CONSTRUCTIONS OF NORTH AFRICAN CORSAIRS IN EARLY AND POST-9/11 AMERICAN ORIENTALIST DISCOURSE

Mohamed Saidi

Abstract


The capture and enslavement of American sailors at the hands of North African corsairs, notoriously known as Barbary pirates, on the Mediterranean coasts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, coupled with the so-called Barbary Wars between the newly-independent United States and the-then branded the Barbary States of North Africa, gave rise to the “the first significant group of U.S. Orientalist works” (Schueller 45). Following the tragic events of September 11 and the ensuing “War on Terror”, many of the negative images perpetuated in these early American Orientalist writings have been revived in post-9/11 American historiography and media accounts of Barbary Wars which both advocate that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century North African corsairs were the first “Islamic terrorists” whom the United States had ever faced. Scholarship on early American Orientalism has demonstrated how representations of the early North African ‘Mahometan’ as despotic, antichristian, and decadent were employed to shape American national identity. Yet, little, if no, scholarly attention has been paid to how both early and post-9/11 American writings on Barbary North Africa have invested in stereotypical depictions of barbarism, savagery, monstrosity, cannibalism, demonization, and, more recently, terrorism and Jihadism to create the misguided and mistaken cultural assumption that monstrosity and violence are inherent qualities of Muslims and Arabs. In tracing and identifying these misassumptions, this article endeavors to prove that the stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs was has been a prevalent phenomenon in American culture. It, too, seeks to unveil how Americans, both in early America and the post-9/11 era, have tried, through narrative, to appropriate and construct and reconstruct the North African ‘Mahometans’, and Muslims and Arabs in general, as the inhumane monster and the arch-enemy who should be fought wherever s/he is found.

 

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Keywords


Barbary Wars, North African corsairs, pirates, United States of America, barbarism, early American Orientalism, terrorists, September 11

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejlll.v6i2.370

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