Deorientation acts: The Middle East in the African American imagination, 1827--1928

This dissertation attempts to unravel the way in which racial identities are constructed, articulated, mobilized, and re-constructed through an excavation of the complex web of significance the Middle East played in the formation of African American identities during the long nineteenth century. It does so by building upon two accepted critical notions: first, that the Middle East has carried great ideological weight in the construction of an American identity from the earliest moments at which such an identity was coming into being; and, second, that the anticolonial and civil rights movements from 1955-1972 amplified this weight for African Americans in particular. My study, however, amends both to suggest that the second process began long before 1955, and advances these studies to propose that early African American authors utilized the Middle East -- which they knew as "the Orient" -- to strategically deform the genres in which they wrote, thus destabilizing the understandings of racial, sexual, and national identities within these genres. This was achieved most often through what I term "deorientation acts" -- processes by which African American authors critically defamiliarized assumptions and expectations within the forms in which they wrote to and, in the process, de- and re-constructed not only of African American identities, but what it means to be an American altogether.;I begin with the underutilized and often idiosyncratic print culture of the antebellum period, a body of texts that deorient our understandings of binaries such as domestic and foreign, self and other. I show that decidedly different travel narratives -- one written by a missionary, the other by a sly libertine -- nonetheless use the conventions of the genre to subtly expose the pitfalls and hypocrisies of traditional Euro-American respectability and to question assumptions about race and gender. Contextualizing Pauline Hopkins' novel Of One Blood within a tradition of turn-of-the-century black women's fiction and political writing, I argue that the novel is a deorientation act in and of itself: it makes fantastic the accepted contrivances and categories of Western ways of seeing. I conclude by reading W.E.B. Du Bois' Dark Princess: A Romance against Du Bois' own body of intellectual work as well as novels by fellow Harlem Renaissance authors Nella Larsen and Claude McKay. I contextualize these writings within a burgeoning Pan Africanism movement, a dying Ottoman empire, and a relationship between the United States and the Middle East increasingly based on oil, and ultimately ask how their appropriation of an Orientalized sensuality sets the stage for the more popularly recognized Arab-African American interactions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ultimately I neither simply report upon an often overlooked body of texts nor present a progressive history which moves unimpeded toward the anti-colonial alliances of the mid-twentieth century. Instead I negotiate the borders of various fields -- from African American Literature to Postcolonial and Queer Theory to Anthropology -- in order to advance theories about the way in which race, sex, and nation were articulated in the early days of American nation -- and the way in which those articulations resonate and continue to "orient" us today.