Examines representations of Arabs, Islam and the Near East in nineteenth-century American culture

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series
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.

"American Arabesque succeeds on many levels, not the least of which is its forging of a method of transnational scholarship. Berman places importance on translation, not only in terms of linguistics but also in terms of cultural forms. The result is a nuanced read of densely overlapping cultural forms and ideas...This is an important scholarly intervention that is sure to push forward transnational scholarship." - Journal of American Studies

"Berman's work opens up extended vistas for consideration, and the central accomplishment of the book is immense: by reading Arabic-language texts from North Africa contrapuntally in relation to English-language texts, Berman points toward the possibility of reading nineteenth-century American literature through frames that are far more genuinely planetary and cosmopolitan that has yet been achieved. Berman's study makes an important, indeed vital, contribution to the field of studies of American Orientalism and of Orientalism in Poe's work specifically." - Poe Studies

"[T]his book will prove useful to both historians and literary scholars....always stimulating and rewarding...it should inspire many new avenues of research." - New England Quarterly

"Berman's American Arabesquemakes an original contribution to the fields of American, Arab American, and Middle East studies through a combination of a novel comparative angle, bold theoretical argument, keenly perceptive and nuanced textual analyses, and an elegant, fluid style. This book will no doubt become required reading for scholars in this field." - Symploke