American Arabesque

Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century Imaginary

Jacob Rama Berman

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814723210
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

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.

1 The Barbarous Voice of Democracy

For pre-Revolution settlers, tales of Indian captivity dramatized the stakes in the American experiment.¹ They also dovetailed generically with themes familiar from Barbary captivity narratives written by Europeans.² After the Revolutionary War, however, American citizens began writing their own accounts of Barbary captivity. White, working-class sailors who claimed no literary skill or pretension to fame produced the majority of postnational Barbary captivity narratives. These accounts were often circulated in support of subscription drives for ransom. Beyond the material support Barbary captivity narratives provided for actual slaves in Africa, the genre was clearly also a source of entertainment and intrigue for American readers. According to Paul Baepler, “Although the Barbary captivity narrative in English existed for more than three centuries, it caught the attention of United States readers primarily during the first half of the nineteenth century. Between John Foss’s 1798 narrative and the numerous printings of James Riley’s 1817 account, … American publishers issued over a hundred American Barbary captivity editions.”³

Stories of American bondage in North Africa exploited the language of freedom that had inspired the American Revolution. But these stories also challenged the meaning of that freedom and, by extension, critiqued the presence of slavery in the United States. In other words, Barbary contact narratives exposed new citizens to literary images of bondage that resonated both with the unifying rhetoric of Revolution and with the divisive rhetoric of abolition. Of course, in Barbary, the roles of African slave and white American were reversed. Nevertheless, captives translated Barbary referents into American tropes of identity. Barbary types such as Turks, Arabs, and Moors allowed Federal-era readers to negotiate American racial classifications, the limits of American democratic inclusion, and ultimately the fantasy of America’s exceptional difference through exotic proxies.

In the polyglot, polyethnic, and polytheist society that was the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Barbary world, U.S. citizens encountered an Ottoman Empire whose racial stratifications, practices of slavery, and imperial aspirations served as both a model for the new nation and a threat to that nation’s sense of identity. Through the figure of the captive, writers in the Federal era explored the continuum and the difference between Barbary and America. In particular, the claims for repatriation enunciated by American-citizen captives in a foreign land are based on an anxious recognition of their country’s need to litigate the domestic relationship between master and slave. In turn, the language of national identification spoken by these captives often recognizes the citizenship rights of American “others.” Contact with Barbary did not consolidate the relation between whiteness and U.S. citizenship but rather troubled that relation with specters of American multiculturalism. In the pages that follow, I examine why North Africa was then and continues to be now an integral semantic space for the expression of American values and ultimately the definition of U.S. national identity.

I begin with an examination of how and why the discourse surrounding North African captivity at the turn of the nineteenth century created literary configurations linking the United States and Barbary. American captives juxtaposed the spatially and culturally unique sites of America and North Africa, creating a range of imagined relations between whiteness and blackness, Christianity and Islam, democracy and despotism. Focusing largely on the firsthand account of captivity provided by James Leander Cathcart, I recover the intercultural dialectic that translates descriptions of Barbary bondage into discursive instantiations of American freedom, democracy, and social mobility. I use the phrase barbarous voice of democracy to describe the articulation of Barbary referents and references into enunciations of American patriotic values.

Next I place Cathcart’s language of American patriotism within the context of a turn-of-the nineteenth-century transatlantic discourse on revolution, empire, and Napoleon. This transatlantic discourse sheds light on Cathcart’s unique brand of cosmopolitanism, revealing the relationship between his ruminations on American patriotism while a captive in Barbary and his ruminations on American patriotism years later while serving as a U.S. government agent in the Louisiana Territory. Despite their obvious geographical separation, the physical spaces of Barbary and Louisiana, I argue, are treated with ideological continuity in Cathcart’s writings. Both are spatially chaotic and historically abject, and both have the potential to be cultivated into the smooth spatio-temporality of empire. Cathcart’s America is a mobile concept more than it is a geographically bounded space. But whether he is in Barbary or Louisiana, Cathcart’s idealized vision of a coherent and culturally homogeneous America is constantly harassed by the multicultural and multilinguistic reality of the literal landscapes he surveys.

