American Arabesque: Arabs, Islam, and the 19th-Century Imaginary - Brossura

Berman, Jacob Rama

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0814745180 ISBN 13: 9780814745182

Casa editrice: New York Univ Pr, 2012

Riassunto

American Arabesque examines representations of Arabs, Islam and the Near East in nineteenth-century American culture, arguing that these representations play a significant role in the development of American national identity over the century, revealing largely unexplored exchanges between these two cultural traditions that will alter how we understand them today.





Moving from the period of America&;s engagement in the Barbary Wars through the Holy Land travel mania in the years of Jacksonian expansion and into the writings of romantics such as Edgar Allen Poe, the book argues that not only were Arabs and Muslims prominently featured in nineteenth-century literature, but that the differences writers established between figures such as Moors, Bedouins, Turks and Orientals provide proof of the transnational scope of domestic racial politics. Drawing on both English and Arabic language sources, Berman contends that the fluidity and instability of the term Arab as it appears in captivity narratives, travel narratives, imaginative literature, and ethnic literature simultaneously instantiate and undermine definitions of the American nation and American citizenship.

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Recensione

"American Arabesque is daringly ambitious. As a work of scholarship, it ventures an extraordinary range of reference, involving old and new works in English and Arabic. As a challenge to think differently about the United States in a larger world, it ventures to name its perspective 'dirty cosmopolitanism'. It makes good on both these risks." --Jonathan Arac, author of Impure Worlds

L'autore

Jacob Rama Berman is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: New York Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2012
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0814745180
• ISBN 13: 9780814745182
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 269
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile