Arabs, Arabesques, and America: The Place of Poe in Studies of Literary Orientalism

Over the past fifteen years, studies of the literary relationships among the United States and a variety of Middle Eastern and North African nations and cultures have flourished. Malini Johar Schueller, Timothy Marr, Stephanie Stidham Rogers, Anouar Majid, Michael Oren, and Hilton Obenzinger all published important scholarly volumes on the subject during that time span, and Paul Baepler, in his anthology of Barbary captivity narratives, has energized discussions of North Africa in particular. Jacob Rama Berman’s American Arabesque thus contributes to a field that is highly active and growing—as further reflected in work published in article form and/or forthcoming in book form from such scholars as Molly K. Robey, Milette Shamir, and Basem L. Ra’ad.

Berman’s entry into this field is distinctive in that it seeks to examine the Middle Eastern and North African sides of the encounter as well as the American, rather than focusing primarily on questions of American representations of Middle Eastern cultures and locales. Indeed, one of the most noteworthy features is that the study not only transliterates and translates Arabic words but also presents numerous words in Arabic script—a strong visual cue to the book’s multilingual and transnational ambitions. The term arabesque, freighted heavily with meaning for Poe himself and for Poe studies over the past half century, provides Berman with an organizing concept that melds cultural and aesthetic questions beautifully, and he moves with considerable agility between such questions throughout the volume.

Berman’s first two chapters work their way toward Poe’s arabesques through representations of encounters between American captives and travelers in the Barbary States of North Africa in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and in the Levant in the early to mid–nineteenth century, in tandem with North African representations of European travelers and invaders. If others have traversed this territory before, Berman brings a fresh approach to it by pairing the narrative of Barbary captivity by John Cathcart (published posthumously in 1899) with the historiography of Abd al-Rahman al-Jabbarti, an Arab historian of the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt (1798). Berman shows how these two contemporaries, divided by nationality, religion, and language, complement each other’s representations of the contact between the United States, Europe, and North Africa. A term Berman coins that works very well as a unifying thread through his entire book is “dirty cosmopolitanism,” which he sees embodied in Cathcart’s status as a working-class polyglot. For Berman, “dirty cosmopolitanism” is a defiantly non-elite form of cross-cultural contact and affinity. By beginning with Cathcart and al-Jabbarti, Berman emphasizes the importance of political, economic, and social relations to the mutual representations of each other by North Africans and North Americans, considerations that might otherwise be lost in the more conventionally literary texts he discusses later. The Barbary narrative is also important for Berman in that it establishes a pattern of “willful misinterpretation of Arab identity” that he will find in other texts, especially Poe’s arabesques [66].

Similarly, Berman pairs John Lloyd Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1838) with the writings of Ibn Kaldun and Ibn Battuta in order to show how Stephens’s readings and misapprehensions of the Bedouin cultures he encounters can be illuminated by Muslim representations of the Bedouins and can at the same time illuminate American attitudes toward American Indians. In the process, Berman draws in the complex depictions of Ottoman Turkish culture that Americans produced in the nineteenth century, calling attention to substantial cultural and linguistic differences within the Islamic Ottoman Empire and significant distinctions in the ways Arabs and Turks were racialized in the US imagination. As the chapter progresses, Berman branches out more broadly, considering the travel account by mid-nineteenth-century African American...