Geographies of Liberation

The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary

Alex Lubin

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781469612881
• eBook ISBN: 9781469612898
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Social Sciences

In this absorbing transnational history, Alex Lubin reveals the vital connections between African American political thought and the people and nations of the Middle East. Spanning the 1850s through the present, and set against a backdrop of major political and cultural shifts around the world, the book demonstrates how international geopolitics, including the ascendance of liberal internationalism, established the conditions within which blacks imagined their freedom and, conversely, the ways in which various Middle Eastern groups have understood and used the African American freedom struggle to shape their own political movements.

Lubin extends the framework of the black freedom struggle beyond the familiar geographies of the Atlantic world and sheds new light on the linked political, social, and intellectual imaginings of African Americans, Palestinians, Arabs, and Israeli Jews. This history of intellectual exchange, Lubin argues, has forged political connections that extend beyond national and racial boundaries.

CHAPTER ONE


Overlapping Diasporas

The question [of Zionism] is similar to that which at this moment agitates thousands of the descendants of Africa in America, anxious to return to the land of their fathers.
—Edward Wilmot Blyden

In 1907 an African American Baptist minister from Atlanta, W. L Jones, articulated his longing to travel the world in order to connect with ancestry and lost culture. “For a long time,” Jones wrote, “yes fifteen years, I have had a desire to visit the old world.” For Jones, however, the location of the “old world” was ambiguous. Did black Americans belong to the African continent, as the emerging pan-African movement suggested? Or was Jones referring to Europe, America’s “old world”? Or, given Jones’s Baptist beliefs, was the old world rooted in a more sacred past and geography beyond Africa and Europe? According to Jones, “I first felt that it was my calling to Africa, and for several years I was troubled with that thought; afterwards my mind was disabused of that idea, for a new one, that of Jerusalem. And for more than ten years I have had a restless desire for the Holy Land and especially for Jerusalem.”¹ What made Jerusalem a meaningful geography for Jones? Obviously, since Jones was a Baptist minister, Jerusalem was the home of his religious faith, and like many Christian ministers he may have traveled to the “Holy Land” in order to realize Bible lands and to develop religious authority.² Black Americans throughout the era of slavery and in the post-Reconstruction era employed “Holy Land” symbols and titles in order to imagine a “Promised Land” or “Zion” within the United States.³ But did Jones’s search for Zion represent more than a mere attachment to religious faith and a sacred geography? Did the geography of Ottoman Palestine and its location next to Egypt imbue the Holy Land with additional meanings?

Although there exists a small but emerging scholarship on African American engagement with Palestine in the post–World War II period, very little scholarship focuses on the complex identification of pan-Africanists with Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴ And yet for many post–Civil War African American intellectuals, preachers, and pan-Africanists, Palestine was a generative site for articulating antiracist politics, particularly at the moment when the future for blacks in the United States was severely attenuated by Jim Crow segregation and violence. In the period following emancipation, many Africa American intellectuals, religious figures, and political radicals sought to visit the Holy Land in order to forge a liberation politics that would enable them to engage a political community beyond the Occident. Moreover, in finding political meaning in visiting the Holy Land, black Americans engaged in a larger Western movement in Europe and the United States of countermodern intellectuals seeking to articulate a new future in a different homeland.

Little is known about W. L. Jones’s motives for international travel, except what he wrote in his brief travel account of visiting Egypt and the Holy Land. What is clear, however, is that Jones encountered the Holy Land at a moment when Ottoman Palestine became a symbolic geography within American national culture as well as within European Jewish diasporic culture, and Jones, as well as many other African American travelers, could not help but encounter the Holy Land through the optics of Western imperial culture.⁵ In seeking to visit the Holy Land, black Americans were like many American figures who traveled to the Holy Land during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, including former Civil War generals, American writers, and religious leaders. Yet African American travelers to Palestine were also like many European Jews who similarly imagined Palestine as a geography of liberation and a destination to escape their inhuman treatment by European nations.

In this chapter I describe African American engagement with Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and argue that this engagement was made meaningful within the context of Gilded Age American orientalism and U.S. national interest in “the Holy Land”; the ascendance of the Jewish Zionist movement, especially in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair; and the growth of black nationalist interest in African settlement in Liberia. These contexts established the conditions of possibility within which a political imaginary cohered around concepts of diaspora and homelands. Palestine was a generative site for black American diasporic political imaginaries that confronted the dehumanizing politics of race within Europe and the United States. Yet, at the same time, pre–World War I black American engagement with Palestine illustrates the mostly elite and Western discourses of black countermodernity during this period of black liberation politics. Throughout this chapter I privilege a historical narrative rooted in political and social change in the United States and, to some extent, in Europe. Subsequent chapters look beyond the United States and will consider how global changes elsewhere produced different Afro-Arab political imaginaries. One of the important claims of Geographies of Liberation is that political imaginaries are always situated in particular spaces and times; hence, what may be radical in one geopolitical context can be much less so in another.

