Melville, Holy Lands, and Settler-Colonial Studies

Abstract

When American Palestine: Melville, Twain and the Holy Land Mania appeared in 1999, it was situated within several broader contexts: American literary studies, of course, but also the field of AmericaHoly Land studies. And I placed America-Holy Land studies within the even broader framework of “settler-colonial studies,” a field that was barely, if at all, acknowledged twelve years ago. These three categories have developed considerably with regard to what had been two relatively neglected Melville works. In the last decade or so, scholars have engaged both Melville’s journal and poem-pilgrimage, either in monographs or as part of broader studies. Clarel has been increasingly recognized as a major work, one that calls out for further readings. Here I want to revisit the heuristics of America-Holy Land studies and settler-colonial studies. These evolving conceptual frameworks have raised new awareness about the effects of culture and colonialism upon each other, about religious-nationalist perceptions in the United States, and about the changing understanding of America’s relationship to the Middle East over an increasingly troubled decade. As a result, critical responses to Clarel are far richer now particularly because Melville’s poem-pilgrimage has come to feel so contemporary. Before the late 1970s, only a small number of studies addressed America’s relationship to the Holy Land and the Middle East: among the critical works are David Finnie’s Pioneers East: The Early American Experience in the Middle East (1967), James Field’s America and the Mediterranean World, 1776– 1882 (1969), and Franklin Walker’s Irreverent Pilgrims: Melville, Browne, and Mark Twain in the Holy Land (1974). Various bibliographies, such as Richard Bevis’s Bibliotheca Cisorientalia (1973), are also important for understanding Melville’s sources. When Moshe Davis initiated the America-Holy Land Project at the Hebrew University in the 1970s, a self-conscious interdisciplinary field gained influence. Davis, along with Israeli and American scholars, sponsored colloquia resulting in historical and bibliographic studies of American as well as broader Western involvement with the Holy Land that were published in a series of collections and monographs, including With Eyes toward Zion: