American Orientalist Discourse: the Linguistic Formation and Transformation

Abstract

The Middle East region had been the epicentre of American orientalist discourse since the American independence from Britain. After independence, American linguists, travellers, missionaries, politicians, sailors and traders scrutinized the anarchy and uncertainty of that region and employed them to produce works that prioritized American identity formation. This research rests on conducting an analysis of how American orientalism was created and how the various encounters between Arabs and America affected the linguistic course of this academia. This study considers the major encounters in the course of Arab-America relationship that brought major transformations to orientalism such as: the Barbary war, the creation of Israel, oil and terrorism. Since the American independence, American orientalism focused on building American identity in comparison with Arabs and their practices. Modern American orientalism has undergone various and huge transformations resulted mostly from formidable threats to American interests and the American retaliations to those threats. These encounters, whether political, economic or military, brought representation of Arabs to the top of American orientalist agenda and left a huge impact on image of Arabs in literature. Therefore, this study is based on the analysis of these different factors in order to know the different perspectives of this orientalism through its different stages.