American Orientalism

African American travel to the Holy Land took place within a geopolitical context characterized by U.S. diplomatic, cultural, and scientific interest in the region. U.S. interest in the Levant began in earnest in the early nineteenth century and was inspired by a mixture of religious and affective interests. During the 1820s, the American Board of Missions in Massachusetts began sending Protestant missionaries to the Mount Lebanon region of Ottoman Syria in order to convert Eastern Catholics, a variety of sects that Protestants believed were not only misguided but also oppressed by Ottoman Muslim leaders. The Protestant missionaries, like most orientalists, did not understand the complex history of tolerance within the Ottoman Empire and therefore were incapable of comprehending the relative stability of Christian communities in places like Mount Lebanon, where Maronite Catholics were then a majority of the population.⁶

The American Protestant missionaries in Mount Lebanon encountered a diverse confessional environment that was majority Christian, with sizable Muslim, Jewish, and Druze populations. Moreover, American Protestant conceptions of religious conversion were foreign to the Levant, where stability among religious communities was highly prized. According to Ussama Makdisi, “The notion of rushing forth to evangelize the world because of the rapid passage of time was alien to an Ottoman Arab culture that prided itself on stability amidst heresy and its fidelity, and its uninterrupted political and religious lineages.”⁷ Failing to learn Arabic and misunderstanding complex Ottoman social norms, the American Protestant missionaries did not produce any religious converts, although they did manage to profoundly transform the society in which they conducted their missionary work.

By the 1860s, the missionaries realized they had failed at religious conversion and transformed their goal to modernizing the Levant via liberal education. The missionaries founded Syrian Protestant College in 1862 as a nonsectarian school located in Beirut. The college would be renamed the American University of Beirut in 1920. Although they failed at religious conversion, the missionaries nevertheless built an American institution in the Levant and, in doing so, helped make the Levant a place of interest for Americans, while also serving to represent America within the Arab world. Through the 1830s–1880s, the United States opened foreign consulates across the Middle East. The consulates signaled the operations of international diplomacy as well as the presence of services and support for American citizens who traveled and worked throughout the Middle East.⁸

During the decades after the Civil War, travelers and writers played a seminal role in making the Middle East accessible and interesting to American audiences. Travel writing played an important role in an expanding U.S. imperial culture by translating “foreign” geography into familiar terms and landscapes. The travel writer assumed an aesthetic authority to name and to know distant lands.⁹ In this way, travel writing has the power to define a geopolitical map from the vantage point of the author’s origins and to contribute to the formation of imperial culture.¹⁰

American travel to the Levant, or Holy Land, was popular especially after the Civil War when Americans attempted to forge national unity. Milette Shamir argues that in the wake of the national and familial violence of the Civil War, Americans sought to define a common national culture by identifying a common cultural ancestry. The Holy Land, as a Christian sacred geography, signified in American national culture a maternal figure that helped Americans reunite as a nation. Hence, in the years after the Civil War, many prominent Americans traveled or expressed an interest in traveling to the Holy Land. It was widely rumored after his assassination that Abraham Lincoln was planning a Holy Land sojourn after the war.¹¹

Hilton Obenzinger has termed the U.S. interest in the Holy Land during the Gilded Age the “Holy Land Mania.” Obenzinger is especially interested in the popularization of Holy Land travel in the literary work of Mark Twain and Herman Melville, both of whom published significant works dedicated to Holy Land travel.¹² Twain authored the 1869 Innocents Abroad; or, the New Pilgrim’s Progress, in which he satirized American travelers’ interests in the Holy Land. Twain drew much of his comedic effect from lampooning Protestant religious interests in the Holy Land and the arrogance of American travelers abroad. Melville published an 1876 epic poem about the Holy Land, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, which he based on his 1856 travels through Palestine.