Cathcart’s writings provide a particularly intimate account of the tension between the cosmopolitan and the local in Federal-era American national identity politics, but they also resonate with the writings of the Arab historian Abd al-Rahman al-Jabbarti. Al-Jabbarti wrote several accounts of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Each wrestles with tensions between the cosmopolitan and the local, and each confronts Enlightenment rhetoric with Arabo-Islamic values. Al-Jabbarti wrote his history in 1798, the same year a newly emancipated Cathcart was appointed special diplomatic agent to William Eaton in Tunis. The French occupation of Egypt that al-Jabbarti details ended in 1801, the same year Cathcart took an active role in recruiting Hamet Karamanelli out of Egypt and into the Libyan Desert to fight for the U.S. cause in the War with Tripoli. A month after the Mameluke sword exchange between Karamanelli and the U.S. Marines took place in 1805, the Albanian janissary Muhammad Ali seized power in Egypt, filling the vacuum left by the departed French. Ali came to be known as the founder of modern Egypt for his military, technological, and cultural reforms. In 1811, while Cathcart was still serving in the Mediterranean as U.S. consul in Madeira, Ali exterminated the Mamelukes forever in a famous massacre at the Citadel in Cairo. In 1819, while Ali was consolidating his hold on Egypt through cultural exchanges with France, Cathcart ventured into the Louisiana swamp on a mission to locate available timber resources from which to rebuild the U.S. Navy after the War of 1812.

Though certainly situated in distinct cultural milieus, Cathcart and al-Jabbarti are historical contemporaries. Both of them chronicle the historical forces that connect Europe, America, and North Africa in the Age of Revolution. Yet they come to quite disparate assessments of revolution’s rhetorical meaning. In al-Jabbarti’s account of the meeting between Western culture and Arabo-Islamic culture, the Enlightenment terminology undergirding Cathcart’s patriotic values undergoes the rigors of the Arabo-Islamic interpretive method. Juxtaposing Cathcart’s and al-Jabbarti’s respective views on the encounter between West and East in the Age of Revolution productively challenges the assumptions inherent in Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and gestures toward what Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan has theorized as a reciprocal defamiliarization.⁴ As Susan Stanford Friedman puts it, discussing Radhakrishnan’s work, “reciprocal defamiliarization unravels the self-other opposition that reproduces systems of epistemological dominance.”⁵ Both Cathcart and al-Jabbarti struggle to reconcile cultural incommensurability and ultimately fail, but in their struggles they point to the possibility for reconstituting a meaningful dialogue between American and Arabo-Islamic intellectual traditions based precisely on what is unknowable.

I end the chapter by examining the legacy of American contact with Barbary and the literature it produces. Barbary referents were vehicles for Federal-era American writers who wanted to express the tenor of national identity. Decontextualized and culturally orphaned, these Barbary vehicles acquired specifically American meanings that spoke to specifically American questions of national identity. In particular, I demonstrate the role that tropes and metaphors of Arabness play in ameliorating the impasses between the rhetoric of American freedom and equality and the U.S. government’s exclusionary practices. The racially, socially, and sexually fluid figure of the captive is a rhetorical lynchpin in the transformation of particularistic American versions of democracy into universal expressions of freedom and equality. In turn, tropes and metaphors of Arabness provide conduits between captivity and freedom that symbolically code the passage as a movement from darkness into whiteness, from savagery into civilization, and from foreignness into American citizenship. As a symbol of national identification, the captive universalizes the reach of American values, but the movement from captivity to freedom is only accomplished by tropes that reparticularize those values. Nonetheless, a recovery of the intercultural dialectics that inform these tropes reveals alternate national imaginaries that American writers throughout the nineteenth century continued to explore through figures of the Arab.

