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chapter 4 .................................................................................................................. Arab Athleticism and the Exoticization of the American Dream, 1870–1920 W hen and why did significant numbers of people from North Africa or West Asia intervene in the American practice of playing Eastern? In the mid-nineteenth century Christopher Oscanyan had done so as an Armenian convert to Protestantism and native of Istanbul. He spent many years talking to Anglo-Americans as best he could while making a living for himself. Yet Oscanyan was only one voice, and his limited influence in comparison to native-born professional spokesmen like Bayard Taylor shows that it was very di≈cult for anyone from overseas to come to America and participate in public debates about the Eastern world. Indeed, why should they necessarily want to? Most people there were probably more concerned with their own lives than with what someone in Cincinnati or Savannah or San Francisco thought about, say, Bedouin politics or the state of the Ottoman Empire’s finances. In fact, when a significant number of Easterners came to America they came simply to make better lives for themselves. Some did choose to work in the United States as public representatives of North Africa or the Middle East, but most did not. We must resist the temptation to place on the shoulders of these historical actors the responsibility of representing their home countries ‘‘accurately ’’ (however we might define that), a daunting task in America with its highly capitalized, growing entertainment and information networks in which even native-born entrepreneurs, audiences, and artists struggled to communicate in meaningful and profitable ways. This is not to say that foreign-born performers were not critical of the conventions of American performance and entertainment but to acknowledge that they decided for themselves to which parts they were resistant and when, how, and if they would attempt to bring about change. In fact, in the beginning, it was Arab men who in significant numbers chose to make their migration to the United States financially viable by speaking publicly for the Middle East. A prominent number did so by working in the tent 112 ...Arab Athleticism show trade of wild west shows and circuses, in the process displacing performers of European and African descent who had been portraying North Africa and West Asia for American audiences most of the century. Thus could they live their own version of the American success story by capitalizing on their unique connection to the Eastern world, a connection they and later immigrants , male and female, would use to move into vaudeville as well. Only in the mid-twentieth century would the American information and entertainment industries come to serve the largest, most a√luent body of consumers on earth and to broadcast their cultural products out into the world. Only then would the implications of American cultural production depicting the Eastern world as a facilitating context for global military, economic, and political interests become clear and highly problematic. In the meantime, after 1870, Arab entertainers began contributing their own expertise and energy to the arts of playing Eastern. They helped make the desert horseman and then the Arab athlete stock characters in the public options for consumer individuation. American interest in desert travel and West Asian– themed fraternal orders all the while were casting Middle Eastern lands as manly spaces of trial, rejuvenation, or spiritual realization.∞ Yet in venues like tent shows and vaudeville, which attracted family audiences from all classes, the Arab as wise man of the East was not prominent. Many of the ticket buyers at those shows had limited access to middling cultural products like Harper’s Monthly Magazine, published books of travel, or Masonic literature that o√ered consumers the brotherly Muslim mystic persona. Instead, the diverse audiences at a circus or an urban playhouse might hold limited knowledge of the Arab world before seeing foreign-born entertainers there. These more democratic venues presented the Arab man in the person of the ‘‘Bedouin Horseman,’’ a more secular, masculine free spirit and heroic villain. As wild-west shows receded after the turn of the century, many of the men who had played Arab horseman turned to earning a living in vaudevillian acrobatic acts, sometimes employing women as well. There they performed personae of Arab-American industriousness that asserted they were self-made men and women glad to live in the United States. To understand how foreign-born people added personae of Eastern athleticism to the American repertoire after 1900...

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