Orientalizing American Studies

The 1978 publication of Edward Said's Orientalism inaugurating the field of postcolonial theory, and the subsequent explosion of studies of imperialism and colonialism in the 1990s, have been the most important developments for American studies since the multicultural challenge to a unified national consensus two decades earlier. Drawing upon the work of earlier scholars such as R. W. Van Alstyne, Carl Eblen, Robert Rydell, and Richard Drinnon, who had repudiated the idea of American exception from European imperialism, critics such as Amy Kaplan, John Carlos Rowe, and Edward Watts acknowledged their indebtedness to postcolonial studies, albeit to different models.¹ Ever since then, there has been a proliferation of studies of colonialism and imperialism as central to American culture. These have ranged from Haunani Kay-Trask's searing indictment of colonialism in Hawai'i in From a Native Daughter (1999), to Ed White's analysis of white settler colonialism's negotiations with different subaltern populations in The Backcountry and the City (2005), to Andy Doolen's study of U.S. slavery and republicanism as entangled with imperialism in Fugitive Empire (2005).

Works dealing with U.S. cultural and geopolitical investment in the Middle East, different Arab societies, or Islamic nations have understandably been central to analyses of imperialism, given Said's monumental critique of the disciplining and othering of what was deemed the Islamic Orient by the British, French, and then the United States. Particularly since 9/11, with neoconservatives' attempts to revive an old-style Orientalism devoted to excavating the essentials of a singular Islamic society or an Arab mind through the republication of works like Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind (1973), the resurrection of Zionist Orientalist scholars such as Bernard Lewis, and the Right approval of anti-postcolonial polemics such as Martin Kramer's Ivory Towers on Sand, scholars dealing with Islam and the Arab world have been particularly self-conscious about the ideological implications of their work.² In The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism, Timothy Marr specifically addresses the need to understand the cultural distortions of U.S. representations of Islam post-9/11 and hopes that his book "will contribute to a fuller analysis of the impasses between Americans and global Muslims and in some small way help to create new avenues of intercultural understanding" (xi). Similarly, Brian T. Edwards in Morocco Bound sees his study as a contribution to the "ongoing crises of otherness" in conversations between Americans and Arabs (301). But neither of these books is simply a response to the current political situation. Rather, following Said, both are acutely conscious of the workings of imperial power in U.S. constructions of knowledge about the Arab world, even as they add nuance to or question aspects of Said's arguments—Marr by examining U.S. investments in the Arab world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and by delineating varieties of Orientalism, Edwards by focusing on ruptures in the discourse while recognizing the corporate aspect of the United States' Orientalist understanding of the Maghreb.

The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism builds upon the work of American studies scholars who have vigorously challenged Said's dictum that U.S. imaginative interest in the Islamic Orient was negligible prior to World War II because of the country's investment instead in its own western frontier.³ These scholars retrieved political confrontations such as the so-called Barbary Wars from historical neglect and demonstrated them to be central to early nationhood while deeming American interactions with Islamic and Arabic cultures pivotal to understanding the early United States. While Fuad Sha'ban's pioneering, archival study Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought (1991) painstakingly revealed the intense involvement and attachment of early Americans to the Muslim world, Robert J. Allison's The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim...