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Maryanne A. Rhett, Representations of Islam in United States Comics, 1880–1922 (London: Bloomsbury, 2020, $135.00 cloth, $40.95 paper). Pp. 137. isbn 978 1 3500 7324 1, 978 1 3501 9627 8.

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Maryanne A. Rhett, Representations of Islam in United States Comics, 1880–1922 (London: Bloomsbury, 2020, $135.00 cloth, $40.95 paper). Pp. 137. isbn 978 1 3500 7324 1, 978 1 3501 9627 8.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2023

MICHAEL GOODRUM
MICHAEL GOODRUM*
Affiliation:
Canterbury Christ Church University
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Abstract

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Review
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Journal of American Studies , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , July 2023 , pp. 451 - 453
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies

Rhett's work takes the reader into a particularly knotty period for the discussion of immigration and its representation in American popular culture. Sitting between the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Act of 1924, Rhett's book works through struggles of definition and national identity that occupied much of the political imagination and energy of both popular and elite political discourse. Rhett is able to draw out that complexity through her analysis of the cartoons she includes, bringing together very neatly ideas of how empire was racialized, sexualized, and gendered. This is worked on throughout the book, situating comic representations within broader discussions, allowing the reader to see how these representations engaged with contemporary resonances. Approaches to the First World War are nicely handled in this regard, especially with the debates around whether or not to declare war on the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent shifts in the characterization of “the Turk” and Islam that resulted from entry into the war. On the threat of the coming “race war” between the Islamic world and Christianity (in chapter 5), however, I would have liked to see this more concretely embedded in contemporary anxieties around race more generally through reference to eugenics and Nativism; chapter 4 adeptly engages with questions of women and orientalism, so it would have been good to see this question of “threats” to American society (and masculinity) carried through.Footnote 1

On the downside, it must be noted that the editing is poor – sentences repeat (41), typos are frequently missed, and names are misspelt. It must be hoped that, in future, Bloomsbury will dedicate more time to copy-editing. In terms of things that Rhett could have undertaken differently, I was struck by the images of imperial “civilization” as a schoolroom, especially on the position of the Native American within that. While the book focusses on Islam, analysis of such images on page 40 has the caricature of a Native American placed at some distance from the more recently acquired imperial Others being “educated.” Given the shift to forced assimilation of Native Americans through education in boarding schools, such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, after 1879, there is a point to be made about the existing American understanding of education as a means of social control; this is especially relevant after attendance was made compulsory in 1891, with the basics of survival withheld from parents who refused to comply. It is also surprising not to see the work of Paul A. Kramer and Louis A. Perez Jr. in here, as both align with the thrust of much of the early stages of this book and would have been illuminating. Similarly, Mae M. Ngai's tracing of the history of immigration policy in this era is an odd omission.Footnote 2

Overall, I found this book to be a useful addition to the scholarship. There is little written on comics, and this topic, within comic studies or historical work more generally, so Rhett's book is a welcome intervention on both counts. All of my reservations can be rolled together into one general complaint: this book is too short. I found myself leaving the book wanting to know more about shifting representations of Islam in the US after the Lausanne Conference of 1922–23 and the next phase of the Anglo-American oil war – particularly as this lays the foundations for later American activity in the Middle East.Footnote 3 I would also have liked to know more clearly how the Nativism of the postwar period, such as the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, fed into representations of Islam and Muslims.Footnote 4

To conclude, this is an excellent piece of work. Comics are situated within the wider popular culture and sociopolitical discourse more generally, and attention is directed toward an important consideration in US histories of immigration. This is particularly salient as the relationship between the US and Muslim immigrants/Islamic culture is almost entirely overlooked in the foundational works on US immigration.Footnote 5 More could also be done to connect contemporary US attitudes toward Muslims to their encounter with Filipino Muslims in the context of the Philippine–American War (1899–1902).Footnote 6 That this relationship should now be further drawn out is welcome and necessary. My main concern remains the length of the book and its narrow focus, albeit on a key period for histories of immigration and US relations with Islam and Islamic countries. Rhett's book, then, is a welcome point of departure, a platform that sets up opportunities for expansion and the connection of the excellent work done here on visual culture with wider histories.

References

1 Hoganson, Kristin, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish–American and Philippine–American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, would have been a helpful reference – it is absent from the bibliography.

2 Kramer, Paul A., The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Perez, Louis A. Jr., “Incurring a Debt of Gratitude: 1898 and the Moral Sources of United States Hegemony in Cuba,” American Historical Review, 104, 2 (1999), 356–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ngai, Mae M., “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History, 86, 1 (1999), 67–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Venn, Fiona, “The Wartime ‘Special Relationship’? From Oil War to Anglo-American Oil Agreement, 1939–1945,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 10, 2 (2012), 119–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The construction of ideologies of race and ethnicity in this period is outlined in Omi, Michael and Winant, Howard, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015)Google Scholar.

5 There is no consideration of Islam, or of emigration from predominantly Muslim countries, in works such as Handlin, Oscar, The Uprooted, 2nd edn (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1973)Google Scholar; Bodnar, John, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; while Jones, Maldwyn Allen, American Immigration (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960)Google Scholar, has just one mention of Turkish emigrants (at 179).

6 See, for instance, Gowing, Peter G., “Muslim–American Relations in the Philippines, 1899–1920,” in Kratoska, Paul (ed.), South East Asia Colonial History, Volume II (London: Routledge, 2004), 372–82Google Scholar; and, as already mentioned, Kramer, The Blood of Government.