American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era through the Twentieth Century

1. The Eighteenth Century: From Politics to Theology

15 1 The Eighteenth Century From Politics to Theology In early America, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, no less than their European counterparts, all took an interest in the various Orients of the eighteenth century. All three were aware of the political import of Confucius , who entered into American political thought mainly by way of the great European philosophes that the nation’s founders admired and respected: Leibniz, Condorcet, Voltaire, and others. Jefferson , for example, appears to have derived some of his ideas about education from accounts of the Confucian system that found their way into the enlightened discourse of the Europeans. But Confucian thought ultimately proved irrelevant to the revolutionary shift from colony to nation that the founding fathers accomplished. After the revolution , Americans ceased to be interested in the old Chinese Orient that the French had discovered; instead, they turned their attention to the “new” Sanskrit East that was beginning to excite their British contemporaries.Adams, for one, expressed Weir_MAIN_Pgs 1-256.indd 15 4/21/2011 9:31:43 AM 16 T H E E I G H T E E N T H C E N T U R Y a keen interest in the way the antiquity of the Hindu faith energized the mythographic debates of the age. Franklin was philosophically less inclined to enter such debates, but he did know and admire the great orientalist William Jones, who had visited him at Passy. Jefferson also took an interest in Jones’s translations from the Sanskrit and other Asiatic languages, though he appears to have shown little curiosity about the aesthetic shift such translations occasioned. In fact, the full impress of the Asiatic awakening on American literature had to wait for the transcendentalists of the mid-nineteenth century. By that time, Confucius and the political meanings invoked in his name had receded from the American scene, even as theological and scholarly values became increasingly intertwined. The well-known orientalism professed by Emerson and his circle in the 1840s (which grew out of Unitarian interest in Hinduism in the 1820s) was the second wave of Asian influence in America, although to divide that influence into waves or phases risks understating just how steady and widespread it was. While Eastern interests among the intellectual elite may have shifted from political to theological, and from Chinese to Indian, during the first century or so of the American Orient, that characterization ignores the growing acquaintance with Oriental culture that followed from the regular arrival of goods from the East in the maritime cities of Salem and Boston.With material riches arriving from China,Turkey, Persia, India, and even Japan (via Dutch traders), the question that presents itself is why India should have eventually emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as the Orient of choice among poets and intellectuals. Classics of Chinese and Persian literature were known in Europe long before the Vedantic literature of India was even translated, so it becomes something of a surprise that Emerson and the transcendentalists in the nineteenth century were already following an earlier American tendency when they began to merge their native New England culture with Vedic tradition. Years before the meeting of Calcutta and Concord, Jefferson acquired a copy of Sir William Jones’s 1789 translation of Kalidasa’s poetic drama Sakuntala. This work, along with Jones’s Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatic Languages (1772) and his Poeseos Asiaticae Commentariorum (1774; also owned by Jefferson), were finding their way into American libraries prior to 1800.1 But eighteenth-century American forays into Hindu literature now appear anticipatory only, motivated largely by the kind of disenchantment with classical tastes that led American readers, including Jefferson, to James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian (1773), the spurious epic based on an ancient but nonexistent Gaelic manuscript. Only after 1800 did the Indian East eclipse the more established Orient of China. And it was that Orient that first attracted the attention of Colonial Americans. Weir_MAIN_Pgs 1-256.indd 16 4/21/2011 9:31:43 AM F R O M P O L I T I C S T O T H E O L O G Y 17 I The initial interest in the Chinese Orient was motivated by politics; at least as represented by the European philosophes, Confucian China was a model society based on virtue and the rule of law. The model, however, was obviously not...