The North American Orient: Literature of the American Oriental Society and U.S. Imperialism, 1842-1882 Público
Tolbert, William (Spring 2022)
Abstract
This dissertation investigates how nineteenth-century scholars and writers mapped their knowledge of a supposedly distant “Orient” onto North American regions, histories, and people. I read novels, travel journals, and academic texts in conjunction with U.S. congressional records and political speeches to demonstrate ways that Orientalism influenced major developments in U.S. foreign and domestic policy. I study Orientalist representations of Mexicans following the Mexican-American War, Indigenous Americans in the lead-up to the Indian Appropriations Act of 1871, and Black and white U.S. Southerners during the Civil War and Reconstruction. I also briefly discuss how popular Orientalist travel journals influenced the creation of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
I explore Orientalism and its effects on U.S. culture by recounting the early history of the American Oriental Society. This group, equal parts social, scientific, and political, included prominent U.S. lawmakers, university presidents, ethnographers, and explorers, as well as literary figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, and Bayard Taylor. I show how literary production—including some of what we read as “canonical” literature—was instrumentalized in the spread of Orientalist ideas and associated policies. I explain how an Orientalist logic—the idea that the world can be separated into two unequal halves, the Orient and the Occident—often justified U.S. domination over various North American racial and cultural others. In doing so, I demonstrate that nineteenth-century scholars thought of “the Orient” as a geographically fluid concept.
Table of Contents
Introduction | Isolatos No More . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1 | “Common Duties”: Transnational Orientalism, The American Oriental Society, and the Growth of U.S. Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2 | “Bedouins of the West”: Bayard Taylor, Transnational Comparison, and the North American Orient . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
3 | Mexico, Indians, and the Strategic Formation of Orientalist Literature: John William De Forest’s Overland and U.S. Policy in 1871 . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
4 | “Like Any Other Savage”: Internal Orientalism and the U.S. South, 1852-1872 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Conclusion | Horatio Hale and the Six Nations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
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