Popular fictional accounts of Holy Land travel joined a range of additional travel accounts from religious leaders who sought to represent a living bible to their parishioners and from American political leaders who used their Holy Land travel to authenticate their Protestant and American bona fides. During the Holy Land mania, the holy city of Jerusalem was understood, by some, as an American space. American national culture had always relied on a foundational narrative of providential destiny, especially in Puritan narratives of North America and the New World as “God’s Chosen Israel.”¹³ In the nineteenth century, some Americans referred to Jerusalem as a quintessentially American geography; both Jerusalem and the United States were understood by these Americans as sacred geographies with a God-chosen destiny. Such was the understanding that the family of Anna Spafford brought to Jerusalem when she established the American Colony in 1890.¹⁴

Americans began to “know” the Holy Land through missionaries and travel writing. They also developed knowledge through military-scientific exploration. In 1848 American naval commander William Francis Lynch traveled overland across Syria en route to Palestine’s Sea of Galilee in order to map and study the Jordan River valley from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. Lynch’s expedition led to his publication of a detailed scientific study of the geography, biology, and cultures of the Jordan valley.¹⁵ Following Lynch’s expedition, the U.S. Army, believing the newly acquired U.S. Southwest and the Syrian and Egyptian deserts were similar, began to import Levantine camels through ports in Texas to constitute the U.S. Camel Corps. Taken together, American missionary work, travel accounts, and scientific study produced a discursive field we might call American orientalism. In his important study, Orientalism, Edward Said argued that Americans did not participate in orientalism until after World War II, when U.S. military power entered the Middle East. Said made this claim because he believed that orientalism was a discourse of direct imperialism, and U.S. imperialism in the Middle East began only in the mid-twentieth century. For Said, orientalism was not merely about producing a discursive field; it was also the material fact of imperialism in the Middle East.¹⁶ Although the U.S. was not directly involved in military and other imperialist projects in the Levant until the twentieth century, American orientalism was nevertheless an important national narrative throughout the post–Civil War period that helped define U.S. geopolitical power throughout the era of the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War. I use the term “American orientalism” as a variation of Said’s important framework in order to argue that orientalism helped Americans make meaning for U.S. imperial expansion across North America and in the Pacific during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is a deep archive of U.S. imperial literature that equates the North American Indian to the “oriental.” For example, Mark Twain could not describe the “orientals” he encountered in The Innocents Abroad without referencing the indigenous subjects within the western United States, especially those he encountered in California’s mining camps. William Francis Lynch described the Jordan valley in terms of the northern Mexico territories he conquered just two years earlier in the Mexican-American War.¹⁷

American orientalism played an important role in helping Americans to make sense of their imperial national culture. In 1904, just six years after the Spanish-American War, the United States hosted the World’s Fair Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri. The fair marked an important moment for the United States. It commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase (which was the country’s largest territorial expansion), and it signified the new status of the United States as an imperial global power, since it had engaged in wars in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Cuba. Like all world’s fairs, the St. Louis exposition enabled the host nation to represent the world geopolitically, with the host serving as the center.¹⁸ At the St. Louis exposition, Europe and America were prominently featured as bastions of modernity and innovation. Territories conquered by the U.S. and Europe were presented ethnographically as primitive curiosities. However, at the center of the 1904 World’s Fair, situated outside geography on the midway, was a 1:1 scale model of the Old City of Jerusalem. The exhibit featured hundreds of “real Orientals” shipped in from the Holy Land. Guests paid a small entrance fee to visit the Holy Land, to get married in the Holy Land, and to shop the Holy Land’s authentic bazaars and souks.¹⁹

That Jerusalem was disassociated from the Middle East exhibits at the fair illustrates the extent to which Americans claimed the holy city as their own. Claiming Jerusalem as American space characterized an American orientalism that helped the United States to make sense of its imperial status in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish-American War. Wars of territorial acquisition and conquest seemed to contradict a national culture that posed the United States as an “Empire of Liberty” and not similar to European empires.²⁰ One way to rationalize conquest was to view national expansion as providential destiny rather than as imperial hubris, and thus Jerusalem was an important symbol of American national “chosenness” and not its imperial violence.

Race and Western Modernity

How should we understand African Americans’ complex relationship to Gilded Age and Progressive Era American orientalism? The decades in which the United States engaged the “Holy Land mania” were also the decades in which it undermined the possibility of black Reconstruction and instituted harsh Jim Crow laws that limited black futures....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Geographies of Liberation
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE: Overlapping Diasporas
• CHAPTER TWO: From Subject to Citizen
• CHAPTER THREE: Black Marxism and Binationalism
• CHAPTER FOUR: The Black Panthers and the PLO
• CHAPTER FIVE: Neoliberalism, Security, and the Afro-Arab International
• CONCLUSION
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index