The North American Orient: Literature of the American Oriental Society and U.S. Imperialism, 1842-1882 Open Access

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

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	English
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, Comparative Literature, American History, United States
Keyword	American Oriental Society Orientalism U.S. Imperialism
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Deepika Bahri, Emory University Benjamin Reiss, Emory University
Committee Members	Sean Meighoo, Emory University

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