Melville, Holy Lands, and Settler-Colonial Studies

Melville, Holy Lands, and Settler-Colonial Studies HILTON OBENZINGER Stanford University W hen American Palestine: Melville, Twain and the Holy Land Mania appeared in 1999, it was situated within several broader contexts: American literary studies, of course, but also the field of AmericaHoly Land studies. And I placed America-Holy Land studies within the even broader framework of “settler-colonial studies,” a field that was barely, if at all, acknowledged twelve years ago. These three categories have developed considerably with regard to what had been two relatively neglected Melville works. In the last decade or so, scholars have engaged both Melville’s journal and poem-pilgrimage, either in monographs or as part of broader studies. Clarel has been increasingly recognized as a major work, one that calls out for further readings. Here I want to revisit the heuristics of America-Holy Land studies and settler-colonial studies. These evolving conceptual frameworks have raised new awareness about the effects of culture and colonialism upon each other, about religious-nationalist perceptions in the United States, and about the changing understanding of America’s relationship to the Middle East over an increasingly troubled decade. As a result, critical responses to Clarel are far richer now particularly because Melville’s poem-pilgrimage has come to feel so contemporary. Before the late 1970s, only a small number of studies addressed America ’s relationship to the Holy Land and the Middle East: among the critical works are David Finnie’s Pioneers East: The Early American Experience in the Middle East (1967), James Field’s America and the Mediterranean World, 1776– 1882 (1969), and Franklin Walker’s Irreverent Pilgrims: Melville, Browne, and Mark Twain in the Holy Land (1974). Various bibliographies, such as Richard Bevis’s Bibliotheca Cisorientalia (1973), are also important for understanding Melville’s sources. When Moshe Davis initiated the America-Holy Land Project at the Hebrew University in the 1970s, a self-conscious interdisciplinary field gained influence. Davis, along with Israeli and American scholars, sponsored colloquia resulting in historical and bibliographic studies of American as well as broader Western involvement with the Holy Land that were published in a series of collections and monographs, including With Eyes toward Zion: c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 145 H I L T O N O B E N Z I N G E R Scholars Colloquium on America-Holy Land Studies (1977); With Eyes toward Zion–II: Themes and Sources in the Archives of the United States, Great Britain, Turkey, and Israel (1986), both edited by Moshe Davis; With Eyes toward Zion– III: Western Societies and the Holy Land (1991), edited by Davis and Yehoshua Ben-Arieh; America and the Holy Land: With Eyes toward Zion–IV (1995), by Davis; and The Holy Land in American Protestant Life, 1800–1948: A Documentary History (1981), edited by Robert Handy. The extensive bibliographic work led to a collection of reprints of nineteenth-century America-Holy Land books by Arno Press, along with a series of related studies. Many scholars were involved, with a variety of perspectives, not all adhering to the project’s overview that regarded the Holy Land as being “rediscovered” by the West. This approach did not consider analysis of settler colonialism in the U.S. or Palestine. The search for Jewish and Christian notions of “Zion” was key, while the history of Ottoman Palestine was seen as leading inevitably to the formation of the State of Israel. The overall thrust of the project was to lay claim to the history of Ottoman Palestine on behalf of Israel, in a sense building a settlement in the past. As part of the project, American historic identification with the Bible and the Holy Land, including the sense that America was a new Holy Land, was generally seen as a significant part of this rediscovery. Yet, while American fascination with both Holy Lands was highlighted in such projects as a compendium of Biblical place names throughout the United States, the consequences of...