Introduction - The University of Michigan Press

14 u.s. orientalisms
Pennsylvania (1787) all participate in the official narrative of the United
States as a virtuous empire spreading the light of freedom in a dissipated
Orient, the imperial body being constructed through an exclusion of both
slavery and deviant Oriental sexuality. But the raced and gendered anxieties
accompanying the construction of strong, imperial nationhood are
also evident. Slavery surfaces at the center of national consciousness,
splitting the coherence and identity of the nation. And all too often the
gendering and respectability of the hero embodying the nation is undermined
by a willing participation in sensual excess, as a discourse of sexuality
contends with a discourse of empire. For instance, in The Algerine
Captive, Tyler’s narrator is made to literally participate in the purchase of
human cargo. Later, inside a Muslim enclave, he delights in the “feminization”
of his body through ritual scrubbing and oiling.
Chapter 3 focuses on the Near Eastern Orientalist literature of the
nineteenth century in relation to the Orientalist discourses of Egyptology
and missionary Protestantism. While Egyptology generated a rush
of self-styled archaeologists chauvinistically ready to excavate all of the
Near East, missionaries prompted concerns about the mixture of races
and cultures there. In literary Orientalist works about the Near East, the
border becomes a site of anxiety and transgression. Most works appropriate
the hierarchical paradigm of white explorer and explored Oriental,
but they do this so self-consciously and critically that what emerges
is a parodic Orientalism in contestation with the dominant discourses
on the Orient, the latter being recuperated only as points of closure. In
John DeForest’s Irene the Missionary (1879), for instance, the vigorous,
USAmerican male archaeologist is constantly critiqued in his quest to
excavate all of the Near East. These works also reveal the precariousness
of the racial alterity on which the missionary-imperial body is constructed,
by introducing moments when this body is transformed
through interracial contact. In William Ware’s Zenobia (1837), for
instance, Lucius M. Piso fears for his manly body in the Oriental languor
of Palmyra. Maria Susanna Cummins, however, uses racial intermixing
to both contain and subvert imperial race and gender hierarchies.
Exploiting the new possibilities available to women as a result of missionary
work overseas, Cummins, in El Fureidis (1860), creates Havilah,
a woman pure but not bound by domesticity, pious but overly learned,
beautiful but more athletic than her male archaeologist suitor. Through
this racially mixed character, Cummins challenges the patriarchy within
imperialism while still maintaining the raced imperatives of the latter.
Finally, chapter 3 explores the tension between the raced and gendered