Suchergebnisse

This dissertation cuts across established academic disciplines and uses the idea of a kaleidoscope as a productive model to debunk generalized ideas put forward by other scholars and navigate through the complexities of ideas about the Orient in early America. This book combines research into textual mobility and meaning making processes that were shaped from within the ideological, political, and cultural contexts. Therefore, a blend of methodologies―building on knowledge and concepts from distant disciplines like biology and linguistics―and the kaleidoscope as a tool for cultural analysis will provide a rigor with which to approach abstract and sometimes elusive aspects of cultural material. What may seem like a linear narrative turns out to be a choir of overlapping and contradicting voices. This book intends to give a sharper and empirically-derived as well as -driven understanding of many voices; that is, the roles the imagined and sometimes geographical Orients played in the broader cultural, ideological, and political contexts of late colonial as well as early American culture. The goal is to showcase the scope of what the Orient came to mean transcending narrow systems of meaning.