"Hindoos" and "Mahometans" in the United States: Religion, Kinship, and Modernity in the Early Republic

In late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America there appeared, spread across periodicals, newspapers, novels, and pseudo-ethnographies, a growing concern with Muslims and Hindus – or, in the contemporary lexicon, “mahometans” and “hindoos” – in the United States. That Hindu or Muslim populations in the United States were either absent or demographically negligible was of little concern.  Representations of Muslim and Hindu kinship and sexuality, especially polygamy and the harem, were collapsed into one another as epitomes of despotism and thus served as counterpoints to the emergent democratic republic that was the United States.  This discourse, I argue, was one of the central sites for working out the relationship between citizenship and kinship in a liberal democracy, as well as the place of the sacred within a vexed secular modernity coalescing in the United States.  Most of the writing created orientalist fantasies of Muslim and Hindu religion, kinship, and sexuality in the service of delimiting the boundaries of liberal democracy.  However, by the mid-nineteenth century this discourse paradoxically became a counter-archive of belonging, offering the interpenetration of the sacred, kinship, and sexuality as alternative forms of democratic affiliation. In tracing this fantasmatic deployment of Muslims and Hindus in early America, we can trace the political, public location of both religion and kinship as the consolidation of the national imperial political project of the United States increasingly privatized both, ultimately troubling practices of national affiliation too often split between the voluntarism of citizenship and the ascription of kinship.