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Description
TIMOTHY MARR The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Cloth $75.00; Paper $24.99. 324 pp.
Scholars have long found Melville's engagement with the elation and terror associated with intercultural contact, as well as with religious faith and doubt, to be crucial to understanding his body of work. For the most part, however, discussions of these issues have focused on Melville's representations of South Seas "cannibals" and his ambivalent relationship to Christianity. Timothy Mart's The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism expands our understanding of Melville's treatment of cross-cultural contact and religious belief by providing a subtle analysis of Melville's appropriation and reinvention of popular representations of Islam in the nineteenth-century United States.
Marr devotes only one chapter entirely to Melville, but the book as a whole evinces a truly Melvillean scope and ambition, and throughout the study, Marr discusses figures likely to engage Melville scholars deeply. Marr argues that American practices of representing Islam, for which he uses the shorthand term islamicism (an adaptation of Edward Said's use of "orientalism"), are crucial to the development of a national identity for the United States, particularly in relation to international affairs. He examines, with considerable thoroughness and erudition, the ways in which Islam served as a foil for America's own self-identification with liberty, as a standard against which to measure Christian hypocrisy (particularly in relation to slavery and temperance), and as a source of romantic and exotic... |
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