No Special Pleading: Abolitionism, Orientalism, and Identity Politics

Year 2008, Issue: 28, 29 - 42, 01.10.2008

Demir Barlas

Abstract

American abolitionists during the nineteenth century invoked slavery in the Ottoman Empire as a means by which to criticize American slavery. In the resulting comparison of slaveholding powers, America did not come off well. Abolitionists mercilessly, and, this essay suggests, ironically, described slavery in the Orient as less oppressive than slavery in the West. This aspect of American abolitionist discourse is significant because, according to Edward Said, any suitably large body of Western discourse that describes the East should be orientalist; that is, it should exist for the purpose of essentializing the East as a means of preparation for military, material, and moral domination by the West. Given that Said’s work Orientalism portrays itself as a valid descriptor of all Eastern-facing discourse from the late seventh century onwards, it is instructive to see how the great theoretical progenitor of post-colonial studies fails in being able to account for the conceptual relationship between abolitionists and Ottoman Islam.

Keywords

Special, Pleading, Abolitionism

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