This study analyzes the black image as it was portrayed in print and visual culture within the framework of "American Orientalism" in the nineteenth-century. By American Orientalism (a phrase obviously inspired by Edward Said's classic study), I mean the larger framework of racial and ethnic stereotyping that includes Hispanic-Moorish and Arab-Islamic elements, a framework that allows for a more nuanced and differentiated account of the "black image." Far from a simple or singular image, blackness in nineteenth-century North America is internally divided by strains of literary narrative and visual-verbal iconography drawn from European sources (especially the Moorish Conquest of Spain) and the presence of Hispanic-Moorish residues in the regional cultures of American territories, especially in the American South, and sites of intense creolization such as New Orleans. Washington Irving on the Alhambra, Charles Willson Peale and other antebellum artists on the figure of the Moor, Thomas Eakins and other post-bellum Gilded Age artists on the Moorish figure of the "New Negro" and, finally, Charles Briton and other artists on the figure of Moor in "carnival culture" proclaim the mystery and, above all, the demand for an imagined Orient. More than simply tracking the Islamic Other in American Orientalism, I suggest how artists and their contemporaries used these works to reconfigure the black image for new cultural circumstances and changing political projects. Given the Islamic Other's malleability and its conspicuous role in American culture, I postulate that this image-repertoire was embraced for its allegorical potential to contain, to mediate, or to break the spell cast over the slumbering black body---Moorish enchantment resonated with those concerned with the possibility of blacks awakening to marshal their collective strength against oppression. From Irving's hobgoblin Moors to Joseph Pennell's carnival devils, the black image of the Islamic Other invoked an apocalyptic spectacle of hell on earth. My study shows how the Afro-Islamic Other became established as an American cultural icon in the nineteenth-century, and the effect it had on racial attitudes, and national and foreign policy.
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