Inherited Scripts and Contested Narratives: Arab Identity in 18th and 19th Century America

Abstract

This dissertation examines the construction and negotiation of Arab and Muslim identity in the United States from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, tracing how cultural representation, legal discourse, and immigrant self-articulation shaped the terms of visibility, belonging, and exclusion. Challenging narratives that frame Arabs and Muslims as recent or peripheral to American history, the project demonstrates that their presence in the Atlantic world predates the nation-state itself and that their identities were forged through a long process of representational struggle rather than belated arrival. Drawing on Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism and Leonard Cassuto’s concept of the racial grotesque, the dissertation analyzes how Barbary captivity narratives by Thomas Pellow, John Foss, and Robert Adams produced enduring ideological frameworks that cast Muslims as cruel, despotic, and civilizationally opposed to the West. These narratives, I argue, provided an early cultural architecture through which American identity was defined against a racialized and religiously marked “Arab Other.” The project then shifts to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to examine how Arab and Syrian immigrants encountered and contested these inherited representations through print culture, legal advocacy, and public performance. Using an interdisciplinary American Studies methodology that combines literary analysis, visual culture studies, archival research, and translation of Arabic-language sources, the dissertation foregrounds immigrant newspapers such as Al-Hoda as sites of negotiation over race, gender, language, and citizenship. It further analyzes the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair as a pivotal moment in the institutionalization of Orientalist spectacle, where visual regimes reinforced racial hierarchies even as immigrant subjects carved out limited spaces of resistance. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Arab and Muslim identity in the United States emerged through continuous negotiation between imposed representations and immigrant agency. Neither wholly excluded nor fully accepted, Arabs and Muslims shaped American cultural and political life while contesting the narratives that sought to marginalize them. By situating Arab and Muslim histories at the center of American racial and cultural formation, this project redefines their role in the making of American identity itself.