The Ambience: Orientalism in General-Interest American Magazines

Abstract On the whole, American Transcendentalism entailed a sustained attempt at religious universalism. But at the same time, the Transcendentalists in general embraced and reflected the ideology of progress, the belief that America was the light of the world and that all traditional cultures should be subordinate to the superior American-European civilization. This ideology of progress governs the Orientalism that appeared in most articles on Asian religions and cultures in the nineteenth century. Hence, to understand the nature of American Transcendentalist Orientalism, we should consider the popular, often racist climate in which Transcendentalism arose, for it will help reveal the subtler prejudices apparent in Transcendentalism as well. The late Transcendentalist fascination with the Orient did not occur in a vacuum, but as part of a more general American discovery of the Orient, following on the heels of a new European Orientalist scholarly movement. Chief among the magazines that reflected this “discovery” in America were the liberal New England periodicals, above all the North American Review, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Christian Examiner. 1 Generally speaking, there was a constant battle between prejudice against the Asian religions and peoples and a more enlightened view of them. In discussing Orientalism in these three magazines, I will focus first on what we might call negative Orientalism hostile or deprecating depictions of Asian religions and cultures-then on positive Orientalism, or attempts at comparative religion, and finally widen our scope to consider Orientalism in popular magazines more generally. In virtually all cases, we will see reflected the ideology of progress.