his literary worlds, especially through his fictional characterizations and the romantic rebellion of his narrators. Melville's developed a more original islamicism after his journey to the Near East in 1856-7 as shown by the changing representations of Islamic architecture in his writings and by the Muslim characters he creates in his long poem Clarel (1876).