A Dirty Cosmopolitan

During James Leander Cathcart’s eleven years as a captive in Barbary (1785–1796), he maintained a lively correspondence with many of the most influential players in the new American republic’s government. His collected papers attest to both his deep involvement in the protracted negotiations for the release of the American slaves held with him in Algiers and his abiding desire to have his efforts preserved for history in the most flattering possible light. On more than several occasions in his personal papers, he emphatically points to “proof” of his patriotic service, including a mention of a letter from the Swedish counsel in Algiers, Mr. Skoldebrand, in which, Cathcart says, “he acknowledges my success and hopes I may enjoy the gratitude of my country.”⁶ That gratitude was far from forthcoming, and Cathcart complained to his dying day of the debts (financial and otherwise) his country had left unpaid. One of these complaints appears in a sardonic note Cathcart scribbled at the bottom of a letter John Quincy Adams wrote to him in 1822. In the letter, Quincy Adams apologizes about a government position the former secretary of state was unable to wrangle for the former captive. Cathcart’s handwritten comment reads, “I am left in my old age with a family of ten children unprovided for, not withstanding that I am master of the French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian languages, God’s will be done!!!”⁷

Cathcart saw himself by experience and training to be a perfect representative of the young, cosmopolitan republic. That experience and training were acquired during the time he spent in the Mediterranean as both captive and diplomat. “One article ought to be added to our Constitution,” Cathcart wrote to then secretary of state Timothy Pickering in April 1800, “viz.: No person should be eligible to be a candidate for the Presidency of the United States before they reside six months in Barbary.”⁸ Cathcart’s cosmopolitanism was not cultivated in school, honed in high-society fetes, or spoken in refined phrases. Rather, it was the product of years spent abroad as a captive, a sailor, and a tavern owner. Cathcart spoke a brand of what I am calling dirty cosmopolitanism,⁹ a bottom-up universalism informed by the experience of slavery, dispossession, and exile.¹⁰

Born in Ireland in 1767, Cathcart joined the American Revolution at twelve years of age in 1779 and spent time in a British prisoner-of-war ship (which he escaped in 1782) before being captured off the coast of Algiers in 1785. The Spanish that Cathcart learned as an English captive served him well in Barbary, where he eventually climbed to the highest position a slave could hold in Algiers, secretary to the Dey. As secretary, Cathcart (having learned Arabic, Turkish, and Lingua Franca) acted as an intermediary between U.S. diplomats and Algerian government officials. Upon his release from Barbary captivity, Cathcart was appointed U.S. consul to Tripoli, and it was in that capacity that he suggested Hamet Karamanelli to General William Eaton as an “instrument” (Eaton’s turn of phrase) that America could utilize in its 1801–1805 War with Tripoli. By every means possible, honorable and dishonorable, Cathcart had managed to parlay Barbary captivity into a small if fleeting fortune (ample enough to buy the ship that sailed him home from North Africa) and ultimately into a career as a U.S. diplomat.

Immigrant, citizen, war veteran, slave, diplomat, avowed patriot, and inveterate critic of a nation he served in the Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, and on the Mississippi River, Cathcart left a body of writing filled with opinions that were largely ignored by his more influential contemporaries. This writing includes a closet Barbary captivity narrative published over a hundred years after its completion, diplomatic correspondences regarding the War with Tripoli that were more often than not dismissed as filled with prejudiced advice, and a government-sponsored survey of the Louisiana Territory that was promptly lost for close to half a century. Whatever his personal shortcomings, Cathcart participated in and provided copious comment on most of the major international events of the Federal era, including the Revolutionary War, the War with Tripoli, and the Louisiana Purchase.¹¹

A consistent theme in Cathcart’s writing is the struggle to manifest an idealized America defined by freedom, democracy, equality, transparency, and civilized order. This struggle is captured for Cathcart in both explicit and implicit comparisons between Barbary and the United States. When Cathcart first arrives in Barbary as a slave, he describes the country’s landscape through a reference to American settlement. “The country except in their gardens and plantations which are all walled in, resembling the first settlements in America [i]s entirely uncultivated.”¹² Cultivation, of course, was an operative metaphor of early American nation building, one found repeatedly in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, for instance. “I repeat it again,” Jefferson wrote, “cultivators of the earth are the most virtuous and independent citizens.”¹³ In Jefferson’s political economy, natural right and natural reason are literally “cultivated” by the free citizen’s relationship to the soil. Jefferson believed that heterogeneity was a threat to this political ideal of cultivation. Speaking of potential American citizens who hail from foreign countries ruled by the monarchies that are the antithesis of natural right and natural reason, Jefferson argues, “These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation.” He continues, “They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”¹⁴

For Jefferson, American soil is a key component of national identification, but for Cathcart, American values can be cultivated almost anywhere. As a Barbary slave, Cathcart commented repeatedly on the potential of the landscape for commercial exploitation, if the population could only be given an enlightened government. “If this country was blessed with a good government which would promote the welfare of its subjects and encourage agriculture, arts and manufactures,” Cathcart writes of Algiers, “it would become in a very few years a perfect paradise; it would also become a commercial nation of considerable import and from a ‘Den of Thieves,’ which it is now at present, it would rank among the civilized nations of the earth” (Captives, 88–89). Cathcart is certainly engaging in what we might call prospective colonialism, but he is also registering a more universal perspective on cultivation than Jefferson. Algiers, as well as America, can be cultivated and become a “perfect paradise.” The formula is much the same: enlightened, progressive governance that creates order out of chaos. To cultivate Algiers would be to bring it not only social order but also historical order. Thus, if cultivated, Algiers would enter historical time and be counted among the “civilized nations of the earth.”

The problem with Algerian society, in Cathcart’s view, is that it lacks the progressive and homogeneous flow of time he associates with “civilized nations.” This lack of order is nowhere more apparent in Algerian society than in the business sector. Cathcart, describing the slave prison, or Bagnio, where he owns a bar, complains:

The jingling of chains adds horror to this dismal dungeon beyond conception, which with the stench and unnatural imprecations and blasphemy of some of its miserable inhabitants, makes it really a perfect pandemonium. I will now proceed to describe this receptacle of human misery…. They are perfectly dark and in the day are illuminated with lamps, and when full of drunken Turks, Moors, Arabs, Christians, and now and then a Jew or two … forms the most disgusting “Coup de Oeil” that can be imagined, … the place filled with smoke of tobacco which renders objects nearly impervious to the view, some wrangling with the tavern keepers for more liquor and refusing to pay for it, that upon the whole it must resemble the infernal regions more than any other place in the known world, especially when they frequently quarrel with themselves and proceed to blows and even murder often takes place in those receptacles of vice and immorality, which generally occasions the tavern keeper to lose all his property as the tavern is seized by the Regency and the tavern keeper sent to hard labor. (Captives, 126)

The antithesis of Enlightenment space, the Barbary Bagnio is a perfect “pandemonium” instead of a “perfect paradise.” This pandemonium obscures clear vision but also impedes commercial order and due process. The mixtures precipitated by the Bagnio space are not only unwholesome; they are violently disruptive. The vision of chaos inherent in Cathcart’s portrayal of the slave tavern within the prison suggests the captive’s suspicions about the limits of multiculturalism. Cathcart’s reaction to the cacophony of cultures mingled in the Bagnio reinforces, by contrast, the importance of homogeneity in creating “civilized nations.” The passage also suggests that Jefferson’s trepidations about the incoherency of a heterogeneous society were shared by other new American citizens. Appropriately enough, Cathcart names the tavern the “Mad House.” If Americans fail to manage the relationship between the country’s various constituent rac...